The Chesapeake Bay Program’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) is administered by the CRC and funded through a cooperative agreement with the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) Partnership – currently spanning the period 2016-2022. The CRC has had a long-standing role of administering all activities of STAC, an active committee with 38 members from academic and scientific institutions around the watershed.
For any inquiries, or to be added to STAC’s Interested Parties list, contact STAC Coordinator, Annabelle Harvey.
STAC February Update
STAC will hold its first meeting of 2021 on March 23-24 over Zoom. STAC members will review upcoming membership vacancies and work to incorporate findings from the CBP DEIJ Action Team into their membership nomination process. In 2021, STAC will have 5 new at-large vacancies to fill in its membership. STAC received proposals for FY2021 Workshops in February and will review and vote for funding approval at this meeting. The second day of the meeting will be dedicated to STAC’s Achieving Water Quality Goals in the Chesapeake Bay: An Evaluation of System Response. STAC members will brainstorm overarching themes and conclusions in both breakout groups and in a facilitated STAC-wide discussion.
The agenda, Zoom information, and meeting materials will be made available on the STAC March Meeting Webpage.
STAC 2021 Quarterly Meeting Dates
STAC has approved the following dates for their 2021 Quarterly Meetings. If you are interested in attending any of these meetings, please sign up for STAC’s Interested Parties email list.
- March 23-24, 2021
- June 15-16, 2021
- September 13-14, 2021
- December 7-8, 2021
FY2020 STAC Workshops: Approved Proposals
STAC-Sponsored Workshops
STAC held 1 workshop in the last quarter:
- Advancing Outreach Effectiveness to Improve Conservation Practice Adoption
January 26-28. 2021, Virtual
This workshop fostered interactive discussions among farmers, outreach practioners, and experts in behavioral economics to improve outreach capacity and address farmer concerns about conservation practice adoption. Along with funding partners from the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research (FFAR), The Nature Conservancy, and the Walton Family Foundation, this STAC virtual workshop utilized facilitation and online survey software to best understand barriers to implementation of agricultural practices and to provide guidance to overcome these barriers to reach restoration targets. The findings and recommendations from this workshop will be released in a report to the Partnership.
The following workshops are in the process of planning.
- Understanding Genetics for Successful Conservation and Restoration of Resilient Chesapeake Bay Brook Trout Populations (Received extension on funding use until December 2021 due to COVID)
- Overcoming the Hurdle: Addressing BMP Implementation Through a Social Science Lens
- Assessing the Water Quality, Habitat, and Social Benefits to Green Riprap (Received extension on funding use until December 2021 due to COVID)
Information regarding past workshops, including agendas, presentations, and reports (as they become available) can be found on the workshop homepage.
STAC Recommendations Database
Development of the CBP requested STAC Recommendations Database has continued to make substantial progress this quarter. STAC staff has tagged each recommendation with keywords and categories, organized by the CBP Goal Implementation Team and workgroup structure. The CBP Data Team has released the test site, which is fully functional and is under Beta-testing by STAC members until February 2021. STAC Staff will then release the website to partners and present its functionality at various partner meetings throughout the beginning of 2021. The test website can be found here.
STAC Synthesis Update
The STAC-sponsored Science Synthesis project continues progress and in September, due to COVID-related setbacks, Jeremy Testa (UMCES, lead PI) requested a no cost extension (NCE). Details can be found below in Testa’s rational. The STAC EB approved the NCE during their November 2020 meeting.
Research Activity and Progress (Jeremy Testa, UMCES): Despite of our delayed research activity, we plan to continue to present our progress to the Chesapeake Bay Program so that lessons learned from our synthesis can be communicated to the restoration partnership as early as possible. In fact, we hope the frequency of our presentations to the CBP will communicate our findings to the community in a similar timeframe as originally proposed, or envisioned. We have already made two oral presentations at the Chesapeake Bay Modeling workgroup Quarterly Meetings in May and July 2020, and we are committed to making two additional presentations in fall 2020 and winter 2021. Since our last update in April 2020, we have continued our statistical analysis (CART, GAM) to determine climate and biogeochemical controls on daily oxygen depletion metrics, (b) computing metrics of ecosystem metabolism (e.g. primary production, respiration) from each station’s oxygen time series, and (c) assembling and collating the data necessary to perform these analyses.