The MRW Ecological Assessment Program has been designed to meet multiple objectives and is organized based on a modified version of the US EPA risk assessment framework. We identified four objectives:

1. Assess and monitor the ecological health of streams, lakes, and wetlands throughout the MRW using a tiered, integrated approach with citizens and experienced scientists;
2. Develop regionally-defined, quantitative relationships between ecosystem attributes, specific pollutants, and human activities that can be used in management models;
3. Develop monitoring technologies that will enable continuous assessment of ecosystem processes at the land-water interface; and
4. Increase public awareness of intrinsic values of MRW ecosystems and the science used to make management decisions.

The first three objectives are directly related to monitoring the status of ecological conditions in the MRW and determining the physical, chemical, and human factors that threaten or cause environmental problems. These objectives call for spatially extensive sampling (i.e. sampling many sites) to assess conditions in many streams, lakes, and wetlands, and relating valued ecosystem responses to stressors and human activities (i.e., stressor-response relationships). The combination of sampling strategies in the first and third objectives calls for summer sampling of many sites and continuous monitoring at a few sites. Integrating high frequency spatial and temporal assessment will enable inference about year-round conditions in habitats throughout the watershed. Automated monitoring systems (AMSs) will be developed using new technologies for linking land-water processes. AMSs will allow continuous monitoring to enable characterizing diurnal changes in ecological conditions related to day/night cycles, daily and weekly patterns related to weather cycles, and seasonal patterns. The final objective involves communicating the results of our ecological assessment to citizens, as well as decision makers and other scientists, which is a critical step in applying assessments in ecological management.