Great Ships Initiative: A Ballast Discharge Monitoring System for Great Lakes Relevant Ships: A Guidebook for Researchers, Ship Owners, and Agency Officials

This Guidebook presents basic guidelines developed by the Great Ships Initiative (GSI) to share with regulatory authorities, ship owners and researchers for collecting and analyzing representative samples of living organisms in ballast discharge from Great Lakes-relevant ships. Specifically, this Guidebook details methods for retrieving quantitative samples from ships to determine live organism densities in three size classes of organisms (? 50 ?m, ? 10 and < 50 ?m, and < 10 ?m in minimum dimension), water quality parameters, and whole effluent toxicity (WET) tests. GSI designed these ship discharge monitoring methods for planned ship discharge monitoring exercises (these methods would not be suitable to surprise spot checks). As such, the methods in this Guidebook are highly applicable to a wide range of quantitative ballast treatment performance research and validation, including type approval testing and planned treatment performance monitoring events post approval. Any application of these methods to regulatory purposes, however, would require close review and revisions of method specifics per specific regulatory guidelines. Overall, Chapter 1 of this Guidebook presents an overview of the GSI ship discharge sampling approach. Chapter 2 describes details of the sample and return port installations necessary for this sampling approach to be used on Great Lakes?relevant ships. Chapter 3 details the set?up and breakdown processes for implementing this approach for a sampling event. Chapter 4 provides a discussion of the feasibility of the methods, including their strengths and weaknesses based on GSI trials in the field.

2011 GSI Ballast Discharge Monitoring Guidebook