At a CEDEN user group meeting (date not specified), State Water Board staff reviewed how monitoring data are currently submitted to the California Environmental Data Exchange Network (CEDEN), described recent vocabulary and method-business-rule updates for PFAS and PCR, and outlined the rollout plan and technical constraints for the CEDEN 2 replacement system.

The update matters because monitoring data flow into CEDEN in several different ways today, and some submission paths are temporarily routed to other regional data centers or to the open data portal. That routing affects where users can find newly submitted records, how they should format submissions, and what metadata (for example, project codes and method names) must conform to new character limits imposed by the CEDEN 2 schema.

State Water Board staff member Tessa said the best single contact for questions about submissions is the CEDEN inbox (ceden@waterboards.ca.gov) and asked users to contact that address for assistance. She explained that several regional data centers (RDCs) — including the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories regional data center, the San Francisco Bay Area RDC managed by the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI), the Central Valley RDC managed by MLJ Environmental, and the SWAMP (Surface Water Ambient Monitoring Program) RDC — all feed into the statewide network that users access through the CEDEN query tool or related data marts.

Tessa described two common submission paths. If data are loaded by an RDC, those records go into the larger data marts and are discoverable through the CEDEN query tool. If users submit via the CEDEN data checker to the State Water Board’s CEDEN data center, some data types (for example, toxicity, tissue or bioassessment) may be redirected to an RDC for loading; chemistry and field results submitted through the checker may instead be published directly to the State Water Board’s open data portal as an "augmentation" dataset. Tessa said the Board uses both sets of data for regulatory processes such as the 303(d) list and the integrated water-quality assessment.

Users raised questions about downstream systems and automation. Adam asked about the historical automated transfer of data from CEDEN to the Water Quality Exchange (WQX). Tessa said that automated transfer is currently not operating and cited resource constraints; she said she would check whether any manual pushes to WQX have occurred and report back. Adam also noted that, currently, there is not state-board funding for RDCs to load data submitted through the checker, which can affect whether an RDC will perform additional loading work.

Marlene asked whether the CEDEN confirmation page could include RDC email addresses to make it easier to notify the appropriate RDC after a successful submission; Tessa said she would investigate the level of effort with the Board’s IT team. Several participants asked for clearer guidance on whether certain stormwater or runoff samples should be reported as "effluent," "runoff," or another matrix; Tessa said she would revisit both the effluent and the runoff definitions and follow up at a future meeting.

On vocabulary and method business rules, Tessa said the CEDEN team recently updated many PFAS analyte names to use acidic forms that align with EPA methods and with laboratory ELAP reporting conventions, and she said the team added a business rule asking that new PFAS analyte names follow EPA or other standardized method names and include standard acronyms. The group also added clarifying guidance for PCR (polymerase chain reaction) methods: method entries should identify the analytical procedure (for example, qPCR or digital droplet PCR), the target organism or assay, and the assay type (for example, TaqMan or SYBR Green) rather than only citing journal articles that first described a primer set.

Participants debated how to represent stormwater-related samples. Some users said they need to distinguish non-precipitation MS4 discharge (for example, permitted non-stormwater discharge from a municipal separate storm sewer system) from storm-event runoff and from other municipal-runoff categories so that those data are not inappropriately assessed as receiving-water samples. Tessa said she will do follow-up research and coordinate with regional staff to clarify whether changing the effluent description, the runoff description, or both best meets the decision-making needs of regions and permittees.

Tessa reviewed progress and schedules for the CEDEN 2 (vendor EarthSoft’s EQuIS-based) replacement. The rollout plan starts with a chemistry module, followed by field and habitat, then taxonomy (benthic data), and later tissue/toxicity modules. The Board expects contract-laboratory testing of the chemistry module in the late second half of the summer and RDC API-connection testing in late summer/fall, with broader public use of the chemistry module toward the end of the year or in early 2026.

Because CEDEN 2 relies on a vendor schema, some character limits are shorter than in the current system. Tessa said the likely field-length changes under consideration are: station code (from 25 characters to 20), parent project code (50 to 40), and method/digest-extract method (50 to 20). She noted that method name shortening is the most challenging because many laboratories use long SOP titles; the CEDEN team is considering alias fields and crosswalks so historic records remain usable. The team also plans to require that a project code and its parent project code not be identical in the new schema; Tessa said the system stores projects differently and that they must be unique from one another. She encouraged users to propose query-tool improvements (for example, adding CSV download format or showing station code and station name together); the Board expects to bundle small enhancements into roughly annual updates.

Several RDC representatives said they plan to crosswalk existing templates in their own systems rather than require all laboratories to change submission templates immediately. Tessa said regional data centers remain responsible for their own loading workflows and that the Board will coordinate vocabularies between the two systems to reduce duplicate requests.

The user group agreed to reconvene in August; Tessa said she will report back on WQX transfer status, the effluent/runoff definitions, and next steps for the CEDEN 2 rollout. The meeting closed with the reminder to email ceden@waterboards.ca.gov for submission questions or requests.