Critical elements in describing and understanding our nation's aquatic
resources
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Paulsen, S.G., Hughes, R.M. and Larsen, D.P. (1998)
Journal of The American Water Resources Association, 34, 995-1005.
Abstract
Despite spending $115 billion per year on environmental actions in the United
States, we have only a limited ability to describe the effectiveness of these
expenditures. Moreover, after decades of such investments, we cannot accurately
describe status and trends in the nation's aquatic ecosystems or even those in
specific regions. Why? This situation has arisen in part because we have
excluded the fundamental principles 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 statistical and biological tools, we present four case studies. These
studies compare estimates of aquatic resource status derived from using (1) a
probability-based study design, often with biological measures of condition;
and (2) a nonstatistical study design, often using chemical surrogates. In
three of the four cases, the results derived from the nonstatistical
perspective underestimate the degree of biological degradation.
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