Guides to environmental monitoring are central to the quality assurance of this activity. They are a policy instrument for the consistency and efficiency of strategies and methods as well as for ensuring the coordination and comparability of environmental monitoring between the national and regional levels.
Guides are designed to be useful also for monitoring at the local level and in sectoral, voluntary and other contexts.
Quality assurance
A guide will cover central aspects of the quality assurance process in environmental monitoring. It contains recommendations of a general nature on the planning and implementation of monitoring as well as specifics of study design, including the variables to be measured or estimated and techniques for doing so. The guide also describes how to incorporate quality assurance in the design of environmental monitoring programmes.