special study (letter to Paul Jacobson from John Dickinson dated September 

 12, 1977) estimated loss of up to 7 5% of the organisms when samples were 

 frozen (Table 3). This loss precludes quantitative analysis of data 

 collected prior to June 1976. 



Infaunal data obtained from June and September 1976 (samples not 

 frozen) were evaluated by Battelle to determine the adequacy of ten 

 replicate cores (sieve mesh 0.7 mm) for sampling infaunal communities 

 (Battelle 1977). Indicies of dispersion, species area curves, cumulative 

 information curves, and frequency distributions were used to evaluate 

 estimates of density, species diversity, and dominance. These analyses 

 illustrated the patchy distribution of infaunal organisms and the influence 

 of this distribution on the various community parameters. The study 

 recommended increasing the number of replicates to help integrate small 

 scale patchiness and thus provide better estimates of density, species 

 diversity and dominance. 



Following this initial evaluation, a more intensive study was 

 performed to examine the effect of sampling area size on estimates of 

 descriptive community parameters (Battelle 1978) . This study compared 

 species area curves, community composition, and diversity based on 

 samples obtained using hand-held corers of 25 cm (i.d.) x 10 cm deep and 



10 cm (i.d.) x 5 cm deep. Total surface area for large 



2 2 



cores was 0.5 m and 0.078 m for small cores. A 0.7 mm mesh sieve was 



used to process all samples. 



Results of this study indicated that species area curves based on 



large cores reached an asymptote at 7 replicates. Curves based on small 



cores failed to reach an asymptote after 10 replicates; the pooled small 



cores included 66% of the taxa collected by the large cores. Comparisons 



