CESR

The effort began as a STAC independent initiative in March 2019, after Kurt Stephenson, Zach Easton, and Brian Benham proposed the idea of a report that would identify gaps and uncertainties in system response—physical, chemical, biological, and socioeconomic—that impact efforts designed to attain water quality standards in Chesapeake Bay. As STAC Chair at the time, Benham facilitated the development of a collaborative process that would engage the entire committee. This process consisted of two major components:

1 – Workgroups were formed around the subsystems of the chain linking management action to water quality and living resource response: nutrient and sediment reductions (watershed), water quality response to nutrient and sediment reductions (estuary) and living resource response to water quality (living resources).  Reports were generated by each workgroup.

2 – A steering committee developed a series of framing questions to guide the preparation of this report that would meet the objective of identifying gaps and uncertainties in achieving the Bay TMDL and water quality standards. Coeditors Stephenson and Wardrop, supported to great extent by a subgroup of the Steering Committee (Leonard Shabman, Zach Easton, Jeremy Testa, William Dennison, Kenny Rose, and Mark Monaco) were tasked with assembling ideas and contributions to write a single draft text, drawing material from the aforementioned workgroup reports, STAC and Chesapeake Bay Program reports, the scientific literature, and a limited amount of additional analyses performed in collaboration with Bay Program scientists. The resulting report was then submitted for several reviews by both steering committee members and the membership at-large to produce a consensus report.