CRITICAL ELEMENTS IN DESCRIBING AND UNDERSTANDING OUR NATIONS AQUATICRESOURCES

Despite spending $115 billion per year on environmental actions in the United States, we have only a limited ability to describe the effecti veness of these expenditures. Moreover, after decades of such investme nts, we cannot accurately describe status and trends in the nation's a quatic ecosystems or even those in specific regions. Why? This situati on has arisen in part because we have excluded the fundamental princip les of probability designs that are widely used in other fields and we have often ignored direct measures of biota, the subjects of greatest concern. To demonstrate the results of ignoring these powerful statis tical and biological tools, we present four case studies. These studie s compare estimates of aquatic resource status derived from using (1) a probability-based study design, often with biological measures of co ndition; and (2) a nonstatistical study design, often using chemical s urrogates. In three of the four cases, the results derived from the no nstatistical perspective underestimate the degree of biological degrad ation.