The System Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP, pronounced “swamp”) was established in 1995 as a means of observing short-term variability and long-term changes in estuarine regions. Each reserve participates in SWMP which provides researchers, resource managers, educators, and other coastal decision makers with standardized, quantitative measures to determine how reserve conditions are changing. By using standard operating procedures for each component across all 29 reserves, SWMP data helps establish the reserves as a system of national reference sites, as well a network of sentinel sites for detecting and understanding the effects of climate change in coastal regions.