Eat Your Invasives: The Bay’s Battle with Blue Catfish Blue catfish have been terrorizing Chesapeake Bay’s native fish for decades; they consume smaller fish and invertebrates in huge quantities and compete with larger fish. Some of their prey species are economically important, like blue crabs and menhaden, while others are already the focus of [...]
Flotsam and Jetsam: Fighting Debris in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed The Chesapeake Bay watershed encompasses 64,000 mi2 of land and the homes of over 18 million people; the unfortunate truth is that this population is the cause of a lot of trash in local waters and the Bay. Whether we’re talking about plastic straws, [...]
UninHABitable: Harmful Algal Blooms Across the Watershed Harmful algal blooms (HABs) threaten waters from the upper reaches of our rivers to the estuaries of the Chesapeake Bay. HAB species can release toxins, reduce dissolved oxygen, form extensive bottom mats, and cloud the water - all with impacts on aquatic animal species, recreation, and even [...]
CRC Member Take-Over Series: Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) It’s All About Carbon: Coastal Cycling and Forest Function Carbon is both the cause and the source of potential mitigation of our changing climate. Research on carbon cycling has implications for policy and the resilience of our communities. Blue carbon ecosystems—tidal marshes, mangroves, and seagrasses—and [...]
How to Protect Local Waterways In 2019, the Local Government Advisory Committee and Local Leadership Workgroup began work on a suite of learning materials that frame the Chesapeake Bay Program’s goals through the lens of a very important audience: local government officials. Elected officials make decisions for their communities that impact restoration progress. This [...]
Shifting to the Shallows: Informed Site Selection One of the core conclusions of the Comprehensive Evaluation of System Response (CESR) report is that there is great potential and urgency in the restoration of shallow water areas; they are the places where many of our favorite Bay species live and reproduce as well as where [...]
Shifting to the Shallows: Refocusing Chesapeake Restoration Efforts The implications of the Comprehensive Evaluation of System Response (CESR) report ripple through all aspects of the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort. One of the core conclusions of CESR is that there is great potential and urgency in the restoration of shallow water areas; they are the [...]
Evaluating Chesapeake Bay System Response: A CESR Q&A The Comprehensive Evaluation of System Response (CESR) report was released by the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC), an independent liaison between the Bay’s scientific community and the Chesapeake Bay Program. Over 60 experts were involved in its creation, and its pages reflect on how the restoration effort [...]
Expanding the Chesapeake Bay Watershed report card to include social, economic and environmental justice indices Geographically explicit, data-rich Chesapeake Bay report cards have been developed annually by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science for 16 years. But over the past several years, the report card expanded to include the Chesapeake watershed and [...]
Improving Understanding and Coordination of Science Activities for PFAS in the Chesapeake Bay Those “forever chemicals” you may be hearing about are Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, more commonly known as PFAS. They persist in our environment and are linked to long-lasting impacts on fish, other wildlife, and human health. In response to growing concerns [...]
