ASSESSING ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY: NEW TECHNIQUES 
by 
Dr. Walter R. Boynton 
Chesapeake Biological Laboratory 
Dr, Boynton: As my presentation will demonstrate today, 
it's going to be apparent that most researchers and other people 
interested in Chesapeake Bay deal with the same estuary and 
interpret it in different ways. And that can be both 
instructive as well as amusing. 
Let me make a few quick introductory points here. One is 
that throughout the world and throughout the United States 
estuaries are common. It's something that we see all over our 
landscape. They are, in addition, close to metropolitan areas, 
close to people, and they’re very productive. And because 
they're close to us and because they're productive and valuable, 
we have major interests in watching the patterns that emerge 
over periods of time. 
This is sort of the union card around here I think. In any 
case, I would like to make the additional point that problems 
either real or perceived that have appeared in the Chesapeake 
and its tributaries are problems similar to those seen in 
estuaries around the world. So in some ways it's gratifying 
that we're not dealing with some sort of unique environmental 
problem; it's one that's shared by many around the world. 
So with that little bit of introduction, I have to talk 
about monitoring and some approaches to monitoring. In 
particular, I'm going to talk about some of the things that 
we've considered in developing one of the newer monitoring 
programs that's currently operating in Chesapeake Bay, and this 
is one that's supported by the Office of Environmental Programs 
(OEP), State of Maryland. 
In the view of many people associated with that program, 
some of the key goals have to do with the description of trends 
of important variables — meaning variables that we can, through 
mental or more formal models, relate to the status of the 
environment and relate also to possible management strategies. 
Secondly, also of real importance, is the detection of 
significant differences in both time and space and how they 
relate to these important descriptors of the environment. I 
might add here that this is something in the past we may have 
fallen down on a little bit or, perhaps, simply have not done as 
well as we could have done. And the last is synthesis of 
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