By Jeremy Cox

Bay Journal

It’s safe to say that Tree No. 160 won’t be standing for much longer.

When a scientist tagged the loblolly pine at some point within the last four years, it was alive. The silver medallion bearing its identification number remains tacked into the tree’s side about 6 feet up from the ground. But the evergreen has now turned forever brown.

The pine’s needles and most of its branches are gone. Its trunk is riddled with insect holes. Chunks of bark are missing. And it has plenty of company.

 

“You can see that there are all of these dead trunks,” said Stephanie Stotts, a forest ecologist with the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, as she surveyed the eerie scene. “You can see clearly that something is happening here. It was a forest. And now it’s no longer a forest.”

Such “ghost forests” are among the most tangible indications of a changing climate in the Chesapeake Bay region. In just a four-county swath of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, state surveys show that more than 400,000 forested acres have been newly impacted by saltwater over the past decade. Those trees, scientists say, are doomed, soon to be replaced by marsh.

But scientists have only recently begun to unlock the mysteries lurking within these haunting places. Like: Why do some trees cling to life much longer than their neighbors? Do tree rings hold any clues? Can we predict where trees are going to die next?

A five-year, $2 million research effort funded by a National Science Foundation grant has shed unprecedented light on the phenomenon, igniting a spate of studies across the Bay area. Scientists have been so intrigued by their findings that they’re looking for ways to extend their investigations beyond next year when the funding is expected to dry up.

 

Such research is critical to understanding how climate change will impact coastal ecosystems and communities, said Greg Noe, a U.S. Geological Survey wetland scientist based in Delaware who is not involved in the NSF studies.

“We’re starting to see some rapid, dramatic changes now,” he said. “It’s a warning. If we don’t like the change we’re seeing now, there will be more of it in the future, and we need to be prepared.”

The climate project is led by University of Delaware hydrogeologist Holly Michael and involves several other institutions across the Bay region. The effort seeks to unpack what happens to crops, forests, groundwater, carbon storage and other coastal matters as the sea level rises — and what can be done to protect them.

Rising seas are carrying lethal doses of salt farther inland during hurricanes and unusually high tides. In that way, scientists say, dying forests are a leading indicator of sea level rise.

What secrets have ghost forests been hiding?

 

Stotts must slog deep into a tick-infested woodland, trudge waist-deep through multiple muddy sloughs (smelling very much like rotten eggs) and pick her way through a thick stand of phragmites to arrive at her research site. Other ghost forests are more accessible. But this Monie Bay marsh, near the mouth of the Wicomico River in Somerset County is part of the Chesapeake Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and likely to remain in its natural state in perpetuity.

She halted at the spot along the rough-hewn trail where living trees begin to give way to marsh grasses and dead snags. She faced inland, where young trees still populated the landscape. To her rear, there were no young to be seen.

“So, there’s this very visible line where essentially regeneration stops,” she said.

She studies tree rings to determine what happened in the past. Most of the trees here are about 100 years old, she has found. She suspects that the impacts of saltwater intrusion first appeared in the 1970s and ’80s, because virtually no trees sprouted in the “transition zone” during that period. Only after Superstorm Sandy struck in 2012, dumping a crush of freshwater onto the landscape, did young trees spring up again in large numbers.

 

Up to a point, trees are naturally resilient to sea level rise, Stotts said. As they drop needles and leaves over the years, they slowly build up the land elevation immediately around them. Even if the lower ground gets flooded by saltwater, these small hummocks can collect just enough freshwater from rainfall to extend the tree’s survival by years or decades.

The research is uncovering a complex interplay at work within ghost forests, Stotts explained. For example, when trees die, their roots shrink and the ground sinks accordingly, making the spot once inhabited by a living tree now more vulnerable to flooding.

On the other hand, as trees grow more stressed from saltwater intrusion and increased flooding, they don’t absorb as much water from the surrounding terrain. That means more freshwater is available to lower the salt concentration of brackish floodwaters, Stotts said.

“It’s a lot more complicated than any of us realized,” she added.

It’s also happening more quickly than anyone realized, she and other scientists agree. But even that basic information — the measurable pace of change — is valuable in helping them predict the future of coastal forests,

The post As coastal woodlands die to saltwater and turn into ghost forests, scientists study the causes and the pace appeared first on MarylandReporter.com.

By Karl Blankenship

For decades, Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts have been driven by a simple equation: Cleaner water equals more fish and shellfish.

The 1983 Chesapeake Bay Agreement, which launched the state-federal restoration effort, made that clear as it sought to reverse the Bay’s “historical decline in the living resources.” It would do so, the agreement said, by addressing pollution flowing into the Bay.

The living resources goal was reiterated in the next two cleanup agreements in 2000 and 2014, and the pollution goal aimed at making it happen has been refined to measurable targets for reducing nutrient pollution in the water.

But would achieving those goals actually result in more fish, crabs and oysters?

It’s complicated.

Bay scientists caution that the link between nutrient reductions and increased fish abundance is highly uncertain. In a report last year, they warned of a need for “grounding” the public’s expectations about the recovery of aquatic life even if cleanup goals are met.

In the May 2023 Comprehensive Evaluation of System Response (CESR) report, the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee of the state-federal Chesapeake Bay Program cautioned that other factors — such as temperature, salinity, river flows and structural habitats — play important roles in determining fish abundance. Compared with those, the water quality role can be small.

“Considerable uncertainty,” they wrote, “will accompany any effort to predict how fish and shellfish populations respond to changes in water quality alone.”

At the same time, scientists who worked on the report are quick to say that doesn’t mean the Bay Program should walk away from its nutrient reduction commitments. Rather, they say, it points to the need to better understand the relative importance of water quality improvements and other factors, such as habitat restoration, in boosting aquatic populations.

That could inform efforts to balance spending on nutrient controls with other things, such as restoring wetlands or other habitat, to produce the greatest benefit for the widest variety of species.

“We’re really saying this is an evolution, not a revolution,” said Kenny Rose, a fisheries scientist with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who was the lead author of the living resources section of the CESR report.

“And it’s what a large restoration program should be doing. It is moving along with changing information.”

The best place to figure that out, according to the report, is in shallow water areas that fringe the Bay and the tidal portions of tributaries that are disproportionately important for a wide range of creatures.

That recommendation has spurred recent interest within the Bay Program to focus increased pollution reduction and habitat restoration work on a handful of targeted nearshore areas.

The challenge of change

While not a revolution, that would be a significant change in direction — and it would also pose significant scientific challenges.

Historically, nutrient reduction actions have generally been aimed at improving the deepest parts of the upper Bay. That’s where water quality is the worst, and the theory is that improving deepwater conditions will improve other areas around the Bay as well.

But the CESR report warns that cleanup progress has been slow, the Bay has not responded as rapidly as expected, and that the deepwater goals may not be fully attainable.

It also pointed out that, when it comes to helping aquatic life, focusing most nutrient reduction efforts on deepwater areas could detract from other actions that would more directly help aquatic life.

That has triggered interest in creating a “tiered approach” to reducing nutrient pollution. In that approach, some shallow-water areas with a high potential to show results would get greater priority, even if their impact on deeper water would be relatively small.

Those nearshore areas would, in effect, become incubators for understanding how — and whether — alternate approaches to Bay restoration might produce better results for fish and shellfish.

That doesn’t mean that all emphasis would be removed from deepwater areas, said Lee McDonnell, chief of the science, analysis and implementation branch of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office.

Some focus on those areas is important because when oxygen disappears there, it triggers conditions that release nutrients stored in the sediment, making overall Bay water quality even worse.

“We can’t ignore the deep water [or] deep channel and say everybody’s going to focus on shallow water,” McDonnell said.

At the same time, he said, there is a public expectation that cleanup actions will result in tangible benefits.

“We’re asking for behavior change in people, and their expectation is that they should be able to see some kind of change and experience it,” McDonnell said. “There’s a much better chance of doing that in the shallow waters than in the deep trench.”

Shifting more resources to shallow water could slow the rate of progress in deepwater areas, but many scientists say the change is worth the trade-off if it results in quicker, more tangible benefits for aquatic life.

“This tiered implementation is not saying you’re taking your foot off the gas of the pursuit of a long-term goal,” said Penn State ecologist Denice Wardrop, one of the lead authors of the CESR report. “But at the pace we’re going, you need an interim goal because you’re going to be losing living resources on the way to the long-term goal. And you don’t need to.”

Finding the balance

McDonnell, Wardrop, Rose and a handful of others have been meeting for months to figure out how to identify shallow areas to be prioritized — and how to assess whether their actions are making a difference. It’s a complex task.

Reducing nutrient loads in the Bay system have long been seen as a way to help living resources. The nutrients spur algae blooms that cloud the water and block sunlight from reaching underwater grass beds, which provide important habitat for juvenile fish and crabs, waterfowl and other species.

When the excess algae die, they decompose in a process that removes oxygen from the water, sometimes causing oxygen-starved “dead zones” that plague the deepest parts of the upper Bay each summer.

The nutrient reduction goals assigned to each Bay state and major tributary aim to improve those conditions, allowing more sunlight to reach underwater plants and largely eliminate dead zones.

That would certainly allow underwater grass meadows to expand and would benefit bottom-dwelling organisms, such as clams and worms, that can suffocate if oxygen levels get too low.

The increased oxygen is intended to help fish and crabs as well, but whether that would lead to greater abundance is unclear.

For one thing, those species can simply move if water conditions get bad. And many, such as striped bass, blue crabs, shad and others, spend most of their lives — or at least important life stages — outside the Chesapeake. Conditions in those areas often are more important in determining their abundance.

Further, reduced algae production isn’t always a good thing. While excess amounts can trigger poor oxygen levels, algae is also an important food, especially for fish in their early life stages, as well as for some adult fish, like menhaden, which are themselves an important food for larger fish and birds.

Indeed, a 2017 EPA study found that while species like striped bass and oysters might benefit from the improved water quality, the reduced algae production might hamper populations of others, such as Atlantic menhaden.

The CESR report also stated that “living resource abundance may eventually decrease as nutrient loads continue to decrease and [water quality goals] approach full attainment.”

“[There are] always going to be winners and losers,” said Tom Ihde, a researcher at Morgan State University’s Patuxent Environmental & Aquatic Research Laboratory, who also worked on the CESR report. “If you’re managing menhaden populations versus the blue crab, you’re concerned about very different things.”

Ihde has worked on complex computer models that try to tease out how various species respond to different variables. In a 2017 paper, he examined the responses of nearly 50 aquatic species to a variety of ecological changes.

He found that achieving the clean water goals only had a small impact on most species — though some, like blue crabs and white perch, showed benefits.

That influence was dwarfed by the impact of temperature increases. Achieving water quality goals does little to offset that problem for most species, he found.

That shouldn’t be totally surprising, Ihde said, because temperature affects everything in the system, such as growth rates, the timing of reproduction and food production.

“It’s not that the nutrient reductions are not having an effect,” Ihde said. “It is, and we’re seeing change. But it’s that temperature is much more of a change.”

It’s never just one thing

Other factors — salinity, the amount of freshwater flowing into the Bay during spring spawning periods, fishing pressure, disease and loss of structural habitats — are also important in influencing species abundance.

A recent Bay Program report looked at the habitats of forage fish, which are small species eaten by larger fish and birds. The researchers found that shoreline hardening played an important role in predicting their abundance. The most sensitive forage species go away when just 10% of an area’s shoreline is covered by bulkheads or rip-rap. And many comparatively tolerant species disappear when that amount reaches 30%.

The CESR report noted that benefits of water quality improvements “will be modest” if such factors are limiting populations.

But, it said, pairing water quality work with other actions — restoring wetlands, replacing hardened shorelines with living shorelines or building oyster reefs — might yield better overall results.

There is some evidence of that. In recent years, state and federal agencies have worked to restore large oyster reefs in 11 Bay tributaries.

Monitoring has shown that underwater grasses are rebounding in areas near the reefs, very likely a result of oysters filtering the water. Other studies have found that oyster reefs help remove nutrients from the water.

“We feel pretty confident that doing large-scale oyster restoration leads to ecological benefits,” said Bruce Vogt of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chesapeake Bay Office. “We have very clear evidence that the oyster reefs are cleaning the water and produce better clarity.”

Fish abundance is also higher near the reefs, though Vogt said it is less clear whether the reefs are boosting fish reproduction or merely attracting fish from other areas.

That is the type of question that scientists say could be cleared up by targeting some shallow water areas for more intense work and monitoring the results.

Still, understanding impacts in a given area — and predicting whether positive signs in one area would be repeated in others — is no easy task in a system as large and complex as the Chesapeake.

“Not all oyster habitats are equal, and not all seagrass habitats are equal,” said Mark Monaco, a senior scientist with NOAA’s

National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science and an author of the CESR report. “How do those relationships hold up across the Bay in specific areas? And would an enhancement in habitat restoration actually move the dial in a particular area?”

Getting to a tipping point

The good news, Monaco said, is that a lot of data is available. Fish surveys and studies have taken place in the Bay for decades. They’ve never really been integrated with information on habitats, water quality and other variables that can impact fish, but that work has begun.

It will take at least two years to glean needed information from that data and identify shallow water areas for emphasis, according to those working on the process.

And there are a lot of basic details to work out along the way: What does “shallow water” actually mean? Is that two feet deep or six feet deep? What species and what life stages should be included in an analysis? How big of an area would be targeted?

The hope, said McDonnell of the EPA Bay Program Office, is to find shallow areas near an ecological “tipping point” where a realistic amount of action can turn an area of poor habitat into fair habitat, or a fair area into a good area, and produce faster improvements for the species that live there.

“If we’re going to have this tiered implementation, it has to be grounded in science,” he said. “If we’re going to do something different than we’re doing now, there ought to be a reason for it. I’m hoping this is our good reason.”

Karl Blankenship is editor-at-large of the Bay Journal. You can reach him at kblankenship@bayjournal.com.

The post Will a cleaner Bay mean more fish and crabs? It’s complicated appeared first on MarylandReporter.com.

By Jeremy Cox

Bay Journal

Three dams have been dismantled on the main portion of the Patapsco River in Maryland since 2010. The fourth and final major barrier may soon go away, too.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in May awarded $1.8 million to the nonprofit group American Rivers to begin the planning and initial design phase for the removal of Daniels Dam.

The project will have broad environmental benefits, said Jessie Thomas-Blate, director of restoration for American Rivers. With the dam gone, river herring and shad will gain 65 miles of spawning habitat, and American eels would gain nearly three times that.

“We’re very excited,” Thomas-Blate said. “This is the final piece to the restoration puzzle we’ve been working on in the Patapsco.”

The Patapsco begins at the confluence of its North and South branches near Marriottsville and wends its way 40 miles to Baltimore Harbor. Nearly half of its drainage basin has been developed.

Daniels Dam was built in 1833 to power mills that have long since closed. It is no longer needed, Thomas-Blate said.

The dam’s owner, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, supports the group’s move, said Gregg Bortz, an agency spokesman. The state will partner with American Rivers in the removal process.

The Daniels Dam project was one of 46 projects nationwide receiving a total of $240 million in NOAA grants to support improvements to fish habitat. The effort to reopen the Patapsco began in 2010 with the removal of Union Dam. That was followed by the removal of the Simkins Dam in 2011 and Bloede Dam in 2019.

So far, the campaign appears to be working as advertised. When Bloede Dam was still in place, the eel ladder attached to the Daniels Dam recorded only a couple dozen uses each year. Since then, observers have counted nearly 80,000 eels, Bortz said.

Dam removal advocates will have to contend with several issues before demolition can begin.

The Daniels area is one of eight developed access points managed as part of the popular Patapsco Valley State Park. The dam, 27 feet high and 450 feet long, creates 2 miles of slow-moving water prized by anglers and swimmers.

“Right now, it looks like a lake,” Thomas-Blate said. “It will look more like a river channel. It will be moving pretty fast through there.” She added that the planning process will include outreach to affected users and recommendations on where they can find similar recreational opportunities nearby.

All dams pose some risk to human safety, Bortz said. But Daniels has experienced fewer incidents than Bloede Dam. In the past 15 years, there have been three emergency incidents on record, the most recent a near-drowning in 2020. None resulted in death.

The project will also have to proceed cautiously, given the large amount of silt that has gathered behind the dam over nearly two centuries. Allowing that sediment to wash away freely after the dam’s removal could cause buildup downstream at Ellicott City, exacerbating drainage problems for the flood-beleaguered community.

Thomas-Blate said the partners may consider dredging the sediment out of the channel and floodplain before addressing the dam’s removal.

Another dilemma: Removing an obstacle to desired fish could also do the same for undesired fish, such as snakeheads, toothy invasives from Asia. But Thomas-Blate said that dams typically aren’t very effective barriers against such species. One of the main ways that snakeheads have spread across the Bay’s tributaries has been by anglers transporting them to places where they want to catch them.

If the Daniels barrier is taken down, the only blockage remaining on the Patapsco system would be Liberty Dam on the river’s North Branch. That dam is the linchpin in a 9,000-acre reservoir that the city of Baltimore taps as part of its drinking water supply.

The post Last major dam on Patapsco River targeted for removal appeared first on MarylandReporter.com.

By Jeremy Cox

Bay Journal

Some eagle-eyed wildlife biologists have made a surprising discovery at Poplar Island.

That’s the island in Maryland’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Maryland Port Authority have been rebuilding over the last 25 years. What was once almost entirely open water is now more than 1,700 acres of rock-ringed land.

One of the primary aims behind creating the island was to reestablish some of the habitat that waterfowl and shorebirds have lost around the Chesapeake to rising seas, erosion and shoreline development. According to the latest count, about 40 bird species have successfully nested on Poplar and produced young.

But one iconic species wasn’t among them — until now.

In early May a veteran U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientist named Craig Koppie shimmied up a cottonwood tree on a spit of higher terrain on the north side of the island. He peered down into a stick-laden nest known to have been built by bald eagles the previous fall. Inside were a pair of newly hatched eaglets — a male and a female.

“It’s that quote where ‘If you build it, they will come,’ ” said Peter McGowan, a Fish and Wildlife biologist who has been involved in the Poplar project since the mid-1990s. “If you have this nice habitat, things will move in, and they will move in quick. You never know what’s going to show up, and that’s one of the great parts of the job.”

McGowan said he isn’t surprised that eagles would nest on the island. He thought it would only be a matter of time. Still, the dynamics behind the island’s reconstruction didn’t make it a likely candidate to host eagles.

Once home to 100 people

The original Poplar Island once sprawled across more than 1,100 acres a few miles west of Tilghman Island on the Eastern Shore. At its height, Poplar was home to a population of about 100 people. There were several farms, a school, a church, a post office and a sawmill.

Like dozens of other low-lying islands around the Chesapeake Bay, though, Poplar was washing away. By the 1920s, the last of its residents had fled to higher ground. By the late 1990s, only a few acres of land remained.

Enter the Paul S. Sarbanes Ecosystem Restoration Project. Named after the U.S. senator from Maryland who championed the effort, the project is rebuilding the island using mud dredged up from Baltimore’s shipping channels to keep its port open to navigation.

The first mud delivery came in 2001, and the last is expected to arrive in the mid-2030s.

To make the island as hospitable as possible for water-loving birds, engineers designed Poplar to poke only slightly above the surrounding tide. The landscape is largely given over to marshes and mudflats. The only trees planted so far have been a handful in a small test plot.

That doesn’t bode well for eagles, who generally seek out trees as their nesting spots. But nature appears to have intervened on their behalf, McGowan said.

The cottonwood tree that harbors the young eagles sprang up on its own. It’s part of a clutch of trees on about an acre’s worth of slightly higher ground surrounded by marsh. Despite the harsh environment, some have grown more than 60 feet tall, McGowan estimates. Cottonwoods — a type of poplar, aptly enough — are known to be fast growers.

Eagles have been spotted flying overhead and hunting around Poplar since the earliest days of its restoration, he noted. A stone’s throw away from Poplar lies tree-lined Coaches Island and its cache of four eagle nests (two of which are active).

20 years wait

But McGowan and his colleagues had to wait about 20 years into the project before they noticed the first signs that eagles were trying to nest on Poplar. It started with a pair of eagles’ effort to build a nest on the metal grate top of a water-control structure in 2020.

“Obviously, it wasn’t the best place for an eagle to nest,” he said.

The nest didn’t last. A second attempt atop a spillway the following year also failed. Then, the scientists noticed a mound of sticks growing larger in a cottonwood tree where a crow’s nest had been. It was too big for the supporting branches and eventually tumbled out of the tree.

Another nest in the same tree started taking shape last fall. McGowan can’t say for sure whether its builders are the same eagles that had enlarged the crow’s nest, but he suspects they are. This time, the nest was more centered over the trunk and less likely to fall.

By March, the amount of time the eagles spent perched on the nest suggested that there were eggs inside of it. Koppie’s climb in May confirmed the presence of two eaglets. Before descending, he attached purple bands on their legs, identifying one bird as “09/E” and the other as “10/E.”

Disaster nearly struck toward the end of May when a strong storm knocked the nest out of the tree. Biologists quickly reconstructed a new nest on a nearby pole and put the eaglets in it. Soon, their parents were back to taking care of them, McGowan said.

The young birds will probably take wing by June, McGowan said. Will their parents try again in the future? McGowan is optimistic that they will.

“That’s a good place to raise a family,” he said. “So, they should come back next year and in following years.”

Jeremy Cox is a Bay Journal staff writer based in Maryland. You can reach him at jcox@bayjournal.com. 

The post First baby eagles hatch on reborn Chesapeake island appeared first on MarylandReporter.com.

Two of the most experienced journalists covering the Chesapeake Bay for decades assess the Chesapeake Bay Program on its 40th anniversary.

By Karl Blankenship & Timothy B. Wheeler

Bay Journal

On a chilly, overcast day in December 1983, more than 700 people who were worried about the declining health of the Chesapeake Bay packed a large hall at George Mason University in Northern Virginia to press for action to save it.

“The room was literally humming,” recalled Ann Swanson, who had recently been hired by the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation to organize grassroots support for the troubled estuary. “It was a noticeable vibrating, excited pulse.”

They had cause to be excited that day.

After decades of research, capped by a $27 million, five-year federal study cataloguing the Bay’s ills, the governors of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia joined the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator, the mayor of the District of Columbia and the head of the Chesapeake Bay Commission in pledging to work together to turn things around.

The four-paragraph agreement signed Dec. 9 didn’t say much. It simply acknowledged that they needed to cooperate to “fully address the extent, complexity and sources of pollutants entering the Bay.”

Their signatures launched the state-federal Chesapeake Bay Program, which, as it marks its 40th anniversary this month, still drives the science and policymaking behind the Bay restoration effort.

Verna Harrison, then Maryland’s assistant natural resources secretary, said she and others charged with carrying out the first Bay agreement came away with a strong sense of optimism. She recalled thinking that the Chesapeake could be cleaned up in, say, 20 years or so.

Reality has long since set in, along with an understanding that the Bay will never be “restored” — whatever the future Chesapeake looks like, it will be different from its past, as population growth, development and climate change spur irreversible changes.

At times in the following decades, the partnership was heralded as a model for ecosystem restoration. At other times, it was derided as antiquated and ineffective. It has been a leader in estuarine science but has often struggled to mitigate the negative impacts of a rapidly growing population on the Bay’s 64,000-square-mile watershed.

Setting goals

Despite the initial burst of enthusiasm, it was unclear exactly what the Bay Program was and what it was supposed to be doing. Initially, it focused on building a system to monitor the Bay’s health and a modeling system to offer insights about how to improve it.

The program itself was run by a series of committees representing all of the parties that had signed the agreement, operating in a collaborative, consensus-based way. Although the EPA had funds to operate a Bay Program office in Annapolis, it would not be running the show

A new, more expansive agreement clarified the program’s mission in 1987. It called for managing the Bay “as an integrated ecosystem” and said that “living resources are the main focus of the restoration and protection effort.”

It was a far-reaching document, establishing broad goals that have guided the Bay Program for 40 years: to reduce pollution; restore populations of fish, underwater grasses and other living resources; protect the watershed from the impacts of growth; improve public access to the Bay and its rivers; and promote public understanding and stewardship.

One goal stood out among them: reducing the amount of nutrient pollution entering the Bay 40% by the year 2000. Studies had implicated nutrients — nitrogen and phosphorus — as the prime cause of the Bay’s water quality woes, spurring algae blooms that clouded its surface and depleted the water of oxygen critical for aquatic life. That tended to elevate nutrient reduction over other goals.

The 1987 agreement was followed by two others in 2000 and 2014. Those began to spell out other goals with more specificity: the mileage of rivers to be opened to migrating fish, the amount of streamside forest buffers to be planted, the acreage of wetlands to be restored, the amount of land to be protected from development, and so on.

In many cases, the goals did drive action. Land conservation, public access to waterways, and outdoor education in schools are among many that got a boost.

Sometimes action came in dramatic form, as when a section of Embrey Dam on the Rappahannock River was dynamited in 2004, part of a broader effort to open rivers to migratory fish. Many more dams were removed, albeit less dramatically, and the region led the nation in dam removal. It has eliminated more than 200 dams in the past few decades.

Bay Program goals drove investments and programs at state and regional levels. Recognizing the important role forest buffers play in improving stream health, the Bay Program in 1996 called for planting 2,010 miles of buffers by 2010. The goal attracted new federal and state funding, and energetic support from watershed groups and others. It was achieved eight years early.

Goals and funding alone do not guarantee success, though. The program has set new goals for streamside buffers, but progress has dramatically slowed as it has become harder to find willing landowners to participate.

The 2014 agreement called for Maryland and Virginia to restore oyster populations, one of the Chesapeake’s most important species, in 10 Bay tributaries. That goal is on track to be achieved by 2025, with many restoration projects measuring hundreds of acres — the largest in the world. Already, they show signs of helping to revive local oyster habitat and populations.

That’s a big improvement from 1993, when Virginia undertook what was by far, at that time, the largest oyster restoration project ever attempted. It was about 2 acres in the Piankatank River, and it failed.

Off track

The Bay Program has also seen misfires. Despite warnings dating to the 1987 agreement that rampant sprawl was gobbling up the landscape, drying up wetlands and destroying stream habitats, the Bay Program has never been able to grapple with the problem.

When negotiating a new Bay agreement in 2000, it took months of wrangling to come up with a goal: to reduce the rate of “harmful” sprawl by 30%. But it could never determine what “harmful” sprawl was.

After years of debate, the effort fizzled even as evidence mounted that development was destroying streams — brook trout disappear when as little as 2% of a watershed is developed, and runoff from pavement is increasing salinity in freshwater systems and warming their temperatures.

The Bay Program has sought to prioritize wetland protection and restoration for decades. Yet it has long struggled to create significant amounts of new wetlands, and it is unclear whether the overall acreage of wetlands is increasing or decreasing.

In 1994, Bay Program leaders in the Chesapeake Executive Council called for a Bay “free of toxic impacts,” but chemical contaminants have declined as a priority even as fish consumption advisories remain in place for much of the Chesapeake and its tributaries and new contaminants emerge.

As far back as 1991, the Bay Program called for increasing its diversity and bringing more attention to underrepresented communities, an objective it still struggles with more than three decades later.

The nutrient reduction goals, which served as the cornerstone for much of the Bay effort, are a mixed bag of results.

The EPA, states and wastewater treatment plant operators agreed on a strategy in 2005 to reduce nutrient discharges at all major plants in the watershed. Without that, nutrients from sewage — fueled by a rapidly growing population — would have overtaken agriculture as the largest source of nitrogen and phosphorus to the Chesapeake.

Instead, discharges from wastewater plants have sharply declined. Nitrogen discharges have decreased by two thirds and phosphorus by three quarters. Wastewater plants have already met goals set for 2025, even as the region’s population continues to grow.

Controlling agricultural runoff, the largest source of nutrients, has turned out to be more complex. Significant regionwide reductions have proven difficult. Data suggest, though, that efforts over the last 15 years have held the line, despite increases in crop production and growing numbers of chickens and other farm animals.

Runoff from developed lands is increasing, at least according to Bay Program computer models, a reflection of the region’s continuing difficulty with managing the impacts of development.

Intangibles

Rich Batiuk, who spent 33 years at the EPA Bay Program Office before retiring in 2018 as its associate director for science, said the legacy of the Bay Program is measured not just by whether goals were achieved or missed.

The goals it has set, the monitoring data it produces, and the attention and funding it has attracted toward the Chesapeake has created a vast human “infrastructure” of engaged scientists, citizens, activists and others who participate in the Bay restoration effort in some way, whether helping with a stream cleanup or prodding for greater action.

“To me, that’s is one of the legacies of what we what we’ve been able to put together here,” Batiuk said.

The Bay Program has engaged the scientific community in ways that go far beyond most other ecosystem-based programs, which has spurred action even when political leadership could not reach agreement on issues. For instance, when some states contemplated introducing a nonnative oyster to the Chesapeake region, the Bay Program’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee raised concerns and insisted on more study.

That ultimately blocked their introduction and led to a new strategy emphasizing aquaculture for commercial harvest coupled with large-scale restoration efforts. That approach seems to be bearing fruit.

Collaboration between state and federal officials, scientists and various stakeholders led the region to develop the most sophisticated set of water quality goals for any major water body in the nation, describing the amount of oxygen needed in different places of the Bay, as well as the amount of light needed by underwater grasses.

That collaboration grew as the states of West Virginia, Delaware and New York joined the partnership.

Forums created by the Bay program led fishery managers from Maryland and Virginia to work together in ways they had not done before, coordinating management of species such as blue crabs in ways once unimaginable.

“It’s almost this nursery ground for that collaboration between a whole bunch of different partners to do things that they might not do otherwise,” Batiuk said.

Looking ahead

When it comes to the bottom line — whether the Bay is getting better — the answer is mixed. Nutrients have decreased, and many areas show improvement from their mid-1980s condition. But less than a third of the Chesapeake has met its water quality goals.

The amount of underwater grass beds, which are a critical habitat for fish, waterfowl and blue crabs and a closely watched indicator of Bay health, have doubled since reaching their low point in 1984. Last year, they covered more than 76,000 acres, though they remain far from their 185,000-acre goal.

“Against the backdrop of almost a 60% increase in human population, development in the watershed and intensification of agriculture, the fact that the partnership not only held the line, but actually made improvements in water quality — maybe not as much as we wanted — I think was a tremendous success,” Batiuk said.

Now, as the Bay Program celebrates its 40th anniversary, its partners are contemplating what comes after 2025, the deadline for meeting most of the 31 outcomes set in its 2014 agreement. Of those, 15 are on track, 10 are off-course and the status of four others is unclear. Nutrient goals will be missed by a large margin.

Some say deadlines should simply be extended. Others believe that a broader overhaul is needed, especially with the significant challenges posed by climate change, development and a human population that has grown from 13 million when the Bay effort started to more than 18 million today.

Because of those headwinds, a recent report by the program’s science advisory committee cautioned that the future Bay will be different than the past. It warned that nutrient goals are unlikely to be met without new programs and new technologies, and it suggested targeting nutrient control efforts, paired with habitat restoration, in shallow areas where they will likely have the greatest benefit for living resources.

“I certainly thought in my career that we would have achieved massive restoration,” said Swanson, who retired at the end of 2022 after 35 years as executive director of the Bay Commission, which is made up of state legislators from across the Chesapeake region.

“What I realize in hindsight is that we did, but [the Bay] is so massive and it’s so degraded that to … essentially improve water quality by a third while the population [increased is a huge achievement.”

Swanson and others worry that the decades-long effort and slow progress is leading to “Bay fatigue” as it is increasingly evident that the task will never be completed, and progress will likely be incremental.

That seemed evident at the latest executive council meeting in October. Only one governor, Maryland’s Wes Moore, showed up. The EPA administrator and DC mayor also sent surrogates. Besides Moore, the chair of the Bay Commission was the only other member to attend.

To some, the loss of enthusiasm is noticeable and perhaps understandable.

“There’s certainly, I think, to some degree a feeling of exasperation that we haven’t achieved these goals, putting aside whether the goals were realistic to begin with,” said John Griffin, who has spent more than four decades working on the Bay in Maryland state government and nonprofits.

Griffin thinks it’s time to recalibrate people’s expectations and gird them for what he sees as yet another multi-decade effort to improve water quality and habitat.

“I think we have to tell the public: ‘Look we’re not doing as well as we should across the Bay … but we’ve made some progress … We need to set goals that are more achievable, and we need to realize that we’re going to be in this a long time.”

The post After 40 years, Chesapeake Bay Program yields mixed results appeared first on MarylandReporter.com.

By Jeremy Cox/Bay Journal

The $886 billion national defense bill signed by President Biden on Friday contains some notable fine print for Maryland nature buffs.

Three members of the state’s congressional delegation inserted language into the bill blocking the U.S. Navy from permanently restricting public access to Greenbury Point. The property, a forested 230-acre peninsula jutting into the Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, has served as a popular destination for birders and hikers for more than two decades.

The land is owned by the Navy as part of the Naval Support Activity Annapolis facility and is used as an occasional training ground for midshipmen and as a buffer for a firing range.

The tract, formally known as the Greenbury Point Conservation Area, found itself at the center of a controversy after the Navy acknowledged in April 2022 that it was considering a proposal to transform the acreage into a golf course. The Naval Academy Golf Association (NAGA) had sought to lease the land for the course adjacent to its existing 18-hole facility.

The Navy and the NAGA broke off talks amid the pushback later in the year. The provision in the defense bill provides stronger assurance that Greenbury Point will remain open to the public, supporters say.

“As the Navy has considered altering that access, our constituents expressed their strong opposition to changing that policy. That’s why we fought for this provision that says in no uncertain terms [that] Greenbury Point must stay open to the public,” said Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, one of the measure’s architects.

“Its proximity to the Chesapeake Bay makes it an important place for outdoor recreation and conservation in the region,” said Sen. Ben Cardin, another Democratic backer. “Ensuring public access and preventing further development will allow Greenbury Point to continue to be a model of coastal stewardship for the Chesapeake Bay.”

The Senate passed the defense bill on Dec. 13. In the House, where Democratic Rep. John Sarbanes was the primary advocate, lawmakers voted in favor of it the following day.

The bill states that the secretary of the Navy “may not modify or restrict” public access to the site except for when conditions may be hazardous, such as during live fire demonstrations. It also does not apply if the property is leased or transferred to another public entity. But supporters say that would still rule out the golf course proposal because the NAGA is a private organization.

A spokeswoman for Naval Support Activity Annapolis said that the Navy will adhere to the new language. She added that a golf course is no longer under consideration for the site and that no “sole-source lease proposals” are currently on the table.

The post Congress protects popular walking trails on Chesapeake near Annapolis appeared first on MarylandReporter.com.

Deer have become a common nuisance throughout suburban and rural Maryland, eating flowers and plants, and presenting danger on the roadways. An ongoing study by researchers in Pennsylvania, with which Maryland shares a 233-mile border, supplies some interesting answers about deer behavior.

By Ad Crable

Bay Journal 

Who knew that deer salivate about 2 gallons a day or that a fawn has 272–342 spots on its coat?

Or that a doe may choose to give birth to fawns near a road so that fewer bears, coyotes and bobcats are around? Or that a deer may consume more than 100 different plant species a year?

After a decade of following and studying 1,200 live-trapped deer, fitting them with ear tags and GPS radio collars to track their movements, Pennsylvania researchers are getting an unprecedented look into the behavior of one of North America’s most widespread mammals and their imprint on the landscape.

In 2013, the sweeping Deer-Forest Study was launched and funded by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry, U.S. Geological Survey and Penn State — each with an interest in what happens between deer, soil and plants in 2.2 million acres of state forests, 1.5 million acres of state game lands and millions more acres of private land across the state.

The study, which won’t be wrapped up until 2026, could shape how land managers ensure healthy forests in an age of climate change and invasive plants.

It offers new nuances to be considered by game managers in determining how many deer are being killed by hunters because hunting is the primary means for controlling deer populations. And it helps the Game Commission with the difficult decision about how many deer should be culled each year for the herd to remain in balance with available habitat.

“This study is unique,” said Duane Diefenbach, leader of Penn State’s Pennsylvania Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. “Looking at all these different factors at the scale we are looking at, and the interaction over a long time, is really a first.”

One aim of the year-round study is to learn how vegetation responds to changes in deer densities and various tweaking to forests by managers. It’s commonly known that unchecked deer can browse the forest floor so heavily that trees and desirable plants never get a chance to regenerate. But the study is showing that what happens in a forest and the best ways to ensure its future growth is much more complex and involves a dance of wildlife, plants and soil.

In some cases, deer may be overly blamed for problems in the understory. A team of about 20 people scrutinized approximately 170 species of herbs, shrubs and trees on 200 fenced and unfenced plots in three state forests with a mix of unfragmented forests, and other plots with a mix of forest and farmland.

They found that the absence of a native plant does not always indicate over-browsing by deer. For example, the researchers found that Indian cucumber-root, an important native species and delicacy for deer, did not grow in areas where the soil was acidic and high in manganese.

This is important because the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources uses a browsing index to determine how many deer can sustainably live in a section of forest and how many need to be removed by hunters. Indian cucumber-root is one of the species monitored and, at least in some cases, its disappearance may be blamed falsely on deer.

In a related finding, researchers found that field technicians had trouble consistently scoring how deer browsing affects understory vegetation. That subjective measurement is part of the deer impact index used by state forest managers. Generally, plants that deer like to browse are sampled for abundance and regrowth. The study is investigating if there is a more reliable way to accurately determine the effect of deer on vegetation.

The study is also highlighting the importance of sunlight filtering through treetops to understory vegetation. Again, deer may be excessively blamed for lack of regrowth in the forest.

Still, Diefenbach cautioned, “that doesn’t mean we can have more deer. A healthy deer population relies on a healthy forest.”

In addition to impacts from deer, forest plots are showing that controlled burns help to regenerate trees and many plants. Also, tree-cutting and herbicide treatments for invasive plants help a forest maintain itself. One preliminary finding is that spraying invasive nonnative plants does indeed help tree seedlings rebound.

Deer insights

Discussions of soil and forest interactions aside, the most interest shown in the study by far has been from wildlife lovers and deer hunters who are gaining new and surprising insights into the behavior of white-tailed deer.

To gain an intimate look into the lives and times of deer, researchers have live-captured more than 1,000, from fawns to geriatric bucks, in four areas of the state.

Attracted by a bait of shelled corn, deer are lured into cages or netted in 60-by-40 foot traps triggered by a nearby technician.

Most captured deer are fitted with GPS radio collars so their movements can be tracked remotely around the clock. Researchers analyze DNA in deer pellets to track those that were captured but not fitted with radio collars.

GPS collars have enabled researchers to plot deer locations more than 1 million times over the last 10 years. Their movements are related in the conversational field diaries that researchers share online.

The often-humorous dispatches have attracted more than 2 million views as they shed light on deer behavior.

One female was captured in 2003 as a fawn.

While many deer are shot by hunters — most bucks will not survive to age 3 — the doe was recovered in 2015 after being killed at nearly 14 years of age during muzzleloader deer season.

Some females have small transmitters placed in their birth canals. When they give birth, the device is expelled and activated, revealing the newborn’s location. Technicians rush to the birthing bed to capture the immobile fawn nearby.

The fawn’s collar communicates with the doe’s collar, enabling researchers to study doe-fawn interactions, learn which kind of terrain a doe selects to have her fawns and assess fawn survival rates.

It turns out that mother does are pretty hands-off. They only approach their fawns two or three times a day to nurse and hang around about 300 feet away. The rest of the time, the fawns are lying camouflaged on the forest floor.

Too often, this leads some people to conclude the fawn has been abandoned. Not so. And if you approach the fawn and leave your scent, it may attract predators. Also, it takes several days for fawns to imprint on their mothers. Until then, a fawn may imprint on almost any moving thing, including humans.

There also have been surprises to conventional assumptions long held by hunters.

For example, hunters generally believe that deer are most active first thing in the morning, and therefore they head out well before dawn, assuming few deer are moving at lunchtime.

But deer movements tracked in the study showed that most spent the early hours bedded down, finally beginning to wander around at about 10 a.m. The peak movement for bucks took place 12–1 p.m. They rested in the afternoon before moving again from 4 p.m. to dusk.

“How often is life fair? Umm, never. So, rifle hunters rejoice. You too can spend an extra hour or two in that nice, cozy, warm bed,” confided one of the study’s bloggers.

The study is providing answers on another question: Do human activities affect deer survival?

Deer typically avoid hanging out near roads, though they do have to cross them between territories. Yet sometimes a doe may seek out a roadside area to serve as a “human shield” when she gives birth, deterring predators that could threaten her or her young.

But that safety may be nullified by increased chances of being hit by a vehicle.

A three-year side study into fawn survival yielded surprising revelations. Between 28% and 43% will not live to 6 months of age. The study found that in about two-thirds of the cases, predators such as black bears, coyotes, bobcats, and dogs killed the fawns.

High stress levels may play a big part in fawn mortality. Necropsies sometimes reveal the presence of the stress hormone cortisol in deceased fawns. Cortisol can help a fawn flee danger with a quick burst of energy but, when produced over a long time, it can be harmful to health.

The exact cause of elevated stress hormones in fawns is not known, but it does not appear to be related to the number of nearby predators. Poor rearing from their mom is one hypothesis.

Other causes of fawn mortality are starvation, failure to nurse, infections, parasites and collisions with vehicles.

Buck on the run

No deer tracking was followed more closely by the public than that of Buck 8917.

In his second year of life, the male was captured in 2013 and fitted with a GPS collar and ear tags. During the next rifle hunting season, his movements were plotted every 20 minutes, with 2,570 movements in all during 2013. He eluded hunters into a second deer season.

The buck’s behavior is typical of males. During most of the year, he moved pretty much in a core area of 1 square mile. He frequently bedded on a ridgetop where he could see and smell approaching danger and leap over the ridge to escape.

But during the rut, when bucks search far and wide for receptive mates, Buck 8917 wandered widely almost nonstop. In one 12-hour period, he covered a 5-mile route and more than a mile in elevation change.

Wily number 8917 survived three hunting seasons before dying in January 2015. When his collar sent an email to researchers saying that he had not moved in eight hours, they went looking for him and found his carcass. Unfortunately, coyotes beat the team to the spot, and we will never know the cause of death.

Do bucks that spar by locking antlers for supremacy ever cause injuries? The study found that in at least one case, yes.

A mortality signal from a 4.5-year-old buck in 2015 sent field technicians out to recover his body. A lab necropsy revealed multiple lacerations and puncture wounds on the buck, including one near the heart. The buck died from loss of blood from a fight.

Researchers have published more than 700 entries on the Deer-Forest Blog to share information about their work. Read them here.

The post Oh, deer: study dishes up surprises about deer behavior and its impact on the land appeared first on MarylandReporter.com.

By Jeremy Cox and Timothy B. Wheeler

Bay Journal 

The Chesapeake Bay’s watermen are getting green lights to catch a few more blue crabs, a year after dismal population numbers led to steep cutbacks in their allowance.

The region’s fishery managers are far from confident that a surfeit of blue crabs now lurks beneath the Bay’s surf. But they say that results from the just-released wintertime survey were promising enough to relax some of the restrictions.

“We’re being cautious, but I think we’re being responsible,” said Ed Tankard, a board member with the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, which voted June 27 to ease certain bushel limits.

In Maryland, the state Department of Natural Resources announced on the same day a raft of industry-friendly changes to its crab controls, including modestly increasing the allowable harvest of female crabs and lifting limits on the harvest of males over Labor Day weekend.

Those moves came a few weeks after the panel that regulates the Potomac River’s fishing industry agreed to roll back bushel limits on female crabs to 2021 levels.

Crabbers disappointed

Crabbers, though, say they are disappointed that regulators didn’t give them more slack. Although the 2022 winter survey revealed the population to be at its lowest ebb on record, the commercial harvest went on to exceed expectations.

“We happened to have good fortune last year,” said Robert T. Brown, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association. “Mother Nature was kind to us. [But] it seems like when Mother Nature is good to us, we get punished and penalized for it.”

This year, the winter survey, released May 18, estimated that the population had rebounded by 40%, increasing to about 323 million crabs. But that was still well below the historic average for the survey, which began in 1990.

“We manage based on trends,” Alexa Galván, a VMRC fishery management planner, told the agency’s board. “So, we are a little concerned about the [overall population] trend of being well below average in the last three years.”

In Virginia, regulators are offering a bit of relief to harvesters of all categories but are giving the biggest increases to the largest operations.

The VMRC sets restrictions based on the size of an operation’s permitted catch size. Under the standards approved at the board’s June 27 meeting, crabbers in the largest permit category will get to increase their daily harvests from 27 to 36 bushels per day. Except for the smallest class of permit-holders, the rest of the fishery will be allowed to keep an additional bushel per day as well.

Those changes apply only to the “low-bushel” periods from Oct. 1–Nov 30 and from March 17–May 15 next year. The board made no modifications to the crab season’s peaks of July 5–Sept. 30 this year and May 16–July 4 next year.

Last year, the largest harvesters in Virginia saw the biggest bushel cuts. Those licensees account for 13% of the operations but 38% of the catch, Galván said.

A young blue crab. Bay Journal photo by Dave Harp

This year’s modest boost in the Bay’s crab population in the wintertime survey made it possible for the agency to raise the overall catch limit, officials say. So, they set aside the bulk of that number for the largest category of harvesters to help offset the cuts they sustained last year.

Chris Moore, a Virginia-based scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said that although the bushel increases could theoretically lead to heavier fishing pressure, the reality is that crabbers usually don’t max out their quotas. VMRC research shows that, from 2015–2022, nearly 9 out of 10 commercial outings during the height of the season returned to shore with 75% or less of their bushel limit.

“I think it was important to create an equitable conservation benefit across all pot categories,” Moore said. “This basically restored equity.”

The agency’s industry-dominated Crab Management Advisory Committee had unanimously supported the changes during its May meeting. But several crabbers urged the VMRC board to consider steps to allow more crabs to be brought ashore.

Peter Nixon, a Norfolk crabber and longtime advisory committee member, said he only sided with staff recommendations because he thought it was important to improve parity among the permit classes. He called on the board to lift the decade-old ban on dredging during the winter, arguing that it would provide crabbers with a much-needed source of income while only marginally raising the overall catch.

The VMRC left the door open to further easing, directing the crab advisory committee to meet in late August to re-evaluate the restrictions for the fall based on fresh data.

In Maryland, the seafood industry had sought the Labor Day reprieve to help meet the surge in demand over the Sept. 1–4 period, said Michael Luisi, assistant director of DNR Fishing and Boating Services. The agency’s staff offset that increase by adding four days at the beginning of October to limited harvesting.

Last year was the first time that Maryland officials had restricted the male harvest during August and September. Keeping those measures in place again this year will help ensure that the male catch doesn’t exceed the benchmark set to safeguard ample numbers for reproduction, Luisi said.

The male crab population hit a recorded low in last year’s winter dredge survey. This year’s small increase wasn’t big enough to persuade regulators to relax their harvest limits.

“We’re happy [the male population] increased,” Luisi said, “but it still hasn’t reached average yet.”

Maryland fishery managers also kept in place the reduction in bushels for recreational crabbers. They were cut from two to one last year.

The Potomac River Fisheries Commission, the bi-state panel that oversees fishing in that Bay tributary separating Maryland and Virginia, agreed June 8 to raise female bushel limits. Watermen with 400-pot licenses are seeing their daily limits rise from 12 to 16 bushels; 500-pot licenses are going from 16 to 20 bushels.

In addition, the commission decided that, starting in 2024, each person involved in recreational crabbing will need to obtain a sport crabbing license. Currently, the panel issues recreational licenses to a boat and a single person assigned to that vessel. The main goal of the change is to be better able to quantify recreational participation, officials say.

Scientists in the Chesapeake region aren’t sure what has been causing the dip in the number of crabs in recent years. Theories include predation from invasive species, declining water quality and a dearth of males to fertilize the females.

Researchers are so concerned that last year they agreed to undertake the first comprehensive stock assessment of the species since 2011.

Jeremy Cox is a Bay Journal staff writer based in Maryland. You can reach him at jcox@bayjournal.com. Timothy B. Wheeler is the Bay Journal‘s associate editor and senior writer, based in Maryland. You can reach him at twheeler@bayjournal.com. 

The post Limits loosened slightly on Chesapeake Bay crab harvest appeared first on MarylandReporter.com.

By Jeremy Cox

Bay Journal

The Chesapeake Bay’s annual “dead zone” is expected to be the smallest ever recorded this summer, providing an unexpected boon to the estuary’s vulnerable ecosystem.

Scientists with the Chesapeake Bay Program, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, University of Michigan and U.S. Geologic Survey forecast that the mass of oxygen-starved water will be one-third smaller than its historic average. The tracking began in 1985.

Dead zones are naturally occurring, but they are worsened by excess nutrients washing off farms and urban landscapes across the watershed. Nutrients, primarily from fertilizer, sewage and pet waste, trigger algae blooms. When the blooms die off, they consume oxygen, resulting in a blob of water where no marine life can live.

Also, a warming climate is raising water temperatures in the Bay, which aids the formation of dead zones, scientists say.

A dearth of rainfall from last fall through the spring may be offsetting that trend, as well as reducing the amount of nutrient pollution in the Bay and its rivers. River flows were 20% lower than average from November 2022 to May 2023, the scientists found.

“Less water moving through the watershed means less nitrogen was carried by the tributaries to the Bay,” said John Wolf, acting coordinator for the USGS’s Chesapeake Bay research program. The researchers estimated that nitrogen loads were 42% lower than average from January through May at nine locations that represent a vast majority of the Bay’s freshwater inputs.

As is typical, this year’s dead zone began forming in mid-May as the water warmed. It’s expected to last until early fall.

Last year’s dead zone was smaller than average, measuring 0.65 cubic miles or the equivalent of about 1 million Olympic swimming pools. The historic average is 0.79 cubic miles, researchers said.

The volume has been trending downward in recent years. Scientists and environmental advocates say some of that progress can be attributed to decades-long efforts to prevent pollutants from flowing into the Bay.

But leaders of the restoration effort acknowledge that nutrients are still a major problem and say that the regionwide goal for reducing nutrient pollution will not be met by the 2025 deadline.

A scientist with one of the region’s top environmental groups said that the positive news about the dead zone signals that the state and federal collaboration should press forward.

“Pollution from sewage treatment plants has been significantly reduced but reducing pollution from agriculture and urban/suburban runoff has been woefully inadequate,” said Joseph Wood of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in a statement. “A smaller dead zone is good news for the Bay’s living resources, but a large portion of the Bay will still lack enough oxygen to support healthy aquatic life.”

The post Smallest ‘dead zone’ on record predicted for Chesapeake Bay this summer appeared first on MarylandReporter.com.

By Timothy B. Wheeler and Jeremy Cox

The Chesapeake Bay’s blue crab population has recovered somewhat from last year’s low ebb, new data show, but not enough to dispel worries about the future of the region’s most valuable commercial fishery and most popular recreational fishery.

The annual wintertime survey by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and Virginia Institute of Marine Science found an estimated 323 million crabs Baywide. That’s up more than 40% from last year’s record-low tally of 227 million crabs.

The survey likewise detected a big jump in the number of spawning-age female crabs, from 97 million in 2022 to 152 million this year. They are now well above the threshold biologists say is the absolute minimum needed to sustain the population.

But the overall crab population is still significantly below the long-term average, the survey found. And while the estimated number of juvenile crabs increased slightly — from 101 million in 2022 to 116 million this year — it remained well below average for the fourth straight year.

Scientists say that the continued weak breeding of new generations is an ominous sign for the future of the Bay’s signature crustacean.

“Not exactly good news,” said Glenn Davis, a Maryland state biologist, as he presented the findings May 18 to a regional panel of fishery managers and scientists. “This is still really bad.”

Since 1990, crews from both states have taken the measure of the Bay’s crab population by sampling a total of 1,500 spots around the Bay and its tributaries. From December through March, they tow a dredge along the bottom and record the size and sex of those crabs found buried there after cold water temperatures render them largely inactive.

The results are an annual a barometer of the health of the blue crab population, and they have been usually reliable at predicting how many will be available to catch and eat through summer and fall. The results also help regulators in both states manage commercial and recreational crabbing to prevent overfishing.

This year’s survey suggests there will be a greater abundance of crabs through spring into summer than was seen over the same period in 2022. But the results still indicate all is not well.

The survey demonstrates that the population is “nowhere near collapse,” said Rom Lipcius, the VIMS crab researcher who oversees Virginia’s half of the survey. But he said he continues to worry that the relatively healthy numbers of breeding-age females aren’t resulting in more young crabs in the count.

Lipcius said the disconnect might be explained by the regulatory system itself. When the crabbing season opens in the spring, a bonanza typically follows.

“We’re hitting them hard before they reproduce,” Lipcius said.

As fishery managers weigh whether to further clamp down on crab harvesting, one of the Chesapeake Bay’s leading conservation groups urged a careful approach.

“While this year’s numbers show some signs of recovery in the Bay’s blue crab population, there is still plenty of cause for caution,” said Chesapeake Bay Foundation scientist Chris Moore. “Because the blue crab population fluctuates annually due to a variety of factors, we hope the improvements observed this year continue over the long term.”

The organization called on officials to maintain measures to protect adult males and consider additional actions, such as requiring tags to be affixed to crab cages, known as pots, to assist in regulatory enforcement. The new survey showed a small increase in the male crab population from last year’s all-time low. But for the second straight year harvest levels for male crabs exceeded a benchmark that managers had set to ensure ample numbers of them for reproduction.

The crab population varies, sometimes dramatically, from year to year. But last year’s survey found them at their lowest abundance in more than 30 years. The number of females old enough to reproduce was also down, though still above the minimum level considered necessary to sustain the stock. And the count of thumbnail-sized juvenile crabs was the second lowest ever, only slightly better than the record low in 2021.

Last year, Maryland watermen faced their first-ever bushel limits on male crabs in late summer — a response to the 2022 survey finding them at their lowest level in three decades as well. DNR also ended the commercial season two weeks early on Nov. 30 and reduced the allowable catch of females from July through October. Even recreational crabbers got cut back to only one bushel a day, regardless of sex, down from two daily before.

The Virginia Marine Resources Commission also imposed new restrictions on commercial harvests from Oct. 1 to the end of the season on Nov. 30. Those reduced catch limits continued for the first six weeks of the 2023 season, which began in April.

The 2022 commercial harvest turned out better than expected, despite the bleak survey results and the tightened crabbing rules. Baywide, watermen landed 42.1 million pounds of crabs last year, 15% more than they had in 2021. But that was still well below the long-term average harvest of 60 million pounds.

The uptick last year was “not all that unexpected,” said Genine McClair, DNR’s blue crab fishery manager, because the number of juvenile crabs seen in the 2022 survey was slightly more than the year before. The harvest picked up in late summer and fall as those youngsters reached legally catchable size.

“What we hope was that [with] the management actions we took last year … we didn’t harvest as much as we could have,” she said.

Maryland’s one-bushel daily limit on recreational crabbing from a boat remains in force this spring, but McClair said no decision has been made yet on whether to tighten commercial harvest limits again on female crabs or to reimpose a cap on the male crab catch. Any changes would be announced before July 1, she said.

Scientists and fishery managers were concerned enough by last year’s survey, meanwhile, that they agreed to undertake a new comprehensive stock assessment of the Bay’s crab population. The last one was in 2011.

Scheduled to get under way later this year, that study will reexamine assumptions about crabs and their life cycle that went into earlier assessments, and it will incorporate data beyond the winter survey results.

Scientists also plan to look at whether environmental conditions in the Bay may have changed, affecting the reliability of the winter survey. It’s already known that the tally of juvenile crabs is based on more limited data than that of adult crabs, because the dredge vessels can’t get far into the shallows where many young crabs spend the winter.

Another big question concerns predation by other fish. Nonnative blue catfish, introduced in a few Virginia rivers in the 1970s, have since spread throughout the Bay and proliferated, consuming other fish and crabs in great numbers. A 2021 VIMS study estimated they were consuming a couple million small crabs per year in one stretch of the lower James River alone.

Concern about the impact of blue catfish is so great in Maryland that Gov. Wes Moore asked U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to declare a fishery disaster in the state, authorizing it to receive federal funds to help watermen and seafood businesses that may be experiencing loss of income from declining catches of crabs and native fish.

For his part, Mark Sanford, a waterman based in Cheriton, VA, doesn’t put much stock in the annual crab survey. Like many in the seafood industry, he points to the potential undercount of juveniles because the survey boats can’t reach the shallows.

“But we have to go by that [dredge survey] because of the fact it’s been going on since [1990], and it’s the only science that they have,” Sanford said

The post Blue crabs doing better than last year, but still below average appeared first on MarylandReporter.com.