ABSTRACT
The environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in the creation of several laws aimed at protecting the environment, and in the creation of Federal, state, and local government agencies charged with enforcing these laws. In the U.S., laws such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and the Comprehensive Emergency Response and Civil Liability Act mandate some sort of monitoring or comparison to ensure the integrity of the environment. Once you start talking about monitoring a process over time, or comparing observations from two or more sites, you have entered the world of numbers and statistics. In fact, more and more environmental regulations are mandating the use of statistical techniques, and several excellent books, guidance documents, and journal articles have been published to explain how to apply various statistical methods to environmental data analysis (e.g., Berthoux and Brown, 1994; Gibbons, 1994; Gilbert, 1987; Helsel and Hirsch, 1992; McBean and Rovers, 1998; Ott, 1995; Piegorsch and Bailer, 1997; ASTM, 1996; USEPA, 1989a,b,c; 1990; 1991a,b,c; 1992a,b,c,d; 1994a,b,c; 1995a,b,c; 1996a,b; 1997a,b). Only a very few books attempt to provide a comprehensive treatment of environmental statistics in general, and even these omit some important topics.
