The main purpose of this book is to give readers accurate, up to date, and easy to understand information on the natural and cultural heritages of the Chesapeake Bay heartland. Although the Chesapeake Bay is one of the most intensively studied regions in the United States, basic information about the area is still hard to find. Many thousands of specialized publications touch on just about every conceivable aspect of the Bay heartland's natural and cultural resources, and thousands of other reports - many unpublished and most hard to find - contain technical findings from studies commissioned by private corporations, public interest groups, government agencies, and other organizations. Add to this the ever increasing numbers of web sites that offer information on everything from water pollution levels to deep surface geology. Yet much of this material is presented in dense, technical terms, and readers may find it difficult to tell which findings are dependable and which are controversial or out of date. And no one source presents information on the region's cultural and natural resources in a systematic framework.

For more than a year, an innovative partnership has worked together to fill this gap. This partnership combines the knowledge, skills, and resources of federal and state agencies, academic institutions, public and private organizations, and interested individuals. In creating this book, project partners have worked to achieve three goals: to offer accurate, up to date information on the natural and cultural resources of the Chesapeake Bay heartland, to present these findings in nontechnical language, to organize this information in ways that reveal how a complex ever changing web of relationships connects all of the region's natural and cultural resources.

Culture is simply the way people live, and nature is what we need to thrive and survive. al and natural heritage is everyone's concern. By investigating our cultural and natural landscapes, we can see how our lives depend on an ever changing kaleidoscope of links connecting the past to the present. When we understand these connections between culture and nature, past and present, we can make better decisions about whether to change things or to keep them as they are.

By providing the latest, most accurate information in plain language, this book aims to provide a sound basis for such decisions. It is meant to assist anyone living in or concerned about the Chesapeake Bay region. General readers seeking basic information and specialists looking for succinct summaries can find useful data and suggested sources in these pages. Developers seeking for ways to avoid past mistakes and enhance potential project values can find useful information here. And State Historic Preservation Office employees using state Historic Contexts can use this study to place information about properties in state borders within a more comparative broader regional perspective. As this is a government report funded by tax dollars, its text may be freely used or adapted for brochures, newsletters, and other publications.