Introduction 



Reports of beaches being closed, trash 

 washing ashore, prohibitions on shell- 

 fishing, health warnings to seafood con- 

 sumers, waste discharges to the sea, 

 ocean dumping, and habitat losses have 

 aroused considerable public concern 

 about the quality of the coastal environ- 

 ment in the United States. To assess 

 the effects of human activities on the 

 quality of coastal and estuarine areas 

 throughout the Nation, the National 

 Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra- 

 tion (NOAA) created the National Status 

 and Trends (NS&T) Program to monitor 

 trends of chemical contamination in 

 space and time and to determine bio- 

 logical responses to that contamination. 

 Since 1984, annual chemical analyses 

 for trace metals and organic contami- 

 nants, e.g., pesticides, have been made 

 on surface sediments, on livers of ben- 

 thic fish, and on whole soft-parts of 

 mussels and oysters collected from a 

 network of almost 300 sites around the 

 U.S. 



The need for this type of national moni- 

 toring of ambient environmental quality 

 was recently emphasized by the U.S. 

 National Research Council. Its report 

 (NRC, 1990) indicated that the United 

 States annually spends more than $1 30 

 million on coastal environmental moni- 

 toring, but that most is devoted to com- 

 pliance monitoring, i.e., testing waste- 

 waters and other materials prior to dis- 

 charge or to performing measurements 

 prescribed by regulation very near to 

 discharge points. Since compliance 

 monitoring, by design, covers very small 

 spatial scales and short time periods, 

 programs such as NOAA's NS&T Pro- 

 gram are required to focus on wider 



public concerns about the long-term 

 effects of coastal pollution throughout 

 the U.S. 



This report, based on six years of results 

 from the NS&T Program and other 

 monitoring efforts, describes the spatial 

 extent and severity of chemical con- 

 tamination and changes in concentra- 

 tions of contaminants over the last dec- 

 ade. While conclusions are always 

 subject to new information, it appears 

 that, on a national scale, high and bio- 

 logically significant concentrations of 

 contaminants measured in the NS&T 

 Program are limited primarily to urban- 

 ized estuaries. In addition, levels of 

 those contaminants have, in general, 

 begun to decrease in the coastal U.S. 



Sampling Sites 



NOAA's NS&T Program is designed to 

 describe national, rather than local, dis- 

 tributions of contamination. Since Its 

 inception, the primary criterion for NS&T 

 site selection has been the collection of 

 samples from places that are "represen- 

 tative" of large coastal areas and the 

 avoidance of small-scale patches of con- 

 tamination, or "hot spots." In particular, 

 no sites were knowingly selected near 

 waste discharge points. For the "Mus- 

 sel Watch" component of the NS&T Pro- 

 gram, a site also has to have a suffi- 

 ciently large and robust population of 

 mussels or oysters to provide annual 

 samples for an indefinite period. 



NOAA sampling sites are not uniformly 

 distributed. Almost half of them are in 

 urban estuaries, within 10 miles of the 

 centers of populations in excess of 

 1 00,000 people. This choice is based on 

 assumptions that contamination is 



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