April brought its traditional showers and some very good news for the Chesapeake Bay region. For the first time since the decades-old underwater grass monitoring program began, underwater grass acreage exceeded 100,000 acres. In 2017, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science mapped an estimated 104,843 acres of underwater grass throughout the Chesapeake Bay. This marks the [...]
Sarah Xenophon is a watershed technician in the Agriculture and Environment Center in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State. She creates large-scale watershed assessments and meets with farmers, land owners, municipalities and others to restore polluted or otherwise “sick” bodies of water in Pennsylvania. The center works with key stakeholders to proactively build partnerships to improve the [...]
Conowingo Dam CRC Director Bill Ball was recently quoted in a Johns Hopkins Magazine article about the need for increased upstream agricultural BMPs to alleviate the sediment build-up behind Conowingo Dam. The dam has been in place, collecting sediment, for almost a century. The dam was completed in 1928 as a hydroelectric and flood [...]
The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), a federal-interstate water resource management agency, currently has two internship opportunities: Environmental Paralegal - Directorate Branch Data Analysis - Water Resource Management Branch Environmental Paralegal - Directorate Branch The Environmental Paralegal Intern will support DRBC’s in-house counsel and coordinate closely with communications staff, technical branches, and other members of the directorate. [...]
As part of a new program described elsewhere in this newsletter and short-handed as C StREAM (for "Chesapeake Student Recruitment, Early Advisement, and Mentoring"), the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) partnership and Chesapeake Research Consortium (CRC) are seeking applicants for three summer intern positions in Summer 2018 (June – August) to provide support to the Chesapeake Bay [...]
The Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) Modeling Workgroup has just completed several years of active model development in support of the CBP partnership’s 2017 Midpoint Assessment. The Midpoint Assessment applies the newly developed Phase 6 Suite of Modeling Tools in support of managing the historic 2010 TMDL (Total Maximum Daily Load) of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. The [...]
Baltimore County Stream Renamed in Honor of Reds Wolman Map showing where the stream is located Thanks to efforts by Johns Hopkins University alumni, faculty and former faculty, and other prominent geomorphologists and hydrologists from throughout the nation, and with the gracious endorsement of Baltimore County Councilman Wade Kach, a unanimous vote of the Baltimore [...]
Dear colleagues, As winter weather quickly turns to summer (what ever happened to spring?), many of us are celebrating longer daylight hours, the beginning of crab season, the end of classes, the graduation of students, the relaunching of boats, and the application of the Phase 6 Chesapeake Bay Modeling System. Well, some of those things are [...]
Chipping away at the “Green Ceiling” – Pilot Summer for Chesapeake StREAM Program The Chesapeake Research Consortium (CRC) and Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) have consistently used their partnership to drive a shared objective to help train and develop the next generation of research scientists, educators and managers. In this regard, there have been ongoing conversations among [...]
Researchers at Virginia Tech recently published a paper in "Science of the Total Environment" discussing how agricultural conservation practices (CPs) can mitigate the impacts of climate change on water quality. Scientists Moges Wagena and Zachary Easton chose to study the effects of climate change and the effectiveness of CPs in the Susquehanna River Basin, the largest source of nutrients [...]
