Environmentalists and watermen have come together to reach a broad set of recommendations for restoring oysters in the Choptank and Little Choptank rivers. OysterFutures, led by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) and funded by National Science Foundation, is a research project aimed at achieving thriving oyster populations. Watermen and environmentalists have long [...]
A team led by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and Marine Global Earth Observatory (MarineGEO), and including participants from Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), University of Maryland (UMD), Old Dominion University (ODU) George Mason University (GMU), and several other institutions conducted a large initiative to document the biodiversity of the Chesapeake Bay on July [...]
Researchers from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) gave the Chesapeake Bay an overall grade of "C" in their annual report card. Although the "C" grade has remained constant since 2012, this is the first year that scientists have seen a statistically significant positive trend. Alexandra Fries, a senior science communicator at UMCES, told [...]
SERC Biological Technician Gabriella Marafino collecting a water sample for eDNA analysis. Credit: SERC. Two types of river herring, alewife and blueback herring, used to be abundant in tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay . These days, however, herring are threatened by habitat loss, overfishing, and dams that block the route to their spawning locations. [...]
Underwater grasses photographed by Lefcheck A landmark paper authored by a power-house of Bay scientists has rocked the Chesapeake Bay for the past two months. The paper looks at the long-term effects of nutrient reductions in the Chesapeake Bay watershed on underwater grasses, or submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV). It was published in the prestigious [...]
CRAB: Collaborative Research around the Bay In the past 50 years, the amount of water in the open ocean without oxygen has increased more than fourfold. In coastal water bodies, including estuaries and seas, low-oxygen sites have increased more than 10-fold since 1950. Scientists expect oxygen to continue dropping even outside these zones as Earth warms. [...]
Sunrise over Kirkpatrick Marsh Researchers at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES), the University of Delaware, and Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) are investigating how ocean acidification could potentially compound existing problems in the Bay. A major problem already plaguing the Bay is caused by nutrient pollution. When fertilizer run off enters [...]
UMCES’ Eric Schott, right, and his graduate student, Matt Spitznagel, take a blood sample from a crab at Phillips Wharf Environmental Center. Eric Schott, a molecular biologist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) is investigating a virus that is plaguing blue crab shedding operations around the Bay. Schott first discovered [...]
A partnership between The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Delaware Maryland Agribusiness Association, and funding from USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), has been providing tools to farmers in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia to prevent nutrient and sediment pollution in the Bay. Farmers want to prevent pollution while also increasing efficiency and productivity on their lands, [...]
The oyster season in the Chesapeake Bay recently ended, but this year oysters harvested in the Rappahannock River came from an unusual home. Some of the oysters they harvested were grown on gravel-sized stones that had been put in the river to provide an unconventional growing spot. Usually, baby oysters, or spat, are grown on old [...]
