EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Benthic invertebrates are commonly used to monitor spatial and temporal impacts on aquatic systems. Similar to other aquatic monitoring tools, the methods have to be applied by adequately trained and experienced individuals to help ensure that the data generated are not of questionable quality. Unfortunately, even though benthic invertebrate community assessments have been a cornerstone of aquatic effects monitoring for many decades, there has been little attention paid towards quality assurance programs to improve data quality. Unlike other components of environmental effects monitoring programs, such as analytical chemistry and aquatic toxicity testing, very little effort has been made to standardize benthic invertebrate monitoring protocols and to implement mandatory quality control measures to ensure data quality. Quality Control associations, such as Canadian Association for Environmental Analytical Laboratories (CAEAL), have developed extensive quality assurance programs for chemistry and aquatic toxicity labs but have yet to incorporate benthic ecology labs into the program.
Quality control procedures are necessary to ensure that benthic invertebrate data achieve an acceptable minimum level of quality and that the level of quality attained is well documented. It is still very common to encounter biomonitoring programs and published literature on benthic invertebrates that have not documented any level of quality assurance.
In Canada, the most recent benthic invertebrate quality assurance program was developed by Environment Canada for the federal government’s environmental effects monitoring program for the pulp and paper industry. Despite the attempts to standardize the benthic invertebrate monitoring protocols for this program and requirements for mandatory quality control components, in many cases, the data from the first cycle of monitoring were still of questionable quality. This was generally due to a lack of enforcement of the quality control requirements.
The Assessment of Aquatic Effects of Mining (AQUAMIN) is presently developing a program to evaluate the effectiveness of Canada’s Metal Mine Liquid Effluent Regulations (MMLERs) in protecting fish, fish habitat (e.g., benthic invertebrates) and the beneficial uses of fisheries resources. This will require monitoring of benthic invertebrates on a national scale. Because the impacts from mines with treated effluents tend to be more subtle than the impacts typically associated with pulp and paper discharges, it is important to have a quality assurance program in place to ensure that the invertebrate programs are sensitive enough to detect whether or not there are impacts that are associated with a mining operation.
The objective of this document is to provide guidance and recommend a Quality Assurance Program that, when adopted by any benthic invertebrate monitoring program, will ensure that the data generated are of known quality, reproducible and comparable among studies.
Typically, most components of a quality assurance program are generic and apply to any aquatic monitoring program. These have been highlighted in this document along with those that are more specific to benthic ecology. The mandatory requirements of a quality assurance program for benthic invertebrate monitoring programs which are considered to be the minimum requirements are as follows:
- documentation of a study design and objectives;
- stipulation of data quality objectives;
- documented standard operating procedures for field and laboratory work;
- an average of 95 % recovery of invertebrates from samples with no samples having less than 90% recovery;
- calculation of the error associated with any subsampling techniques;
- archiving of sorted invertebrates and bench sheets;
- compilation of a voucher collection;
- a listing of taxonomic keys used; and
- documentation of the sorters’ and taxonomists’ qualifications.
AETE
