USGS Biology: Status & Trends

BEST History

The BEST Program originated in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in 1992. Along with other monitoring and research components of the FWS, it was incorporated into the newly formed National Biological Service (NBS) in 1994. The BEST Program was transferred to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in the fall of 1996 when NBS became the Biological Resources Division of USGS. The page describes the early events leading to its development by the FWS through program reviews and administrative changes that have brought BEST to the USGS.

Events leading to the development of the BEST Program:

In 1961 the President's Science Advisory Committee recommended the development of an effort to monitor residue levels (primarily pesticides) in air, water, sediment and biota, which ultimately lead to the National Pesticide Monitoring Program (Johnson et al. 1967). The FWS had the responsibility for monitoring contaminants in tissues of biota. The monitoring of persistent, bioaccumulative contaminants in fish, starlings and wings of hunter-killed ducks was initiated by the late 1960s and was renamed in 1980 as the National Contaminant Biomonitoring Program (NCBP). Tissue levels were measured for organochlorine pesticides, PCBs, and trace elements. By the late 1980s, FWS recognized that while NCBP had successfully tracked the declines of organochlorine contaminants in the environment, it had limitations, such as:

many organochlorines had decreased to low levels and were no longer widely used;

other chemicals with the potential to harm wildlife were being released to the environment but not being monitored;

tissue residues were not adequate for identifying impacts of some contaminants, could not be used to characterize exposure to ephemeral toxic substances, and did not always lead to inferences about effects;

measures of exposure and effect needed to integrate the effect of encountering mixtures of chemicals and other stressors.

Also during the middle 1980s, large population declines and deformities in fish and wildlife at Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge (Harris 1991) were linked to high selenium levels in agricultural drainwater used to irrigate wetlands on the refuge. This situation prompted an audit of the FWS National Wildlife Refuge system by the Inspector General of the Department of the Interior (U.S. FWS 1986). The audit resulted in the development of a contaminant monitoring and problem resolution process for refuge lands so that other catastrophes related to contaminants could be avoided in the future. For more information on the NCBP click here.

In response to both these needs, FWS concluded that a revised and expanded biomonitoring program was needed to assess existing, and to anticipate future, effects of contaminants on fish and wildlife and the habitats that support them.

In 1990, the FWS Directorate endorsed the development of a comprehensive biomonitoring program. The FWS's Division of Environmental Contaminants led the effort to develop a conceptual framework for a new program, called the Biomonitoring of Environmental Status and Trends (BEST) Program. The goals of BEST, as described in the draft conceptual plan, were to: determine the status and trends of environmental contaminants and their effects on trust resources; identify and assess the major factors affecting trust resources and provide current and predictive information to alleviate impacts; and provide summary information in a timely manner to managers and the public to guide conservation efforts. A key to accomplishing these goals was the application of a comprehensive approach to monitor resources at the tissue, organism, population, and community levels. Issues both on and off FWS lands were to be addressed.

In late 1991, FWS convened a steering committee, hired regional field coordinators, and convened ad hoc work groups to develop a document that described strategies and mechanisms to implement BEST. A draft plan titled BEST Detailed Plan was completed in June of 1993 and reviewed by FWS later that year. At the same time, planning for a review of BEST by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) began. Shortly after the NAS review was initiated, BEST was transferred to the newly created National Biological Survey (later to be renamed as the National Biological Service [NBS]). In coordination with FWS, NBS completed the review of BEST and continued its development.

In the fall of 1996, BEST was transferred to USGS as part of the BRD. At this time a Technical Steering Team was formed to provide strategic oversight for BEST. The initial charge to the team was to prepare a strategic plan for BEST that builds on the vision developed by FWS, addresses recommendations from program reviews, and incorporates the results from pilot and demonstration projects.

Vision for the BEST Program:

The draft Detailed Plan for BEST included sections describing sampling design, methods, QA/QC, data and information management, reporting, and logistical details for implementing the BEST Program. As described in the Detailed Plan, BEST was to address issues related to contaminants of concern to FWS trust resources (both land and species). Four different monitoring components were developed for FWS lands (primarily National Wildlife Refuges) and trust species which included migratory birds, anadromous and interjurisdictional fish, endangered species and selected marine mammals. Different monitoring networks were necessary to meet the information needs for each component.

For FWS lands, a process was needed to identify existing or potential contaminant-related problems. This process led to biased selection of areas within a refuge to maximize the potential for identifying contaminants and their effects on that refuge. The Problem Identification Process was not intended to provide data for objective description and quantitative inference about the individual refuge or about the status of FWS lands, in general. Because of the inferential limitations of the Problem Identification Process, a second network under the FWS lands component was proposed to produce unbiased estimates of the distribution of contaminants and their effects on FWS lands, in general, and to measure changes in this status over time.

For the trust species component of BEST, two types of networks were proposed. One would focus on describing the exposure and response of selected or a key trust species to contaminants and measuring the changes in exposure and response over time. To complete the assessment for trust species, a second set of networks was proposed to describe contaminants and their effects in important habitats used by trust species. A habitat-based network would not only describe the spatial distribution of contaminants and their effects, but also describe indirect effects (e.g. reduction of prey items) and changes in habitat quality over time. Both trust species networks (exposure/effect and habitat) involved unbiased sampling to provide objective description and quantitative inferences.

A major tenet of BEST was to use a wide range of methods for identifying contaminants and their effects. Monitoring programs, including the NCBP, were criticized for relying on chemical residue analyses with little interpretation of the biological significance of such measures. In addition, some chemicals that pose risks to biota do not bioaccumulate or persist and cannot be measured in tissues. Therefore, BEST adopted a monitoring approach that relies on multiple lines of evidence to identify and characterize contaminant exposure and effect at all ecosystem levels.

The Detailed Plan identified four major categories of methods: biomarkers, toxicity tests and bioassays, community health, and residue analyses. The use of methods from these categories was intended to provide results which constitute a "weight-of-evidence" approach for identifying effects from a wide variety of contaminants. The Detailed Plan described a tiered approach for deploying the methods of BEST. The first tier included valid methods from each line of evidence that would be used to screen for contaminants and their effects. As such, these methods would be applicable to a wide variety of habitats and would be readily available and inexpensive. The second tier included more specialized (and also more expensive) methods than the Tier 1 methods. These methods would provide greater insight for specific situations and would be more useful in determining cause-and-effect relationships.

While BEST was proposed as an operational program of the FWS, the Detailed Plan described an integral role for research within BEST. Research was needed to develop and validate new methods for measuring exposure and effects, collecting data, and interpreting results; provide technical support regarding the development and implementation of BEST and data interpretation; and identify new or emerging issues and problems for BEST to address.

Reviews of the BEST Program:

Following completion of the Detailed Plan in June 1993, the FWS conducted an internal review of the document. The Director of the FWS, in requesting reviews of the Detailed Plan, asked reviewers to address whether BEST would adequately address the information needs of FWS, and whether it would provide information to support the existing operational contaminants program in FWS. Over 50 individuals from a variety of FWS programs, such as Environmental Contaminants, Endangered Species, Fisheries, Refuges, and Research, provided over 80 pages of comments. These comments were completed in August 1993. No formal response to this review was assembled, largely due to the transfer of BEST to the newly created National Biological Survey (NBS) in late 1993.

In the winter of 1994, the NAS began its review of BEST. The review had been initiated by FWS prior to the transfer of BEST to NBS. The panel convened by NAS examined the draft Detailed Plan (dated June 1993) and met with BEST program staff and FWS staff on several occasions. Initial recommendations from NAS were presented in February 1995 with the publication of its report, A Review of the Biomonitoring of Environmental Status and Trends Program Detailed Plan (NRC 1995). Both reviews identified the value of having a contaminant monitoring program focused on trust resources and endorsed the emphasis on biological effects or impacts rather than just monitoring contaminant concentrations in tissue. Both reviews also noted that the Detailed Plan was too ambiguous and ambitious and recommended that monitoring be directly linked to management needs.

Responses to Reviews:

Both reviews concluded that the broad goals of BEST were reasonable but few details were provided on how they would be achieved. Both reviews provided some general recommendations on how to proceed with a revision of BEST. In the second phase of the NAS review, the NAS panel was to develop specific guidance on how to redesign BEST. This phase was prematurely ended due to a rescission of funds. As a result, the revision of BEST proceeded without additional guidance from the NAS review panel.

Two approaches were pursued to evaluate the general recommendations from these reviews and to develop the details that were lacking. First workshops were held to explore various recommendations from the reviews and discuss direction and a conceptual framework for BEST. Second, pilot and demonstration projects were developed to explore the general recommendations from the reviews and those from various workshops. During discussions of direction and concepts for BEST, most things seemed possible. The pilots and demonstration projects provided a critically needed reality check and allowed details to be developed by doing rather than talking. Through reviews and critiques of these pilots and demonstration projects, the details for redesigning BEST were developed.

Several general strategies were common to these discussions and the design of pilot and demonstration projects. They were:

an emphasis on exploiting existing information and data;

exploration of links with other monitoring programs as a way to leverage limited resources and as a means to develop integrated assessments of contaminants within the context of other stressors;

a focus on scales that are relevant to management decisions and actions;

evaluation of the framework for ecological risk assessment as a means for defining monitoring and assessment questions;

application of multiple lines of evidence to move beyond evaluating chemicals one at a time with analytical chemistry and provide a basis for drawing conclusions concerning the effects of contaminants on organisms, populations and communities.

One recommendation in the NAS report was to rethink approaches for proactive or anticipatory monitoring. The report went on to suggest that observations of wildlife die-offs, although opportunistically reported, may provide a cost-effective and efficient means of identifying re-emerging or new contaminant problems before they become widespread or cause extensive injury to populations or habitat. A project was initiated by BEST in cooperation with the National Wildlife Health Center to identify data sources for wildlife mortality/morbidity events; to evaluate the feasibility of data sharing, limitations and biases of the data from these events, and their application for identifying emerging local, regional, and national contaminant problems; and to make recommendations on how such information can be exploited.

Both the NAS review and comments during subsequent workshops identified the importance of data on contaminants and their effects that are collected in a comparable and consistent manner across the country for large-scale comparisons and interpretation of site-specific screening measures. The fish network of the NCBP was identified as a model upon which to build because of the existing database; opportunities to link with WRD monitoring programs (i.e. NASQAN and NAWQA), and availability of biomarkers and methods to assess the effects of exposure. A demonstration project in the Mississippi River basin was designed by the Columbia Environmental Research Center to evaluate such enhancements to the NCBP fish network. The project involved scientists from several other Centers and FWS and expanded to the Columbia and Rio Grande River basins.

Several workshops were held to evaluate how the framework for ecological risk assessment could be applied at a national or regional scale for defining monitoring and assessment questions for BEST. An outcome of these workshops was to apply the framework at a regional scale in part because this scale transfers directly to the scale and scope of management decisions and actions taken by FWS and also because current threats from contaminants are more likely to have a regional rather than a national focus. Four regional assessments (northern Oregon, lower Rio Grande valley, estuaries along the Atlantic coast, and tributaries to Lake Erie) were conducted to evaluate the application of ecological risk assessment. The exploitation of existing information and data was a major theme in each of these projects.

Although few recommendations from the reviews directly applied to the Problem Identification Process, its scope was enlarged by the transfer of BEST from FWS to a science agency with responsibilities to all DOI bureaus. This process, now called the Contaminant Assessment Process, utilizes the framework for ecological risk assessment, makes extensive use of existing information, and is conducted at the scale used to make decisions and take actions on National Wildlife Refuges and in National Parks. While FWS has remained a key partner in the development of CAP and its supporting data management system and the primary user, demonstration projects have also been explored with other DOI bureaus.

Literature Cited:

Harris, T. 1991. Death in the marsh. Island Press: Washington, D.C. 245 pp.

Johnson, R.E., T.C. Carver, and E.H. Dustman. 1967. Residues in fish, wildlife, and estuaries. Pesticides Monitoring Journal 1(1):7-13.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 1986. Preliminary survey of contaminant issues of concern on National Wildlife Refuges. Department of the Interior, Washington D.C. 177 pp.