Abstract:
The National Estuary Program (NEP) has as its core an excellent public involvement
strategy. As a result, NEPs can be viewed as ideal financial and technical support
`umbrellas' under which citizen volunteer monitoring activities can be readily and
successfully established. This study focused on individual NEPs nationally and their
citizen volunteer water quality monitoring (VWQM) activities. In particular, three
elements responsible for successful volunteers programs, program initiation,
implementation and evaluation were examined. Under these elements, various
aspects of volunteer programs were addressed, such as financial and technical
support, recruitment success, volunteer training, program size, scope, parameters
sampled and technology employed. Areas where volunteer programs were
particularly successful and less successful were also identified.
