The Chesapeake Community Modeling Program (CCMP), Chesapeake Research Consortium (CRC), Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System/Chesapeake Focus Research Group (CSDMS/CFRG) and the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) convened a three-day STAC workshop to undertake a comprehensive review of the status of the current CBP management modeling system and discuss future directions for management modeling in the CBP with a view toward developing a roadmap for future CBP modeling for 2015 and beyond. This workshop was guided by the following overarching questions:
- Description of needs: What are the mandates and the scientific, computational, and data management challenges the CBP faces in the coming years and what critical changes and upgrades will have to be made to the CBP modeling system to meet these challenges?
- Review of advice: How can information and recommendations from previous workshops and committee reports and organizations like the STAC, National Research Council (NRC), CCMP and CSDMS be brought to bear to address these needs?
- Description of resources: What human and infrastructure resources are going to be available to meet these future needs and challenges? How can resources be used more efficiently and collaboration among government, private, and academic partners be maximized? What additional resources might be needed and how might the various stakeholders and partners work most effectively to find these?
- Visioning for 2018 and beyond: Can a well-informed, realistic, and unified vision for future CBP modeling be created to guide us into the future?
The workshop began with a full day plenary session that reviewed the purpose of the CBP models, the current state of the CBP modeling system, and the goals of the workshop. In this plenary there were also presentations and discussion related to overarching considerations, like how new technologies and modeling approaches can be used to address CBP modeling needs. The second day of the workshop was spent in breakout sessions, organized around each of the major components of the CBP modeling system (land use, watershed nutrient and sediment transport, estuarine physics, water quality and living resources). These breakout groups were tasked to consider all four of the overarching workshop questions and to condense their reports to four major recommendations. A final day of plenary session consisted of concise reports from the breakouts, discussion of the compatibility between the major recommendations, and also reports from cross-cutting participants.
The workshop was an overwhelming success. The workshop steering committee will use the breakout group reports to generate a set of specific recommendations for CBP to consider for how the CBP’s modeling suite might be changed and upgraded for 2025 and beyond to meet future management needs. These recommendations will be specific to each component of the CBP modeling system (watershed and estuary) and will consider the potential benefits of state-of-the-art modeling approaches and the potential need for changing the CBP modeling infrastructure. The recommendations, along with a justification and priority for each, will be developed into a STAC workshop report and a synthesis paper for the journal Ecological Modeling.
The workshop, titled “Chesapeake Bay Program Modeling Beyond 2025: A Proactive Visioning Workshop” took place January 17-19, 2018 at the National Conservation Training Center, West Virginia. It was chaired by Raleigh Hood (HPL/UMCES) and Gary Shenk (CBP/USGS).