Measurements of trace chemicals in water, rocks, soils, and living organisms frequently result in values reported only as less than the laboratory detection limit (“less-thans” or “nondetects”). In biogeochemical studies, a common practice for interpreting these data is to substitute one-half the detection limit and perform traditional statistical tests. This overly-simplistic practice results in significant errors in interpretation. Groups may be declared different that are not, for example. Methods for interpreting right-censored (“greater-than”) data in medical and industrial statistics are available for estimating summary statistics, hypothesis testing, and regression, but have rarely been applied to biogeochemical data. Once adapted for left-censored “less-than” data, these methods return results that are unequivocal, powerful, and accurate -- unlike results based on fabrication of values not originally in the data set. Illustration of the use of these methods for biogeochemical data are summarized from the author’s newly-released textbook "Nondetects And Data Analysis: Statistics for Censored Environmental Data", published by John Wiley