The scope of environmental monitoring systems now encompasses landscapescale
monitoring networks, multimedia approaches, and far more biological indicators
of environmental impact than were ever employed 20 or more years ago. In my
opinion all these trends and changes are for the good and in the right direction.
Techniques and approaches are rapidly changing as well as the conceptual thinking
used to design monitoring networks. For example, geostatistics were not widely applied
20 years ago, but they are commonly used today. Single media sampling programs
used to be the norm 20 or more years ago, but today it is far easier to find monitoring
programs that are multimedia in nature than are single media—as witnessed by the
makeup of this book. I found it much easier to recruit authors dealing with ecological
monitoring indicators, geostatistics, multimedia assessment programs, etc. than to identify
authors who were working in the more traditional areas of air-, soil-, and watersampling
programs.