Condition of the Mid-Atlantic Estuaries: Production of a state of the environment report

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released a report entitled Con dition of the Mid-Atlantic Estuaries. That report summarizes the findings o f several studies conducted by federal and state agencies and academic inst itutions in Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Estuary, and the coastal bays of Delaw are, Maryland, and Virginia, and simultaneously addresses two distinct audi ences: environmental managers and the general public. This paper documents the process of preparing the Estuaries Report, emphasizing the lessons lear ned in merging information from a wide-variety of sources and in reporting the results to multiple audiences. The major difficulties in preparing the report included: 1) choosing a format and topics that adequately addressed both environmental managers and the public, 2) resolving spatial and tempor al disparities in the assembled data sets, and 3) establishing threshold va lues that distinguished between acceptable and unacceptable conditions in i ndicators. Our solutions to these challenges and alternatives are discussed . We conclude that a small team of knowledgeable scientists can effectively merge the information of diverse sources into a document that is useful to both environmental managers and the interested public. However, considerab le interaction between the team and other scientists was necessary to resol ve ambiguities and assure relevancy and accuracy. These findings support th e proposition that the vast sources of existing environmental information c an be easily and effectively used to assess the ecological condition across large regions.