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→Environmental Effects Monitoring
===Environmental Effects Monitoring===
===Environmental Effects Monitoring===
In the field of stormwater management, the purpose of environmental effects monitoring is to evaluate the effectiveness of stormwater management measures in mitigating impacts of land use practices on the health of groundwater, watercourses and terrestrial systems. While performance monitoring assesses the effectiveness of stormwater management measures or treatment trains, environmental effects monitoring takes the analysis a step further by assessing the extent to which these management measures help meet their ultimate objective of improving the health of aquatic, groundwater and terrestrial systems.
The scale of environmental effects monitoring may be at the stream reach, subwatershed, watershed or community scale. Sites must be carefully selected to ensure that the impact of stormwater management measures that are being assessed have the potential to have a significant impact on the receiving watercourse. In practice this means that runoff from the assessed drainage area represents at least 50% of total flow within the receiving water system (otherwise system response to land use changes and/or management measures may be difficult to detect with statistical significance).
In addition to detailed assessments of receiving water health, environmental effects monitoring should also include monitoring of significant point sources of contaminants as well as major stormwater management practices treating water discharged to the area of interest. This allows for meaningful relationships to be developed between contaminants sources, management measures and environmental conditions. In addition to precipitation and air temperature, general environmental parameters that may be measured in environmental effects studies may include those listed in Table 1.