The grants, from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency , will support the development of chemical, biological and physical standards for estuaries, particularly for estuarine wetlands. Those standards will function rather like the measures of blood pressure, heart function and blood chemistry that are used to assess human health, said Susan Anderson, the project director and an associate research biologist at UC Davis' Bodega Marine Laboratory . We need to be able to assess the situation before the patient gets sick. Or if the patient is already sick, to assess how sick.
Estuaries are vital components of the planet's ecosystem.
But estuaries are in serious trouble. But the health indicators we have now are not sophisticated enough. For instance, when pollution occurs or an exotic species invades, we can't discern subtle effects or predict responses at all levels in the ecosystem. Our challenge is to improve those indicators. The others are at the Great Lakes, on the Atlantic Coast and on the Gulf of Mexico.