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System-wide Monitoring Program

Synthesis of the Water Quality Data from 1995 to 2000
Acknowledgements

Although our experiences during the first synthesis project helped prepare us for the arduous task that we agreed to undertake, the completion of this report could not have been possible by the efforts of the authors alone. The majority of assistance that we received came directly from the Reserve staff, providing us feedback during the process ranging from providing data sets to evaluating and assisting with attribute data to critiquing preliminary analyses included in this report. Thank you all for your efforts that enabled us to provide you with this report.

In addition to Reserve staff, Tammy Small and Ashly Norman at the NERR CDMO provided valuable assistance for obtaining missing data sets so that we could begin this undertaking. Tim Snoots at the SCDNR-MRRI once again provided critical technical support to our data management efforts. Ron Chandler and John MacDonald at YSI and George Riekerk and Amy Ringwood at the SCDNR-MRRI assisted the development of informative water quality metrics for pH and turbidity, which were not included in the previous report.

Collection of attribute data was perhaps the most cumbersome undertaking of this project, and we wish to recognize several people for their assistance. Gunnar Lauentstein at NOAA-ERD helped in verifying deployment locations. Darcee Killpack at TPMC provided us with PAGIS data for each Reserve. Although we were not able to collect all the attribute data we originally intended to collect, one of the most beneficial data sets we were able to collect was precipitation data. We wish to thank Sam Baker and Buffy Summer at the State Climatologists Office in Columbia, SC, and Saundra Upchurch at the SCDNR-MRRI for their help in obtaining the National Climatic Data Center precipitation data. We would also like to thank Jonas Almeida at the Medical University of South Carolina for performing the Artificial Neural Network analysis on the attribute data.

Lastly, we wish to thank Philip Wolfe (SCDNR) and Maurice Crawford (NOAA) for administrative assistance, and Karen Swanson and Phil Maier (both SCDNR) for their helpful insights regarding formatting this report.

This report is South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, Marine Resources Division Contribution Number 500.