-4- 



Smithsonian Institution's Office of Environmental Sciences provided 

 matching funds and established the Smithsonian Center for Natural 

 Areas to undertake the task. 



Objectives 



Briefly stated, the task was this: on the basis of a new survey, 

 to recommend for procurement those natural areas which Smithsonian 

 personnel judged to be of highest priority for preservation action. 

 This in turn called for the creation of a survey concept including an 

 evaluation system — a concept that could function within rather narrow 

 limits of time (two years) and expenditure, and therefore make use of 

 already available information. Also, the system for organizing the 

 data and ranking the areas had to be flexible, to allow for additional 

 details as they accumulated and for changes in the landscape as they 

 occurred. Development rarely pauses for surveys of this kind: on 

 several occasions in the course of the study, a prime natural area 

 would be taken out of contention by development, and we would have to 

 erase it from our maps. Finally, the new survey concept, it was hoped, 

 would not only provide the data necessary for decision-making in the 

 Chesapeake Bay region but also would serve as a model for similarly 

 motivated surveys in other regions. 



Survey Concept 



The survey concept includes four fairly distinct phases. (1) It 

 was first necessary to determine and map all of the areas in the 



