Dear colleagues,

I hope you all are having a great summer. The patterns of daily weather change have certainly been unusual (at least to the best of my own rusty memory …), but I think we’ve all been well warned that variability and heat are on the long-term rise in our region.  Meanwhile, though, there have certainly been some beautiful days mixed in.

Anyway… It is my pleasure to welcome you to this  Summer 2018 edition of the CRC Quarterly Newsletter (aka “QNL”) — it’s our 8th edition.  As we begin the second month of CRC’s Fiscal Year (FY19), it’s a good time to reflect back on FY18 and describe some FY19 objectives.

FY18 was another highly productive year for the CRC. In addition to a very busy year of work assisting the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) Partnership with hiring and mentoring “staffers” through our Environmental Management Career and Development Program (link here), CRC efforts in the past year have included:

  • Year-long work to successfully  complete multiple important workshops and technical reviews for the Partnership’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) as we assisted the CBP to complete the 2017 Mid-Point Assessment of the Chesapeake Bay TMDL.  (See latest update here.)  STAC staff, including our newest Annabelle Harvey (see story here) – are happy to have the Mid-Point Assessment (MPA) technical reviews behind them and are now looking forward to a more regular schedule of workshop and review activities and to catch up on other delayed work, such as collating a database of prior long-term STAC recommendations for the Partnership.
  • Continued recruitment and hiring of talented young staffers for the CBP as part of our highly successful Environmental Management Career and Development Program (see link here);
  • Hiring of Dr. Danny Kaufman to help the CBP with development of new tools for the optimization of Phase III Watershed Implementation Plans within CBP jurisdictions Optimization Tool Develop. (See the story from our Winter 2018 QNL  here.);
  • Culmination of our two-year effort with the Chesapeake Community Modeling Program (CCMP) to plan, coordinate and host the highly successful 2018 Chesapeake Research and Modeling Symposium in June 2018 (See story here.);
  • Continued cooperative work with NOAA’s Chesapeake Bay Office to, among other things support the  CB Interpretive Buoy System; coordinate the activities of the CCMP; support meetings, workshops and conferences on issues related to fisheries and fish habitat; support NOAA programs of K-12 teacher education, and provide support for publication of the Bay Journal.
  • Successful launch of a new program (“Chesapeake StREAM“) to help develop a “diversity pipeline” for  the environmental science, engineering and management workforce, including the recruitment, early advisement, and mentoring  of four new C-StREAM Fellows. (See story here.)

And of course, the CRC was not alone –the entire CBP Partnership had a highly productive — albeit tumultuous — year in FY18.  In addition to experiencing the retirements of two key US EPA CBP Office personnel (Director Nick DiPasquale in December of 2017 and Associate Director Rich Batiuk just this month), the CBP successfully weathered an especially threatening (and nonsensically aggressive) proposed budget cut from the Executive Branch, thanks to many supportive Congressional Representatives and Senators.  Blissfully un-involved in the budget discussions, CBPO managers, scientists, and staff successfully continued to coordinate the work of all six Goal Implementation Teams and many work groups, contractors, and advisory committees while, importantly, completing the important TMDL mid-point assessment.

Aided by many STAC-supported workshops and reviews, the Partnership was able to reach a successful negotiation of Final Phase III Watershed Implementation Plan Expectations for the partnering jurisdictions via agreements that were finalized by the Principals’ Staff Committee (PSC) on July 9 and discussed by the Partnership’s Executive Council at their annual meeting this week (August 9).  As testament to the Partnership’s transparent approach, details of the July 9 meeting of the PSC  are published here.  Some of the important elements include the Agricultural Directive (draft document linked here) and new goals for increasing diversity by 2025.  These include increasing both increasing the percentage of people of color in the Chesapeake Bay Program to 25 percent and the percentage of people of color in leadership positions to 15 percent.  These are important  goals that should benefit from CRC’s new C-StREAM program, mentioned above.

For FY19, the CRC has recently secured continuation funding to continue with all of the cooperative activities noted above, and we have already begun work with the CCMP to plan for the next  biennial research symposium, which will occur in spring of 2020. Meanwhile, on the near-term horizon, we are currently putting special emphasis on two important projects:

  • A major effort to complete the update of our database of electronic (PDF) copies of historical CRC Publications.   Here, you can search for and access most of over 150 documents (outside of the equally high number of STAC-related reports) that the CRC has published since its founding in 1972, including numerous major research project reports, conference proceedings, research synthesis/needs reports, and other original documents produced  by the CRC.  These include, for example, searchable PDF copies of early NSF project reports authored by the CRC’s “founding fathers” (L. Eugene Cronin, William J. Hargis, Jr., and Donald W. Pritchard) and their many professional colleagues through major NSF-funded research during pre-CBP Partnership years (1972-1983). We continue to add newly obtained PDF scans of these documents every week and will be working hard to improve the functionality of the database for searching and sorting.
  • In the next quarter we intend to continue to work closely with the Partnership’s Diversity Work Group and all CBP partners (especially including CRC member institutions) to better define, develop, and expand the C-StREAM program. In this context, we anticipate leveraging with existing programs to the fullest extent possible, especially including  programs at our member institutions that offer “Research Experience for Undergraduates” and already sponsored programs of summer internship at the CBPO, NCBO, various state agencies, and at other NGOs involved in the partnership.  Please read elsewhere in this QNL to learn more about our Summer 2018 class of C-StREAM Fellows and about the many REU programs that are coordinated by CRC member institutions.  (See comprehensive story here.)

Cheers and warm regards to all our subscribers!

Bill

August 6, 2018

P.S. I always will feel remiss if I do not remind readers to please CLICK HERE to register yourself in our expertise database — if you have not already done so — and to please encourage your colleagues to do the same.  This database continues to grow and is becoming the “go-to” resource for many within and beyond the CBP Partnership who seek collaborators and experts for proposals and projects, or who hope to reach the right applicants for the work they hope to fund.