Interagency Ecological Program: Benthic invertebrate monitoring in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay-Delta, collected by the Environmental Monitoring Program, 1975-2025.

Benthic invertebrate raw data from upper San Francisco Estuary, monitored by the Environmental Monitoring Program, 1975-2025. This data file is too large to open in most spreadsheet programs, and is most easily handled with a coding language like R or Python. The count data are the original counts of organisms per 0.052 m2 Ponar dredge sample.

Benthic invertebrate CPUE data from upper San Francisco Estuary, monitored by the Environmental Monitoring Program, 1975-2025. This data is intended for a more casual user, and is condensed from the raw dataset to be more tractable for spreadsheet programs. The data have been converted to CPUE (organisms/m2), replicate grabs have been averaged for each site visit, and all non-occurrence (zero) data for a site visit has been removed (but can be re-added by pivoting to wide format).

DWR benthic monitoring site names, descriptions, coordinates, and status

This data table lists all species that have been found, or were expected to be found, in the course of the Environmental Monitoring Program's mandated monitoring and special studies, including work outside the geographic bounds of this sampling program. Not all species listed here are found in the sampling data, and this data table is neither a definitive species list detected by our program, nor a metric of species richness. This data table is provided as a convenience to data users and sampling staff about what species might conceivably be found by benthic sampling in the upper San Francisco Estuary.

This dataset contains sediment analysis, conducted by DWR's Bryte Soils Laboratory. Grain size analysis (ASTM Test Designation D 422-63 (2007), "Particle-Size Analysis of Soils") and organic content (ASTM Test Designation D2974-07a, "Moisture, Ash and Organic Matter of Peat Materials," Method C") were determined on a 500 mL sample of the sediment. The sediment samples were subsets of standard size Ponar grab.

This data table documents how many site visits were conducted at each site in each year. It is provided as a convenience to data users who want to understand the structure of the data record, and compare levels of sampling effort at different times through the period of record. Since many sites were visited for only part of the period of EMP's sampling and there are many more historic than active sites, documenting the site visits in data table form was more precise than writing a narrative description.

This data table documents how many total grab samples were collected at each site in each year. It is provided as a convenience to data users who want to understand the structure of the data record, and compare levels of sampling effort at different times through the period of record. Since many sites were visited for only part of the period of EMP's sampling and there are many more historic than active sites, documenting the number of grab samples in data table form was more precise than writing a narrative description.

This data table compiles the occasions on which benthic invertebrate data does not exist for a survey site in a given month. It was was compiled by reviewing the data record of site visits and grab totals. Data was designated as missing all grabs on a given date if the site had been sampled at dates both earlier and later than the date in question; many of the early "missing" dates may not be truly missing, since since the sampling design from 1975-mid 1979 was still being settled. Data was counted as missing some grab samples when the total grabs taken at a site in a given month was smaller than the number taken at other sites in in that month.

This method step describes provenance-based metadata as specified in the LTER EML Best Practices. This provenance metadata does not contain entity specific information.

A link to the original metadata web page on the EDI Portal

A link to the EDI Quality Metadata Page