Michael Haire and Elizabeth C. Krome, eds.
As the Chesapeake Bay Program resolves some of the issues before it, other problems come to the forefront for consideration. The 1983 Chesapeake Bay Agreement identified a small number of critical issues to be addressed. The selection of these issues was based on a consensus among citizens, resource managers, and the scientific community. These groups agreed, first, that these problems were important, and, second, that we knew enough about them to develop successful solutions.
As times has passed, the different parts of the complex interstate, state-federal, state-local, public-private, and legislative-executive entities that comprise the Chesapeake Bay Program have coalesced into an increasingly effective and efficient apparatus for dealing with the various parts of the problem. It has become apparent that the solutions to many of the problems articulated in the 1983 Agreement and its successor, the 1987 Bay Agreement, are not going to be as simple as was hoped in 1983. The basic consensus as to the importance of the original problems still holds, but some newly-identified problems demand solutions and require integration into the Program.
The Chesapeake Bay Program Is moving in uncharted waters. No other environmental management effort on this scales has ever been attempted in a system as complex as the Chesapeake. The effort is complicated by the diversity of approaches and the interrelationship of various program activities. The Comprehensive Research Plan approved by the Chesapeake Bay Program Executive Council in July 1988 recognizes the need for continuing interdisciplinary studies of the Bay's estuarine system, subsystems, and watershed from both basic and applied perspectives. The Research Plan clearly recognizes that the Bay Program cannot "stay tied up at pierside waiting for all of the answers before setting sail."
This publication presents four reviews of scientific and technical topic relevant to activities of the Chesapeake Bay Program. Like the reviews in the first publication series, these topics have broad implications beyond the immediate scope of the disciplines involved and promise to make contributions to other areas of research and management.
Fore example, modeling has been used in various ways in the Chesapeake Bay Program since its inception as a research program funded by the Environmental Protection Agency. The term modeling, however, is frequently misused in discussing the ways in which the Bay's problems should be solved. The distinction between conceptual and simulation models is not universally recognized, and the relationship of ecosystem models to water quality, hydrodynamics, and population (fisheries) models is unclear even to many participants in the Bay Program. The contribution by Wenzel and Hopkins, Coastal Ecosystem Models and the Chesapeake Bay Program: Philosophy, Background, and Status, clarifies misconceptions about the use and nonuse of ecosystem models within the Chesapeake Bay Program. For scientists and managers outside the field of ecosystem modeling, it also offers a sense of where the effort in the Chesapeake Bay stands in relation to modeling projects in other coastal systems.
Efforts to understand problems of living resources and their response to pollutants initially focused on the water column and submerged aquatic vegetation habitats. However, as we have refined our understanding of nutrient and sediment processes, particularly as they relate to storage and mobilization in the sediments, it has become apparent that we cannot ignore the role of the benthos. Diaz and Schaffner, in The Functional Role of Estuarine Benthos, provide a timely and current review of the subject.
A major strategy of the Bay restoration and protection involves controlling nonpoint sources of pollution by applying best management practices (BMPs) to any land-based activity that might has a deleterious effect on the Bay's aquatic habitat or living resources. Dillaha, in Role of Best Management Practices in Restoring the Health of the Chesapeake Bay: Assessments of Effectiveness reviews the science behind the assessment of present and developing BMP technology and outlines the strengths and weaknesses of some current practices.
As the Chesapeake Bay program begins to address issues related to toxics, difficult decisions will have to be made, often without the luxury of complete knowledge of either the problem or the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. Cairns and Orvos outline a framework for these choices in their paper, Developing and Ecological Risk Assessment Strategy for the Chesapeake Bay. This term "risk assessment" is one which should become familiar to all who are interested in a restored Chesapeake Bay.