ChesCRS20 will be held as a Virtual Symposium

 

This event is organized through the Steering Committee of the Chesapeake Community Modeling Program and is supported through a cooperative agreement between the Chesapeake Research Consortium (CRC) and the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office (NCBO).  Additional co-sponsors are welcome! Interested parties are encouraged to contact the CRC Executive Director at CRC-Director@chesapeake.org.

 

The bi-annual Chesapeake Community Research Symposium will be held as a virtual conference via Zoom from June 8-10, 2020. The symposium will be free of charge for participants and email updates will be sent out when registration is live.


The theme of the symposium is Chesapeake Bay Research and Management: Progress and Future Challenges and it will highlight recent progress, challenges and prospects for research, monitoring and modeling efforts that are used to guide management and restoration efforts in the Chesapeake Bay. The Scope and Aims of the symposium are as follows:

With the completion of the Chesapeake Bay Program’s 2017 mid-point assessment of the EPA’s Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) regulatory process, it is timely to convene a symposium aimed at examining the observations and models that were used in that assessment and discuss future needs and challenges for the next one in 2025 and beyond. There is a need for higher temporal resolution measurements and higher spatial resolution models. Research should be focused on developing a better mechanistic understanding about and models of physical, biological and chemical processes in the airshed, watershed and estuary. Additionally, more flexible sampling and modeling approaches are also needed for resolving management impacts on water quality and living resources over a wide range of scales.

The TMDL faces several challenges as we enter the third decade of the 21st century:

  • What magnitude of additional nutrient reductions, beyond those specified in the 2017 mid-point assessment, will be needed to compensate for impacts of climate change and population growth in 2025 and beyond?
  • What is the current status of efforts to account for these impacts and what new observations and models are needed to improve future predictions?
  • How will we look beyond the TMDL to restoration of living resources?
  • What is the state of the art in our ability to predict how management of nutrient and sediment loads will impact higher trophic levels in the Bay and its watershed?
  • What additional observations and models are needed?

By bringing together managers, scientists, and stakeholders for a series of plenary talks, panel discussions, and special sessions, the 2020 Chesapeake Community Research Symposium will highlight recent progress, challenges and prospects for research, monitoring and modeling efforts that are used to guide management and restoration efforts in Chesapeake Bay.