Document Type

Report

Publication Date

2002

Pages

24 pp.

Abstract

The Chesapeake Bay benthic index of biotic integrity (B-IBI) was developed to assess benthic community health and environmental quality in Chesapeake Bay. The B-IBI evaluates the ecological condition of a sample by comparing values of key benthic community attributes (“metrics”) to reference values expected under non-degraded conditions in similar habitat types. It is therefore a measure of deviation from reference conditions.

The B-IBI is used by the Chesapeake Bay Benthic Monitoring Program, which is conducted by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (MD DNR) and by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VA DEQ). The program contains two primary elements: a fixed site monitoring effort directed at identifying trends in benthic community condition, and a probability-based sampling effort intended to estimate the area of the Chesapeake Bay and its major tributaries with benthic communities meeting the Chesapeake Bay Program Benthic Community Restoration Goals (Ranasinghe et al. 1994). Further information about the benthic monitoring program can be found in the World Wide Web at www.baybenthos.versar.com.

The development of the Chesapeake Bay B-IBI has been described in Weisberg et al. (1997). In addition, a series of statistical and simulation studies were conducted to evaluate and optimize the B-IBI (Alden et al. 2002). The results of Alden et al. (2002) indicated that the B-IBI is sensitive, stable, robust, and statistically sound. New sets of metric and threshold combinations for the tidal freshwater and oligohaline habitats were also developed in Alden et al. (2002) with a larger dataset than was available to Weisberg et al. (1997) for these two habitats. The present document includes the latest updates and the necessary information to calculate the Chesapeake Bay B-IBI.

Rights

Included with kind permission from the author(s).

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