wherein the relative abundance of vascular plants can be cor¬ 
related with two species of dabbling duck abundance as percent¬ 
ages of the North American population for a number of years. 
Again, some continuity, a little bit of synthesis and the sug¬ 
gestion that perhaps the relative abundance of ducks in the 
Chesapeake, those that have some relationship to sea grass, is 
in fact related to sea grass abundance. You can see, in the re¬ 
cent years, when the decline was very intense, redhead abundance 
was really quite low. 
There's considerable room for improvement in our monitor¬ 
ing, to say the least. There are data gaps. I might ask where 
are the data from 1939, 1940, 1941, 1965, 1968 and so forth? 
And the fact of the matter is, for many of these variables, 
dissolved oxygen being an obvious important one, they simply 
don't exist. So one area I think that the monitoring community, 
scientific community as well, ought to be very keyed on is this 
notion of continuity in measurements. That's one place I think 
we can really improve. And I'll say a few more things about 
that in a moment. 
Throughout the day we've seen all kinds of activities that 
are occurring in the Chesapeake Bay. And I took some time and 
made a number of phone calls and listed what I call examples of 
Chesapeake Bay monitoring programs. Early on in my search, it 
became very clear to me, without a very large effort, I wasn't 
going to be able to list them all. I have a few points to make 
here. One is that there is an awful lot of activity going on 
that can be construed to be monitoring or is in fact called 
monitoring. 
The second point is that, and this is good in our view, 
we're worried about things like freshwater inflow, a forcing 
function on the Bay. People are interested in trying to assess 
migratory waterfowl, one of the end products of the Bay, which 
has substantial economic interest. 
And one could go on with examples of where people are mea¬ 
suring rate of input, where they are measuring the relative abun 
dance of characters that are deemed important in an estuarine 
system. 
Lastly, there are all types of measurement schedules. Some 
of them by and large seem to be quite appropriate; others might 
need a little more fine tuning, but they range from the decades 
to the hours. And I'll say a bit more about that in a second. 
In developing the OEP Monitoring Program, we considered 
several generic issues at some length that I thought might be of 
interest to this audience when they're considering, perhaps, put 
ting monitoring programs together. 
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