The program to protect and restore the Chesapeake Bay includes perhaps the most extensive monitoring program for any coastal ecosystem. After twelve years of monitoring in the Bay, efforts are underway to advance the environmental monitoring through greater integration: (1) across different environmental media and between environmental quality and living resources; (2) among monitoring programs of different federal, state and local agencies; (3) between predictive management models and monitoring of environmental responses; and (4) between monitoring and research. In addition, a suite of new technologies is being employed, including in situ observing systems, remote sensing, and continuous profiling from underway vessels, which are providing new insights and more efficient means to measure environmental responses. Finally, the increasingly diverse information sources are being linked and made available on the Internet to a broader array of users.
1. INTRODUCTION
The Chesapeake Bay, on the east coast of the United States, is one of the world's largest estuaries at 320 km long and including about 11,000 km tidal waters. The Bay is relatively shallow (average depth 4 m) and has a large catchment area of 166,000 km , making it particularly susceptible to agricultural and urban development on land.
Since its beginning in 1983, the Chesapeake Bay Program has become known around the world as one of the most ambitious efforts to protect and restore a large coastal ecosystem and manage its resources. Notably, this program is multi-jurisdictional-involving formal agreements among the federal government, the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, and the District of Columbia and increasing involvement of local governments, as well-and has been successful in engaging broad public involvement.
Also notable, has been the role science and technology has played in the Chesapeake Bay Program in understanding the causes of the degradation of the ecosystem; setting goals for its restoration; identifying solutions, including in wastewater treatment, non-point source controls, habitat restoration and fisheries management; and in measuring progress toward the goals. Centerpieces of the scientific and technical effort have been integrated management models for predicting the effects of controls of nutrient inputs (viewed as the most important cause of degradation of this ecosystem) and the extensive monitoring program. The mathematical models consist of a time-variable, three-dimensional water quality model coupled with a model of sediment processes and linked with a watershed model (Thomann et al. 1994).
Monitoring is a critical component of environmental assessment in terms of providing background information on trends, data for model construction and validation, and measures of response of the ecosystem to management actions (National Research Council 1990). In the Chesapeake Bay, monitoring has been used for all three of these purposes. In a narrow sense, the Chesapeake Bay Program monitoring consists of systematic collection of water quality and biological data at a large number of stations in the Bay and its tidal tributaries, however results of many additional monitoring programs (including measurements made on river flows, the atmosphere, and the landscape) also contribute essential information. In this paper I will provide
