The Regional Monitoring Program for Water Quality in San Francisco Bay has monitored the water, sediment, and biota of the bay for nearly 25 years.  It has evolved, from a start monitoring primarily along a deep-water transect in the central channel, to a stratified random characterization of most subtidal habitat in the bay.  Despite some signs of improving sediment concentrations of legacy contaminants such as PCBs in open-water subtidal areas, concentrations in sport fish and other biota show little evidence of improvement. One hypothesis for this relative lack of improvement in biota is continued input and a persistent inventory of contaminants at the margins of the bay.  These shallow subtidal and intertidal margins have been well characterized in and around specific sites targeted for cleanup actions, but that targeted data likely presents a high-biased picture of contamination in the margins.  A pilot study, using random stratified site selection, surveyed sediment contaminant concentrations in the margins of central San Francisco Bay to improve our understanding of the degree and extent of contamination in these habitats.  The data collected to date show concentrations of many pollutants mostly only moderately higher than in the open bay, with especially high concentrations near historically known source sites.  Continued unbiased monitoring data in the margins will be useful in evaluating benefits of upland management actions, tracking trends in legacy and current use contaminants, and in informed decision-making for maximizing sediment reuse opportunities in maintaining and restoring margin wetlands in the face of sea level rise.

Survey of legacy pollutants in margin sediments of central San Francisco Bay

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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