Status and Trends

Next meeting: September 2025.

The Status & Trend Scientist subgroup of the Stormwater Work Group reconvened in summer 2025 to discuss ongoing adaptations and clarifications to the Stormwater Action Monitoring (SAM) program’s study design. The subgroup maintains this webpage.

The goal of SAM’s status & trends (S&T) monitoring is to provide a regional assessment of receiving water health, and to evaluate whether collective management actions protect and improve receiving water conditions.           

Three Puget Sound regional studies completed their first round of monitoring in 2015-2018. Read a short summary of these receiving water studies or watch the video. Since 2020, USGS, WDFW, and Clark County have collected data under a revised study design and provided status reports. What’s needed next is an analysis of the data to identify any trends in water quality, stream habitat, and benthic macroinvertebrate populations.

SAM maintains project webpages for each of three active receiving water studies:

• Puget Sound small streams

• Puget Sound nearshore

• Lower Columbia urban streams

Subgroup Purpose & goals

Mission: To bring together regional scientific expertise to guide long-term monitoring programs and support collective learning about improved stormwater management.

Goals: To recommend robust methods for collecting data and analyzing trends in water quality, habitat, and biological health in waters receiving or otherwise impacted by municipal stormwater discharges. To help regional partners evaluate whether our stormwater efforts are protecting and improving aquatic ecosystems.

Current Subgroup Work

The subgroup will focus on the tasks listed in our Work Plan for 2025 and may add tasks for 2026 and 2027 as the need arises.

Background

Two status and trends oversight subgroups helped coordinate early ramp-up activities of the status and trends small stream and nearshore monitoring components of the regional stormwater monitoring program now called SAM, or Stormwater Action Monitoring. A group of "SAM S&T Scientists" reviewed the findings of the first round of studies and suggested adjustments to the monitoring design to be implemented for streams in 2019 and for mussels in 2021.   

Key points:

• All SAM project scopes of work and final deliverables (including published reports and fact sheets) are posted at ecology.wa.gov/SAM

• SAM Priorities Workshop was February 27, 2019;  see materials for the afternoon

• SAM Receiving Water Findings Symposium was September 13, 2018; presentations are posted here 

• Site confirmation and deployment of water level recorders are underway for the Puget Lowland wadeable streams sampling. The study design is informed by lessons learned from the final report on the 2015 stream sampling that was was completed in 2018. 

  • For the 2015 sampling:

    • A Small Streams QAPP Addendum Subcommittee met in December 2014 and January 2015 to finalize assessment questions and compile information to guide analysis, interpretation, and reporting of the findings of the SAM data collection effort that began in January 2015. SAM Coordinator Brandi Lubliner finalized the addendum document. 

    • Monthly water quality sampling was conducted at 30 Puget Lowland wadeable stream sites inside UGAs and 30 outside UGAs by USGS, King County, Skagit County, and the San Juan Island Conservation District. Sampling was completed in the 2015 calendar year.

    • These 60 sites plus an additional 32 sites (16 inside and 16 outside UGAs) were sampled for sediment chemistry, stream benthos, and habitat measurements. 

  • For the 2020 sampling: 33 sites were randomly selected in strata defined by percent impervious surface in the watershed. Water level (as a proxy for flow) was continuously monitored for the year preceding the summer stream benthos, watershed health, and sediment and water quality sampling. 

    • Sampling will be done annually at new and randomly selected 33 sites each year. 

    • Two reference/least-disturbed sites will be sampled annually as a baseline condition in the region.

• WDFW leads the nearshore mussel monitoring. So far, three rounds of monitoring were completed in winter 2015-2016, 2017-2018, and 2019-2020. Two final reports were published and are available in the SAM webpage. The third round report will be published in early 2022. Future monitoring, starting from winter 2021-2022, will follow the new study design.

• USGS led the summer 2016 sediment monitoring in coordination with WDNR and King Co; USGS completed the final report in 2018. SWG recommended waiting ten years to conduct another round of this monitoring. Work is needed to better understand the effects of marine currents on sediment deposition and dispersion.

• SWG decided not to conduct monthly nearshore bacteria monitoring, but instead to compile and analyze existing data. That report was completed in early 2017.

• Scopes of work for various "ramp-up activities" (including 3 related to S&T) are available here.

  • Chris Konrad at USGS completed a Puget Sound stream gauging network analysis http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5020and recommended next steps to inform future monitoring of stormwater impacts. A follow-up project published at http://pubs.usgs.gov/ds/815/ helped identify priorities among existing gauges and among gaps that need to be filled in order to meet regional stream gauging needs.

  • Technical report for WDOH fecal coliform sampling here.

  • Technical report for Mussel Watch sampling here.