Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Surveillance
Surveillance is repetitive measurement of selected variables over a period of time,
but with a less clearly defined purpose than monitoring. It is more exploratory and
can be undertaken to determine trends, calibrate or validate models, make short-
term forecasts, ensure optimal development, warn of the unexpected, etc. Surveillance,
like monitoring, can focus on the environment, people or an economy, and may:
♦
check whether statutory regulations are complied with (without monitoring
and surveillance the setting of standards and rules is of little value);
♦
provide information for systems control or management;
♦
assess environmental quality to see whether it remains satisfactory;
♦
detect unexpected changes.
Where monitoring seeks to establish the ongoing picture, it may be important
to examine past conditions and establish trends to understand the present and permit
extrapolation of possible future scenarios. For example, studies of climate changes
and ecological responses give clues to possible future conditions.
Environmental, social and economic monitoring have each generated their own
practitioners and literature, which may focus at local, regional, national or global
level or study ‘pathways’ (e.g. for pollution). Surveillance and monitoring can be
done at source (where something is being generated), at selected sample points, at
random, along transects, or by sampling some suitable material or organism. For
example, pollution might be monitored by checking a smokestack, by a network of

---

CHAPTER FOUR
64
instruments, or by surveying lichen species diversity and growth. Regulatory
monitoring checks its findings against set, in-house, national or international standards
or stated objectives.
For the last few decades, and at a gathering pace, remote monitoring and
surveillance have been possible: at its most extreme, data gathering by unmanned
space vehicles; also by orbiting or geo-stationary satellites, reconnaissance aircraft
and automatic weather or oceanographic data-gathering stations. The best data are
of little use if poorly co-ordinated, so bodies have evolved to support surveillance
and monitoring on an international scale and disseminate results to where they are
useful.