Dr Cerrato’s research has tried to identify factors that contributed to the decline, and more recently it has focused on the loss of function created by the decline and its consequences on populations of large suspension feeding bivalves such as the hard clam Mercenaria mercenaria have declined in the shallow, enclosed bays that are common features on Long Island. In addition, recently developed high-resolution acoustic methods such as side-scan and multibeam sonar provide a whole new class of environmental variables that can be related to benthic community structure.