Environmental Monitoring, Statistics, and the Law: Room for Improvement

Concerns over environmental degradation have led to legislation such as the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. Federal and state laws have mandated the creation of numerous monitoring programs to ensure or determine the integrity of the environment. Unfortunately, many of the resulting monitoring programs shed little light on the questions that they were meant to help answer because they are based on poor experimental designs and a superficial knowledge of statistics. This article briefly discusses some past environmental-monitoring designs and current regulations for monitoring at hazardous-waste sites. The deficiencies of many monitoring programs are linked to the need to improve the status of the career category "statistician" in the sphere of the environmental sciences.