This book represents an outgrowth of an interdisciplinary session held
at the Seventh International Estuarine Research Federation Conference
held at Virginia Beach, Virginia, OCLober 1983. At that meeting, the
participants agreed to contribute to and develop a monograph entitled
"Tidal Mixing and Plankton Dynamics" by inviting an expanded group of
authors to contribute chapters on this theme. The emphasis would be to
review and summarize the considerable body of knowledge that has
accumulated over the last decade or so on the fundamental role tidal
mixing plays in energetic shallow seas and estuaries in stimulating and
controlling biological production. We have attempted to provide a mix of
contributions, composed of reviews of the state-of-the-art, reports on
current research activi- ties, summaries of the design and testing of a
new generation of innovative instruments for biological and chemical
sampling and sorting, and some imaginative ideas for future experiments
on stimulated mixing in continental shelf seas. We encouraged the
contributors to present critical and thought- provoking assessments of
current wisdom specifying the sorts of techniques and observational
strategies needed to validate the various hypotheses linking physical
structure, mixing and circulation to plankton biomass and production. We
hope this volume will appeal to incoming research students and
established scholars alike. We certainly have enjoyed working with all
the authors in compiling this book. We thank the numerous scientists who
have served as reviewers, P. Boisvert for typing the manuscripts and W.
Bellows for proofreading.