Chesapeake Bay Journal

A new report on the health of the Chesapeake concludes that most of its water is “degraded,” critical habitats and food webs are “at risk” and many fish and shellfish populations are “below historic levels.”

Overall, the “Ecosystem Health” report from the state-federal Bay Program paints a grim picture of the Chesapeake, showing the estuary is far away from goals set by the region’s leaders to restore the Bay’s water quality by 2010.

In 2005, the report indicated, only 24 percent of the Bay met dissolved oxygen water quality standards, 45 percent met water clarity standards and 41 percent met chlorphyll a (a measure of algae) standards.

Achieving the dissolved oxygen, clarity and chlorophyll water quality goals are the objective of the nutrient and sediment reduction efforts under way throughout the region.

The new document replaces the Bay Program’s old “State of the Bay” reports, which had been published every two or three years in the past, but which were sharply criticized by the Congressional Governmental Accountability Office last year.

The GAO faulted previous reports for mixing figures about management actions taken with those of actual Bay health, which it said resulted in a “rosier” picture of the Chesapeake’s condition than was warranted.

As a result, the Bay Program has produced two reports, the first, “Ecosystem Health,” which deals only with the condition of the Bay, and a second report, “Restoration Efforts,” which deals with progress toward meeting various management objectives, from nutrient reductions to wetland restoration to land preservation.

The reports were released for 60 days of public comment, which will extend through May. Later this year, they will—reflecting another GAO recommendation—be subjected to a scientific peer review. They are the first steps in a three-year plan to improve the Bay Program’s annual reports to the public. Future efforts will attempt to map geographic variations in Bay and watershed health to help people understand more localized conditions.

“We want to communicate in a clear way with citizens of the Bay region because we believe that if the public and the decision makers have a better understanding of where we are, and where we need to go, that will lead to better decision making,” said Carlton Haywood, chair of the Bay Program’s Monitoring and Assessment Subcommittee which led the report development effort.

The “Ecosystem Health” report paints a stark picture of how far the region has to go to meet restoration goals. Using almost any parameter, the report indicates the health of the Bay is poor. Dissolved oxygen, water clarity, chlorophyll a and chemical contaminants are all at less than 50 percent of restoration goals.

Graphs in the report illustrate the year-to-year variation observed for most of those parameters over time. Readers are left on their own to try to determine whether they can see any trend in the data.

Haywood said that is intentional. “We decided to let the plots speak for themselves,” he said. “Our report is trying, to the best of our ability, to present just the facts of what we know has happened.”

No clear trend toward improving conditions is evident in many of the plots. Dissolved oxygen conditions may have improved slightly over time, but water clarity in much of the Bay seems to have worsened.

One reason for the lack of clear water quality trends may be the lack of nutrient trends. Last year, the report said about 370 million pounds of nitrogen entered the Chesapeake—which was just above the average since 1990. That’s almost 200 million pounds more than the Bay cleanup goal of 175 million pounds.

There are some bright spots in the report. While underwater grasses last year covered only 39 percent of the Baywide 185,000-acre goal, the amount of grass beds in the upper Bay have soared in recent years, hitting 92 percent of their objective.

Nonetheless, that increase is somewhat offset by a lack of grass in the mid-Bay, where only 29 percent of the goal was met, and in the lower Bay, where 42 percent of the goal has been met but acreage has been slowly declining over the past 15 years.

Only 41 percent of the Bay’s benthic habitat, which include worms and other bottom-dwelling organisms that are an important base for the Bay food web, was considered healthy in 2005.

And while nutrients have stimulated plenty of algae growth in the Bay, most of that abundance consists of species which are either harmful, or provide poor quality food for fish, shellfish and other grazing species. Only 9 percent of the Chesapeake’s phytoplankton communities were considered healthy last year.

On the fisheries front, oysters and shad are both near historic lows. Blue crab abundance is below its long-term average, but has edged up from historic lows seen a few years ago. The number of young Atlantic menhaden has declined and is five to 10 times lower than levels seen in the mid-1980s, the report said.

Striped bass have rebounded from historic lows seen two decades ago, and are above restoration goals, but that is tempered by the fact that 60–70 percent of the population is infected with mycobacteriosis, a chronic wasting disease.

The companion report, “Restoration Effort,” does not deal specifically with the health of the Bay, but with assessing progress toward various management goals.

For instance, it shows that 80 percent of the phosphorus and 61 percent of the nitrogen reduction goals for wastewater treatment plants have been achieved, as have 44 percent of the nitrogen and 49 percent of the phosphorus goals for agriculture. The impact of those reductions on actual water quality, though, may have been diluted by several high-flow years in the past decade-and-a-half that drove more nutrient laden runoff into waterways.

It shows the region has achieved 65 percent of its fish passage goal of opening 2,807 miles of rivers to migratory fish by 2014, and that it has achieved 97 percent of its goal to preserve a fifth of the watershed as permanently protected open space.

But many of the restoration goals presented in the report differ from those needed to restore the health of the Bay. The report shows that the region has met 46 percent of the Bay Program’s goal to plant 10,000 miles of riparian forest buffer by 2010. But cleanup plans developed by the states call for about 50,000 miles of forest buffers to meet water quality objectives.

Similarly, it shows that 40 percent of the Bay Program’s goal of restoring 25,000 acres of wetlands by 2010 has been achieved, but state tributary strategies call for restoring about 200,000 acres.

Copies of the reports are available on the Bay Program’s website,www.chesapeakebay.net