The Biology Workgroup has been charged by the Board to fulfill two major objectives:

1. Produce a compendium of biological methods that is searchable and that summarizes salient characteristics of each method so that prospective users can see consistencies and inconsistencies among methods and choose appropriate methods for a given purpose. The Biological Methods Compendium will be developed as part of the National Environmental Methods Index (NEMI) being developed by the NEMI Workgroup and it will be linked with other appropriate on-line databases provided by consensus organizations, and federal and state agencies.
2. Develop a framework or methodology that could be used to provide performance characteristics for biological methods and that could be used to determine comparability of different biological methods

Given the broad range of biological methods under consideration, and the often disparate ways in which these different types of methods need to be viewed and characterized, the Workgroup has been involved in several different activities, to address these objectives, depending on the type of method.

Products

• Macroinvertebrates
•  Precision and accuracy case studies
•  Table for NEMI
• Bioassessment Performance Table
• Metrics Precision Table
• Region 5 Invertebrate Methods

Workgroup Activities

• Draft 2-year Strategic Plan

General Activity		Links to Specific Information
(1) Develop water quality data elements for field population/community and organism toxicity data collection efforts
(2) Identify appropriate database fields and data dictionary for field population/ community and organism toxicity methods suitable for Phase 2 or Phase 3 of the National Environmental Methods Index (NEMI).		Toxicity Methods Business Rules
(3) Identify performance characteristics for field and toxicity methods and developing appropriate ways to determine field method performance.		Laboratory Methods for NEMI
(4) Develop a framework for determining comparability of field methods, using stream macroinvertebrate methods as a test case.		Biology Accuracy Draft
(5) Provide peer review for a project sponsored by the Water Environment Research Foundation that uses a data quality objectives approach to develop a study design to compare toxicity test and field bioassessment results.		Specific Biology PBS Draft
(6) Explore new and emerging technologies in the context of NEMI and a performance-based systems approach.

Reference Documents

• Multimetric approaches for describing ecological conditions
• Ecoregions, reference conditions, and index calibration
• Biomarkers
•  EPA reference methods (12)
•  Commercial immunoassay kits (78)

• Toxicity
•  Whole effluent

Members