Bight ’18 synthesis report for Sediment Quality studies updated with new SQO scores

The Southern California Bight 2018 Regional Monitoring Program has updated its final assessment report summarizing how sediment contamination in Southern California has impacted the overall health of coastal marine ecosystems – a response to discovering calculation errors in Sediment Quality Objective (SQO) scores.

Importantly, the calculation errors did not change the overall conclusions of the published synthesis report. The erratum that was published with the updated report was approved by the Bight ’23 Steering Committee.

After discovering the errors, the Bight program conducted a rigorous quality assurance investigation, and introduced safeguards to ensure SQO scoring errors do not occur again, including publishing all codes for calculating Bight SQO scores, which will be included with each assessment report.