SEMINAR INTRODUCTION 
Dr. D'Elia: Thank you very much, Jim. It's great to be 
here and great to have such a super turnout, and we very much 
appreciate Senator Mathias's interest and attention to this 
seminar series today. 
It's been a busy week in the Chesapeake Bay area, starting 
with the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Restoration and Protection Plan, 
this seminar, various committee meetings, and leading up to the 
Chesapeake Bay Commission's program at the end of the week in 
Baltimore. 
This particular presentation is really designed to be a 
scientific, technical, and understandable program. If you'll 
notice, on the program I put primarily active research scien¬ 
tists in the beginning in making presentations. And we're 
starting with a morning session which is going to have sort of a 
background and informational aspect to it. And then we're going 
to move on to an afternoon session, which is going to discuss 
some of the controversies and things that we don't understand so 
well about Chesapeake Bay. And then it's going to move into 
management issues, some of the things that we really need to do 
in terms of managing it better. And then finally ending up with 
a panel discussion, which includes a mix of scientists and 
managers. 
This is the Chesapeake Bay. I would like to point out 
several things that I think are very important as we go along 
today. 
The first thing is there are numerous tributaries and 
subtributaries, et cetera, on this Bay. It's a long Bay, 
there's a lot of shoreline on the Chesapeake Bay. And I point 
this out to you because it's in contrast to other estuaries that 
have been discussed in these NOAA Estuary-of-the-Month seminars. 
For example, compare Chesapeake Bay with Long Island Sound. 
Long Island Sound has a relatively straight shoreline and 
relatively few tributaries and relatively great flushing by the 
sea. 
So what we're dealing with in Chesapeake Bay is quite a 
different situation than what we might talk about in other estu 
aries. And I encourage people to think about the comparison of 
this estuary to those estuaries. There's a lot of shoreline, 
lots of places for people to impact these days. 
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