Research Areas > Regional Monitoring > Bight Regional Monitoring > ASBS
Project Group: Areas of Special Biological Significance (ASBS)
SCCWRP Research
Areas of Special Biological Significance (ASBS) were added to the Southern California Bight (Bight) Regional Monitoring Program in 2008. This element was added in response to the need for more information from areas that have been called out for special water-quality protection in the 2005-2006 California Ocean Plan legislation.
Yellow circles represent the locations of ASBS in California (courtesy Coastal Observing Research and Development Center)
State regulation mandates that there shall be no “discharge of waste,” to ASBS, so that they maintain “natural water quality.” Determining natural water quality, however, is not a simple task. This is particularly true at locations where wet-weather discharges occur, because many potential contaminants carried by urban runoff can also occur naturally in the environment (e.g., suspended solids, nutrients, trace metals). The best way to obtain a sense of natural water quality is to collect information from reference areas where no human discharges exist. In the case of wet-weather runoff, these would be locations with minimal to no human development in the adjacent watershed.
The main project in this group is:
Data from this and other components of the Bight surveys are available on the SCCWRP website.
This page was last updated on: 1/20/2010