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April 1, 2023

The Talbot Spy

The nonprofit e-newspaper for the Talbot County Community

Ecosystem Eco Lead

Raking Up Bay Grass Beds in a Bid to Restore Them

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Restoring the Chesapeake Bay’s depleted underwater meadows is a painstaking process, requiring lots of elbow grease, savvy and patience. Paradoxically, it begins by pulling up a little of what’s left of the critical aquatic habitat.

Standing knee-deep in the Wye River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Elle Bassett and a handful of helpers raked clumps of wispy green grass from the water one warm June day. They piled the vegetation, known as horned pondweed, in orange plastic baskets for transport by boat to shore.

Miles-Wye Riverkeeper Elle Bassett displays a clump of horned pondweed collected for its seeds. Photo by Dave Harp, Bay Journal

“This one is easier than others to harvest,” noted Bassett, the Miles-Wye Riverkeeper. Some species of Bay grass are more firmly rooted in the bottom, she explained, and have to be collected one handful at a time.

For the last four years, Bassett and other staff and volunteers with the nonprofit group ShoreRivers have been working with experts from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and Anne Arundel Community College learning how to restore Bay grasses.

“We’re doing what I would call a ‘technology transfer’” said Mike Naylor, a DNR biologist specializing in the Bay grass restoration effort who was on hand to help.

Now, with a $75,000 grant from the Chesapeake Bay Trust, ShoreRivers has ramped up its efforts, with a focus on mid and upper Eastern Shore waters. Their aim: to double the state’s overall restoration capacity.

A lot is at stake. Bay grasses, also known as submerged aquatic vegetation, or SAV, are a vital component of the Chesapeake ecosystem. They provide food and shelter for waterfowl, turtles, fish, blue crabs and other creatures. They also consume some of the excess nutrients that foul the water, clearing it up and infusing it with fish– and shellfish-sustaining oxygen. For those reasons, the grass beds are closely monitored as an indicator of the Bay’s health.

Like the rest of the Bay, the grasses need all the help they can get. Historical photos show that they once covered at least 185,000 acres of the bottom of the Chesapeake and its tributaries, and probably much more. But by 1984, with the Bay suffocating from nutrient and sediment pollution, the coverage had dwindled to just 38,227 acres.

Bay grasses are so important to the estuary’s health that federal, state and local agencies and nonprofit groups have been trying for decades to restore them, with mixed results.

Rebound, then regression

A few years ago, it looked like the Bay’s grasses were rebounding quite well on their own. By 2018, aerial surveys spotted underwater vegetation growing across more than 100,000 acres of Bay and river bottom, well on their way to achieving the restoration effort’s goal of having 130,000 acres by 2025.

Water quality has proven to be a major factor, both in the past decline of the Bay’s aquatic plants and in the recovery seen so far. Like upland vegetation, underwater grasses need sunlight to grow. But sediment or nutrient-fed algae blooms cloud the water, which stunts or even kills the plants.

“It really only required a modest improvement in water quality for SAV to improve,” noted Brooke Landry, a DNR biologist and chair of the federal-state Chesapeake Bay Program’s SAV workgroup.

But 2018 and 2019 brought heavy and persistent rains, which clouded the water and altered its salinity — another critical factor for sustaining certain species of underwater vegetation. The Bay’s grasses shrank by 40% in 2019 and by another 7% in 2020, the surveys found.

Now, manual grass restoration efforts, which seemed almost superfluous just a few years ago, have taken on renewed importance.

“I think every little bit does help,” Landry said.

For a while, in the 1990s and early 2000s, comparatively more money and effort were put into replanting lost aquatic grasses. There were some notable successes, such as the restoration of eelgrass beds in the seaside bays of Virginia.

In Maryland, biologists at Anne Arundel Community College figured out how to raise Bay grasses from seeds collected from the wild. They set up an aquatic plant nursery there capable of producing batches of underwater vegetation.

Around 2000, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the DNR teamed up to get students in more than 300 Maryland schools to grow aquatic vegetation in their classrooms and then take it out to plant on the Bay bottom.

Those broad-scale efforts succeeded in replacing some missing grass beds in places such as the Severn and Magothy rivers in Anne Arundel County. But they were “expensive, time-consuming and laborious,” Naylor said. The results also proved to be spotty overall, and funding dried up.

Out of necessity, the effort shifted to a lower gear.

“Instead of doing huge projects, we’ve been concentrating on small-scale restoration efforts of an acre or less,” Landry said. They’ve also chosen to skip the logistical challenges of raising aquatic plants in nurseries or classrooms and instead sow the seeds directly on the bottom.

The aim, she said, is to plant about 20 acres a year, roughly evenly divided between Maryland and Virginia.

“We started working with waterfront homeowners,” she explained, “planting little, tiny half-acre projects, just placing seeds offshore.” Those have worked, she said, in places like the upper Chester River.

“The hard part is collecting and processing seeds,” Landry added. Care must be taken to find grass beds lush enough they can afford to give up some seeds and still sustain themselves. Collectors limit their harvests to no more than a third of those beds.

Focus on the Shore

The aerial SAV surveys conducted by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science help to identify candidate sites for seed collection, but ground-truthing is still vital.

The patch of horned pondweed harvested in June had never been spotted from the air, noted Bassett, the Miles-Wye Riverkeeper. It was instead discovered by a ShoreRivers volunteer who routinely scouts local waters to check on grass beds.

ShoreRivers is focusing its efforts on restoring grasses in the four Bay tributaries in the mid and upper Shore. Of the rivers in those regions, only the Sassafras has a healthy stock of underwater vegetation, which has at times met and even exceeded the acreage goals set by the federal-state Bay Program. It’s lost ground lately, though, like much of the rest of the Bay.

Grass coverage in the other rivers — the Chester, Miles-Wye and Choptank — is well below acreage targets considered sufficient for ecosystem health.

Complicating restoration efforts: Each river has a different type or mix of underwater vegetation — horned pondweed, widgeon grass, redhead and wild celery — each with its own characteristics and optimal growing conditions.

Chester Riverkeeper Annie Richards (left), ShoreRivers volunteer coordinator Amy Narimatsu and volunteer Carole Trippe feed clumps of harvested redhead grass into a “turbulator,” which begins process of separating seeds from stalks. Photo by Dave Harp, Bay Journal

“SAV is almost as elusive as crabs in determining their patterns,” said Annie Richards, the Chester Riverkeeper.

The grasses harvested by ShoreRivers staff and volunteers are being taken to Chestertown, where the group has forged a partnership with Washington College to process and store the seeds for replanting the next spring. They’ve built a “turbulator,” a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption on the grounds of the college’s new Semans-Griswold Environmental Hall. It is based on a prototype built by Anne Arundel Community College.

In the turbulator’s big, water-filled fiberglass tank, ShoreRivers staff and volunteers dump in batches of Bay grass to give them hot tub-like baths. Shopvacs churn the water, beginning the process of separating the tiny grass seeds from their stalks. The seeds and some plant matter sink to the bottom, where they’re drawn out by draining the tank.

Staff and volunteers must meticulously cull the seeds from plant debris by hand. They first sift them through a series of wooden trays lined with successively finer screens, much as miners pan for gold. Finally, they pore over them, trying to spy and winnow out seeds that don’t look like they’re ripe enough to germinate successfully later.

“Every seed counts,” said Amy Narimatsu, the group’s volunteer coordinator.

Once that laborious process is complete, the seeds are stored in jars and refrigerated to keep them viable until the next spring, when they’ll be taken out for planting. To prevent them from being carried away by the current and ending up in the wrong place, the seeds are embedded in clumps of playground sand, which pull them to the bottom and give them a fighting chance to sprout and take root in the intended spot.

The harvesting, processing and storage all follow a tried-and-true script worked out by experts at Anne Arundel Community College. But one important challenge remains: getting the grasses to grow again where they vanished years ago.

“You can collect all the seed you want, and we are really good at keeping it and storing it properly,” said Mike Norman, lab manager at Anne Arundel Community College’s environmental center. “But we really have to work on getting it out in the field in successful projects.”

Learning where to plant

With decades of VIMS surveys as a guide, Norman said they to try to target areas for seeding where they know grasses grew in the past.

There have been some successful plantings of redhead and widgeon grass, Norman said, but the Johnny Appleseed method of restoration is still a learning process, with misses as well as hits.

“We’ve been collecting seeds for a long time,” he said. “We have been broadcasting seeds for a much shorter time — the past three years.”

Bassett said Bay grass restoration offers ShoreRivers a way to engage more volunteers in hands-on work that directly benefits the Bay. She said she’s looking forward to enlisting Washington College students in the ranks.

“For us, as riverkeeper organizations, our main mission is protecting and restoring our waterways,” she said. “So we feel very much that SAV restoration is key to improving water quality.”

The DNR’s Naylor said he hopes the ShoreRivers undertaking can be replicated by other riverkeeper and watershed groups around the Bay. But it’ll take more funding, he noted.

While the acreage they’re able to restore may be small compared to what’s needed, Naylor said it also helps to engage and educate the public about the value of aquatic plants, which were once routinely eradicated because boaters complained about the grasses fouling their propellors.

“We can get people involved, to care about it,” he said, “so they appreciate SAV and don’t look at it as a pain in the butt.”

By Timothy B. Wheeler

Report: Study Finds OTC, Prescription Drugs Flowing into Bay

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Dharna Noor, writing in Gizmodo, reports that “a study conducted by scientists with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that tens of thousands of doses of pharmaceuticals are flowing into the Chesapeake Bay every year. They include everything from over-the-counter pain medicine to prescription antidepressants.”

Researchers took weekly water samples from six sites in a Baltimore watershed for a year and sent the samples to a Swedish chemist to test for certain “pharmaceutical chemical compounds,” Noor wrote.

“The compounds fell into 9 common classes of drugs: adrenergics (prescribed for asthma and other cardiovascular and respiratory issues), antibiotics, antidepressants, antiepileptics, antifungals, antihypertensives, urologicals, and painkillers separated into two categories, non-opioid and opioid analgesics. The authors found that all of these were present in varying degrees.

“The highest concentrations they found were of non-opioid analgesics like Tylenol, Advil, and Aleve…. But the most commonly found drug in their samples were antibiotics, especially trimethoprim, which is prescribed for kidney infections and urinary tract infections.”

Read the full study here.

Senate Set to Vote on Funding for Reconstruction of Chesapeake Bay Islands

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The Senate Appropriations Committee has signed off on $37.5 million in spending that could launch the reconstruction of James and Barren islands in the Chesapeake Bay.

The Aug. 4 approval sets up a vote before the full Senate. The legislation will then undergo negotiations between the House and Senate to merge their differing versions of the measure, which is part of the $53 billion Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill.

The current House bill does not include the James and Barren funding.

The $1.9 billion undertaking, called the Mid-Chesapeake Bay Island Ecosystem Restoration, will rebuild two eroding islands off the coast of Dorchester County, MD. In all, it will create more than 2,100 acres of new land.

The fill will be dredged from the shipping channels for the Port of Baltimore, keeping the lanes open for cargo traffic.

The funding would cover the first year of planned construction. Critically, the move transfers the effort off the “new start” phase, where projects can languish for years, said Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland.

“The project will build the resiliency of Dorchester County communities, provide new habitats for a variety of fish and wildlife, support commerce at the port and enhance safety for boats and ships navigating the Bay,” Cardin said. “Having worked for years to make this vision a reality, I am heartened to announce that we are finally taking decisive steps toward giving the Mid-Bay Island Project what it needs to move forward in earnest.”

By Jeremy Cox

Infrastructure Bill would Boost Bay Restoration Funding, Senate Eyes $238M Funding Increase over Next Five Years

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The struggling Chesapeake Bay restoration effort stands to get a hefty infusion of funding from the ambitious $1.2 trillion infrastructure deal reached over the weekend in the U.S. Senate.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act calls for providing $238 million over the next five years to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program, which coordinates the state-federal restoration effort.

The Bay restoration effort is among $21 billion in environmental remediation projects that would be funded under the bill. The 2,702-page measure also includes money for physical infrastructure, such as highways, bridges, transit and rail, airports and ports, power and water systems, waterways, broadband access and electric vehicle charging stations.

Hammered out by a bipartisan group of senators, the infrastructure bill is much smaller than the $2.6 trillion plan that Biden proposed in March. Many Republicans had criticized that plan because it included funding for things not traditionally deemed as infrastructure, such as workforce training and care for the elderly and disabled.

Those are now to be included in a separate $3.5 trillion spending bill that Democrats are working on, which faces an uncertain future in the closely divided Congress.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill, which is expected to pass the Senate with the backing of Republican leaders, also slashed funding for clean energy tax credits intended to help fight climate change.

But the bill increases spending overall on environmental remediation above what Biden had proposed. It would provide funds for cleaning up abandoned mine land and Superfund sites, as well as for improving the resiliency of degraded ecosystems, such as the Great Lakes, Puget Sound and Gulf of Mexico.

The Chesapeake restoration effort also could get additional help from the bill’s proposal to boost funding nationally for water and wastewater infrastructure. Two EPA programs that provide loans to states for upgrading sewage and stormwater treatment facilities and for enhancing drinking water systems each would get an additional $14.7 billion over the next five years. That would more than double the current annual level of funding for such projects.

The Chesapeake Bay Program received $87.5 million for fiscal year 2021, and President Biden has proposed increasing that by $3 million for fiscal year 2022, which starts Oct. 1. The House has already approved that level of funding. The infrastructure measure, if passed, would boost that by roughly 50%, providing an additional $47.6 million a year.

“As we work to modernize our infrastructure and tackle climate change, it’s crucial that we’re investing in protecting our watersheds,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “That’s why we fought to include funding for the Chesapeake Bay Program in the bipartisan infrastructure deal.”

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) cited the Bay Program funding as one of the reasons he supported the infrastructure bill. “Marylanders will be pleased to see this includes funds for ecosystem restoration,” he said in a statement.

The bill’s text doesn’t say how the EPA is to use the additional money. The Bay Program typically funds research and helps assess cleanup progress, but nearly two-thirds of its money also goes to states, local governments and nonprofit groups for on-the-ground projects.

Even without such details spelled out in the bill, Bay advocates hailed the proposed funding increase. Kristin Reilly, director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition, called it “a shot in the arm” for the states and federal government, which could help them get closer to putting all needed pollution reduction practices in place by their 2025 deadline.

“While currently there is ambiguity on the exact allocation of this funding, we are heartened to see the restoration of our waterways is recognized as a national priority,” Reilly said in a statement. “This investment will not only help provide all the benefits clean water brings, but the many on-the-ground restoration projects this funding supports will also deliver good jobs and stimulate local economies.”

With just four years to go to meet the deadline of the “pollution diet” that the EPA set for the Bay in 2010, advocates and state and local officials have been urging Congress to boost funding for the restoration effort, which remains far short of many of its goals.

At least one-third of the outcomes pledged in the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement are lagging badly or in limbo. An internal Bay Program review found that seven, including the key goal of meeting nutrient and sediment pollution reduction targets, are unlikely to be met by the 2025 deadline.

In May, governors of the six Bay watershed states, the mayor of the District of Columbia and the chair of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, a tri-state legislative advisory body, wrote Congress seeking an additional billion dollars for the effort. They didn’t specify how the extra money could be spent.

The Choose Clean Water Coalition, representing dozens of environmental and community groups across the six-state watershed, also wrote congressional leaders that month asking in part for a $132 million boost in Bay Program funding. It proposed distributing the increased funding in grants to states and local governments to support their restoration efforts.

By Timothy B. Wheeler

Chesapeake Bay’s ‘Dead Zone’ to be Smaller this Summer, Researchers Say

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The Chesapeake Bay’s “dead zone,” the oxygen-starved blob of water that waxes and wanes each summer, is forecast to be smaller than average for a second consecutive year.

A consortium of research institutions announced June 23 that it expects the volume of this year’s dead zone to be 14% lower than average. In 2020, the zone was smaller than 80% of those monitored since surveying began in 1985.

The size of the summer dead zone is driven largely by how much excess nutrients flow off lawns and agricultural fields into the Bay during the preceding January to May, researchers say. Those nutrients — nitrogen and phosphorus — fuel explosive algae growth, triggering a chemical reaction that robs the water of oxygen as it dies back. The area is dubbed a “dead zone” because of the lack of life found within it.

This year, those first five months were slightly drier than usual, causing river flows entering the Bay to be 13% below average. As a result, the Chesapeake received 19% less nitrogen pollution compared with the long-term average at monitoring stations along nine major tributaries.

Efforts to curb nutrient pollution in the Bay’s 64,000-square-mile watershed also appear to have played a role in shrinking this year’s dead zone, scientists say. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has joined with Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia to implement a “pollution diet” for the Bay and its tributaries by 2025.

“This year’s forecast suggests a smaller dead zone than is typical because the river flows that carry nutrients to the Bay were slightly lower than normal,” said Jeremy Testa, a researcher with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “But the amount of nutrients carried to the Bay by a given amount of flow has lessened over time due to effective nutrient management in the watershed. This is an example of a positive trajectory for the Bay.”

Oxygen is measured in the Bay throughout the year by the Chesapeake Monitoring Program, an effort involving several federal agencies, 10 academic institutions and more than 30 scientists. The dead zone forecast is produced by UMCES, the Chesapeake Bay Program, the University of Michigan and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The dead zone is typically biggest in summer, when temperatures are their hottest and oxygen is at its lowest.

Water is considered “dead” to marine life when the concentration of dissolved oxygen falls below 2 milligrams per liter. The average Chesapeake dead zone measures between 0.7 and 1.5 cubic square miles of water, the equivalent of 280,000–600,000 Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth of water, according to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

This year’s dead zone began forming earlier than normal because of warming temperatures in May, according to real-time estimates produced by VIMS and Anchor QEA.

Beth McGee, director of science and agriculture policy with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said the smaller area of low or no oxygen is good news for crabs, fish and other creatures that dwell in the Bay. But it shouldn’t obscure the fact that the states and federal partners are struggling to meet the pollution-reduction targets they set for 2025, she added.

Noting that 40% of the nitrogen that causes dead zones can be traced to Pennsylvania, McGee said: “The U.S. Department of Agriculture must provide more funding for conservation and technical assistance, and the Pennsylvania legislature should establish a state agricultural cost-share program. At the same time, EPA must hold the states, especially Pennsylvania, accountable to meet pollution-reduction requirements from all sources. Without those federal efforts, the Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint will be yet another in the history of failed Bay restoration efforts.”

By Jeremy Cox

Chesapeake Bay Receives D+ for Second Year in a Row

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The health of the Chesapeake Bay remains poor, due in part to insufficient management of the Bay’s rockfish population, according to a recent report by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

Out of the 13 health indicators, the rockfish score alone declined by 17 points, which is “the largest decline in any indicator in more than a decade,” the foundation said in its report, which was released Tuesday.

The Bay’s rockfish population began declining in the 1970s and 1980s from overfishing, but returned to healthy levels by the early 2000s, thanks to conservation efforts. However, the rockfish population has been under threat again within the last few years. The presence of adult female striped bass dropped by 40% from 2013 to 2017.

In response, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission required Maryland and Virginia to reduce their striped bass, or rockfish, harvest by 18%, and restricted the catching of menhaden, which is a primary food source for striped bass, in 2019.

Still, there need to be stronger actions that help stimulate stiped bass’s population growth, according to the report — especially in Maryland.

“The state needs to take more effective measures to stem the decline in striped bass. While other states chose to close the striped bass fishery during key times when the species is most threatened, Maryland took a piecemeal approach that we believe had limited effectiveness,” Alison Prost, the vice president for environmental protection and restoration of CBF, said in a statement.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has been releasing biennial reports since 1998, relying on 13 health indicators, including water clarity, forest buffers, blue crabs and oyster populations.

The bay’s health remained at a D+ since its last report in 2018. It scored 32 on a 100-point scale, one point lower than in 2018. If the Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint, which calls for six Bay states and the District of Columbia to meet pollution-reduction targets by 2025, is successful, then the Bay’s health should reach a score of 40 by 2025, according to the report.

A score of 70 would represent a “saved” Bay, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation said, and a “saved” Bay would provide $130 billion a year in natural resource benefits to the region.

Not all health indicators were negative this year. For instance, the Bay witnessed lower nitrogen and phosphorus pollution over the last two years, which decreased the size of dead zones, or areas of water that have little to no oxygen. This year, the Bay had the seventh smallest dead zone in the last 35 years.

However, forest buffers, which help slow down nutrient runoff into waterways, are still low, partly due to changes in federal law that used to help fund many of the buffers in the Bay region. The health of underwater grasses, which provide food and habitat for fish, also declined because of heavy rainfall from the last two years, which affects water clarity.

The Bay can be restored by enforcing the Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint, CBF representatives said, but this heavily relies on Pennsylvania, which has lagged behind other Bay states, to meet its share of pollution reduction goals.

“If Pennsylvania does not meet the obligations it’s promised to meet by 2025, there is no doubt that the Chesapeake Bay will never be saved. It’s that basic,” William Baker, the president of CBF, said during a news conference Tuesday.

Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia and several organizations sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in September, accusing the federal government of failing to hold Pennsylvania accountable for its portion of the Bay cleanup.

“The stagnating score shows that we are witnessing apathy take hold and political will wane,” Baker said in a statement. “We can still save the Bay and deliver the promise of clean water to the next generation, but only if our elected officials redouble their clean water commitments and invest in finishing the job.”

U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) lambasted the Trump administration for failing to hold Pennsylvania accountable.

“While Congress, on a bipartisan basis, has increased the federal resources available to protect the Bay, the Trump Administration has refused to hold Pennsylvania more accountable for failing to meet their pollution reduction targets under the Chesapeake Bay Agreement,” Van Hollen said in a statement. “Everyone needs to work together and I look forward to working with the incoming Biden Administration EPA to meet our mutual goals of Clean Water in the Chesapeake Bay by 2025 by holding all partner states accountable.”

What will be most important for Maryland, however, is to make sure that lawmakers continue to allocate enough money in the budget for the Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint, Prost said. Investment in pollution controls for agriculture will also be important, since it is one of the areas that Maryland is relying on the most to reach its pollution reduction goals by 2025, CBF officials said.

Another priority for the upcoming General Assembly legislative session will be the Climate Solutions Act, which is a multifaceted bill that addresses the intersection between climate and water quality, Prost said.

By Elizabeth Shwe

EPA hit with lawsuits over Chesapeake Bay cleanup

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Making good on threats issued months ago, three Chesapeake Bay watershed states, the District of Columbia and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation took the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to court Thursday for its failure to push Pennsylvania and New York to do more to help clean up the Bay.

In their lawsuit, the attorneys general of Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia accused the EPA of shirking its responsibility under the Clean Water Act by letting Pennsylvania and New York fall short in reducing their nutrient and sediment pollution fouling the Bay.

“This has to be a collective effort,” said Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh. “Every state in the Chesapeake Bay watershed has to play a part, and EPA under the law has to ensure that happens.”

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said the Chesapeake Bay cleanup must be a collective effort. Photo courtesy of the Maryland Office of the Attorney General.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, joined by the Maryland Watermen’s Association, a pair of Virginia farmers and Anne Arundel County, Md., made similar complaints in a separate federal lawsuit. Both were filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where they’re likely to be consolidated into a single case.

“The courts must ensure that EPA does its job,’’ Will Baker, the Bay Foundation president, said in an online press conference held with attorneys general from Maryland, Virginia and the District.

At issue is the EPA’s duty to enforce a decade-old plan the agency drew up for restoring the Chesapeake to ecological health. The plan, known as a total maximum daily load, requires each of the Bay watershed states and the District to do what’s needed by 2025 to reduce their share of the nutrient and sediment pollution harming the Bay.

Progress has been made toward restoring the Bay’s water quality, though much more remains to be done. In particular, Pennsylvania and New York have fallen far behind in meeting their pollution-reduction targets, especially in curbing nutrient runoff from farmland.

All six Bay watershed states and the District were required to submit plans last year spelling out the measures each would take by 2025 to make the needed pollution reductions.

Most of the plans indicate that states will have to increase pollution-reduction efforts to unprecedented levels to reach their cleanup goals. But Pennsylvania’s and New York’s plans don’t even achieve their goals on paper. Pennsylvania’s falls short on curbing nitrogen, the most problematic nutrient, by about 25%, while New York’s was around 33% short. Pennsylvania’s plan also identifies an annual funding gap for cleanup activities of approximately $250 million a year through 2025.

The EPA cited those shortcomings for both states but hasn’t taken any action against them. The lawsuits contend that the federal government is abdicating its legal responsibility by accepting clearly inadequate cleanup plans with no reasonable assurance the two states can achieve their assigned pollution reductions.

Without responding directly to the lawsuits’ core complaint, an EPA spokesman issued a statement defending the agency’s role in the Bay cleanup.

“EPA is fully committed to working with our Bay Program partners to meet the 2025 goals,” the statement said. “We have taken and will continue to take appropriate actions under our Clean Water Act authorities to improve Chesapeake Bay water quality.”

The spokesman noted that in just the past year, the EPA and other federal agencies have supplied “nearly a half billion dollars” to support Bay watershed restoration efforts. The agency also has provided “thousands of hours” of technical assistance to the states, it said.

Those filing the lawsuits say that’s not enough. Unless the federal government holds the states accountable for doing their part to reduce nutrient and sediment pollution, the 37-year effort to restore the Bay’s water quality is likely to fail, they warn.

Will Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said that the courts must make sure the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “does its job’’ in enforcing Bay cleanup actions. Photo by Mike Busada, courtesy of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation

“When EPA uses its bully pulpit to tell a state that they’re failing to meet their obligations, action follows,” said the foundation’s Baker. “We’ve seen that with Pennsylvania in the past.”

The agency briefly withheld about $3 million in federal funds from Pennsylvania five years ago to prod it to come up with a plan for getting its cleanup back on track. Critics suggest the EPA also could leverage state compliance by threatening to block permits that are needed to build or expand businesses.

Environmentalists and Maryland officials have been complaining for some time that the EPA is not doing more to press Pennsylvania over its lagging cleanup pace. But discontent ramped up in January when Dana Aunkst, director of the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program office, described the 2025 cleanup deadline as “aspirational” and said the Bay TMDL was “not an enforceable document.”

The litigants said they didn’t relish taking the EPA to court but felt they had no choice. They faulted the Trump administration, contending it had not only abandoned the federal government’s role as enforcer of the Bay TMDL, but had threatened the cleanup further by rolling back or weakening federal environmental regulations.

The Annapolis-based environmental group and the attorneys general had served the EPA formal notice in May of their intent to sue and followed up later with a letter offering to meet and discuss their concerns. The EPA did not respond, they said.

“We’re here to enforce the agreements,” said Karl Racine, the District’s attorney general. “It’s not unusual at all that when parties don’t do what they’re supposed to do by law, we go to court to have it enforce the remedy.”

Neither Pennsylvania nor New York are defendants in the lawsuits, though their alleged shortcomings are key issues. Deborah Klenotic, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, declined to comment on the litigation, saying, “We remain focused on our work to improve water quality here in Pennsylvania and in the Chesapeake Bay.”

But Maureen Wren, a spokeswoman for the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, disputed assertions the state isn’t doing its part to help clean up the Bay.

“New York is fulfilling its clean water responsibilities under the Chesapeake Bay TMDL and is a committed partner” in the federal-state Chesapeake Bay Program, she said.

State officials now expect to meet New York’s nitrogen reduction targets based on new information about Susquehanna flows and a change in the Bay Program’s computer model.

Maryland’s Anne Arundel County, which has more than 500 miles of shoreline on the Bay and its tributaries, joined the foundation in its lawsuit.

County executive Steuart Pittman of Anne Arundel County, MD, walks one of the shorelines in his jurisdiction that border the Chesapeake Bay. The county has joined the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in its suit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Photo by Dave Harp, courtesy of Bay Journal News Service

“Anne Arundel County residents have invested far too much in the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort to watch from the sidelines as upstream states and the EPA abandon their obligations,” said Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman. The county has spent more than $500 million in the last decade on Bay protection and restoration, officials estimate.

The Maryland Watermen’s Association, which has been at odds with the Bay Foundation over the state’s management of oysters, also joined in the group’s lawsuit. Observing that “water runs downhill,” Robert T. Brown, Sr., the group’s president, said the nutrients, sediment and debris coming down the Susquehanna River from Pennsylvania and New York are having a devastating effect on watermen.

“So goes the health of the Bay, so goes [our] industry and seafood,” he said. “…We need to have the EPA do its job.”

Also suing are Robert Whitescarver and Jeanne Hoffman, who raise livestock on a farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Whitescarver, a former Natural Resources Conservation Service representative, has long advocated for farm conservation practices. He said farmers have a stake in this issue.

“All jurisdictions need to do their fair share,” he said. “The efforts that Virginia and Maryland farmers have put into sustainable farming are harmed by EPA’s failure to require all jurisdictions to meet the commitments they agreed to.”

At least a couple of the states suing the EPA to put the heat on Pennsylvania and New York could find themselves on the receiving end of similar pressure if their lawsuit succeeds. Only the District of Columbia and West Virginia have met their 2025 goals ahead of schedule, according to recent data. None of the others are on track to reduce nitrogen by the needed amount.

“If any of the Bay states fall significantly short in implementation, CBF will call on EPA to take action,” Baker said.

By Timothy B. Wheeler

Environmentalists Bash Leaders of Chesapeake Bay States for Backsliding

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Leaders from six Chesapeake Bay watershed states, the District of Columbia, the Chesapeake Bay Commission and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have failed to address recent reports highlighting how some Bay states are not on track to meet their pollution reduction goals by 2025, environmental groups said Tuesday.

The Chesapeake Executive Council, which includes the leaders of Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New York, D.C. and the EPA, met virtually Tuesday for its annual meeting. Gov. Lawrence J. Hogan Jr. (R) announced that the council had adopted a diversity statement, pledging to improve equity and a culture of inclusion throughout the states’ efforts to clean up the Bay.

“Just as natural ecosystems depend on biodiversity to thrive, the long-term success of the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort depends on the equitable, just and inclusive engagement of all communities living throughout the watershed,” the council’s statement said in part. “…For this effort to be successful it will require us to honor the culture, history and social concerns of local populations and communities.”

Hogan then turned the gavel over to Gov. Ralph S. Northam (D) of Virginia.

“Over my past three years as chair, we have worked together to implement real, bipartisan, common sense solutions to the challenges facing the Chesapeake Bay, and the results speak for themselves,” Hogan said. “Maryland remains fully committed to this historic partnership as we continue making strides to preserve this national treasure.”

However, the leaders did not address reports issued in the last few days by the Environmental Integrity Project and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, both of which found that Maryland and Pennsylvania are regressing on their efforts to mitigate stormwater pollution runoff into the Bay. Both reports found that Pennsylvania in particular was far from meeting its pollution reduction goals by 2025.

“Once again this year, Bay restoration leaders ignored the elephant in the room. Pennsylvania’s plan to meet the goals that all agreed on is woefully inadequate and implementation is seriously off-track,” Chesapeake Bay Foundation President Will Baker said in a statement.

“Unless the Commonwealth finds a way to meet its commitments, the investments that the other Bay states are making will improve local water quality, but the Bay will not be restored,” he continued.

In 2010, the EPA established the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), which requires Bay states to implement plans that would reduce nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment pollution into the Bay by 2025. The federal agency is responsible for establishing accountability measures to ensure that each state meets its cleanup commitments.

A report released last week by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation found that although Maryland is on track to achieving its 2025 pollution reduction goals, it must focus more on reducing urban and suburban stormwater pollution runoff, as this will be Maryland’s second largest source of nitrogen pollution by 2025.

Although Pennsylvania has successfully reduced pollution from wastewater treatment plants, the report found that it needs to focus on reducing pollution from agriculture, which makes up 93% of the total remaining nitrogen reduction necessary to meet pollution reduction goals by 2025.

Another report by the Environmental Integrity Project released Monday found that Maryland’s 2019 Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan allows 1.5 million more pounds of nitrogen pollution from urban and suburban stormwater runoff into the Bay by 2025, or 20% more pollution, than its 2012 commitment.

Similarly, Pennsylvania’s Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan will allow 7 million more pounds of nitrogen pollution from stormwater runoff by 2025, a 87% increase from its 2012 plan.

“It was disappointing that today’s annual meeting of Chesapeake regional governors – only two of whom even bothered to show up – did not discuss the Bay’s serious pollution problems with any candor or depth, and did not even bring up the backsliding by Pennsylvania and Maryland on controlling urban and suburban stormwater pollution,” said Tom Pelton, spokesman for the Environmental Integrity Project.

“Governor Hogan praised the ‘incredible progress’ the states have made in cleaning up the Bay. But, in fact, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s most recent report card on the Bay showed that the estuary’s overall health rated a terrible 44 out of 100 in 2019, which was an even worse score than the 47 out of 100 score in 2010, when the current Bay cleanup efforts began,” Pelton continued.

The leaders from the Chesapeake watershed also did not mention Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia’s recent declaration that they intend to sue the EPA for its failure to enforce state pollution reduction plans, specifically Pennsylvania and New York.

“Once again, Pennsylvania’s progress has fallen short, and, once again, EPA has failed to hold them accountable. This should not be surprising, since this administration has spent the past three and a half years rolling back environmental regulations and enforcement mechanisms,” Kristen Reilly, director of Choose Clean Water Coalition, said in a statement.

“We would like to remind EPA that their role in this restoration effort is to hold the states to the commitments they have made to clean their local rivers, streams and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay.”

By Elizabeth Shwe

Long-running Chesapeake Crab Study Threatened with Shutdown

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One of the longest-running scientific investigations of the Chesapeake Bay is in danger of shutting down permanently.

The Morgan State University blue crab monitoring survey has persisted for 50 years through two institutions, three financial sponsors and the evolution from paper to digital tabulation. But its funding dried up this year, and the deep financial downturn triggered by the coronavirus has cast doubt on finding an alternative source.

“Normally, we’d be getting the crab survey ready, but that’s not happening this year unfortunately,” said Tom Ihde, the fisheries ecologist at Morgan State who currently helms the study.

The coronavirus has grounded environmental research across the Chesapeake region and around the globe. Some studies are impossible to carry out without violating social-distancing protocols. Others suffered human resource shortages when university graduate students were sent home. And the future funding picture is hazy at best.

Amid this crisis within a crisis, the Morgan State crab study stands out. Its ills predate the pandemic, putting it in a tougher spot than most of the other suspended work. Meanwhile, what hangs in the balance isn’t a few months of datasets but rather a decades-long crusade that helped fishery managers resurrect the iconic species after years of decline.

Ihde said he has been trying to find other avenues to finance the work. The prospects didn’t look good before the coronavirus emerged, he said. Now, they look even worse.

“These long-term surveys are notoriously hard to keep funded, and it’s not cheap to get boats on the water or to pay for gear and staff time,” Ihde said. “We’re trying to find other ways of funding. I’ve tried quite a few, but there’s no success yet.”

The research historically has cost about $50,000 a year to conduct.

Stanley Nwakamma, an intern at Morgan State University’s Patuxent Environmental and Aquatic Research Laboratory, hoists a crab pot in 2018 while working on the facility’s long-running blue crab survey. Photo courtesy of Morgan State University

The protocol has changed little from the beginning. Once a month from June to early November, when crabs are most active, Ihde and his team bait 30 crab pots with menhaden and drop them into the Bay along the western shore in southern Maryland. The pots are divided among offshore sites near Kenwood Beach, Rocky Point and Calvert Cliffs.

The researchers return in their boat 24 hours later to record how many they caught, the size of the crustaceans and the characteristics of the water.

The study got under way in 1968. It grew out of researchers’ and environmentalists’ concerns about how a new nuclear power plant, which was then nearly a decade from opening at Calvert Cliffs, would affect crabs with its discharges of heated water.

The scientist selected to lead the study was fresh from receiving his master’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Delaware. George Abbe became the first employee of the Academy of Natural Sciences’ Estuarine Research Center on the Patuxent River.

Over the next 40 years, Abbe produced a wealth of publications — more than 150, including his oyster research and other topics. But the crab study was his obsession, colleagues say.

The crab survey would soon move beyond its initial parochial goal — the heated water turned out to be a non-factor. Along the way, the survey shaped science’s evolving understanding of the Bay’s crabs.

Sandra Shumway, a marine scientist with the University of Connecticut who knew Abbe through academic conferences and followed his work closely, called him a visionary for developing a study that stood the test of time.

“Long-term data sets are rare,” she said. “It’s only by having that long, broad picture that you really understand what the population is doing.”

In the 1990s, Abbe was one of the first scientists to warn that the once-abundant species was dwindling in the Bay. His work showed that fishermen were taking too many crabs just over the legal size limit instead of waiting for them to grow mature enough to reproduce, a phenomenon known as “growth overfishing.”

“He rang the warning bell very loudly and clearly,” Ihde said.

Abbe’s research helped inform the U.S. Commerce Department’s decision in 2008 to declare the Chesapeake crab fishery a disaster, Ihde said. The designation made watermen eligible for $75 million in federal aid. It also prompted fishery managers in Maryland and Virginia to enact harvest restrictions that have been widely credited with helping to drive the population up 60% to 594 million crabs as of 2019.

The study has weathered several changes in recent years.

In 2004, the Academy transferred the research center that housed Abbe’s work to Morgan State. Funding for the study began with Baltimore Gas & Electric, the nuclear plant’s original owner. After 15 years, it moved to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources for 30 years. The state money stopped flowing in 2011; there was no funding and no surveying for the next two years.

Abbe continued working and studying the Bay’s shellfish until shortly before his death in August 2013 at the age of 69.

Dominion Energy, which operates a liquefied natural gas plant in the area, stepped up and voluntarily funded the work from 2014 through last year. This year’s stoppage initially stemmed from a mix-up between Morgan State and Dominion over the application deadline for the funds, each side confirmed.

But the coronavirus has forced the energy company to reshuffle its priorities.

“We have halted all expenditures companywide for the foreseeable future,” said George Anas, Dominion’s external affairs manager. “It’s not that we don’t care any less [about the crab survey]. We have enjoyed working with them, and we look down the road hoping we can do some more.”

Maryland’s DNR has no plans to fund the study, agency spokesman Gregg Bortz said.

The state has conducted its own annual crab survey in conjunction with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science since 1990. It uses dredges to collect crabs during the winter.

Bortz added that the agency’s scientists prefer their method for assessing the population size because it analyzes many locations around the Bay and catches crabs of all sizes. In contrast, the Morgan State study focuses on one area and can only capture crabs that are at least a year old.

The director of what is now known as the Patuxent Environmental and Aquatic Research Laboratory insists the study can still be valuable to the state’s fishery monitoring. “Our survey can do different things and fill in some gaps,” Scott Knoche said.

For example, because it looks at female crab movements in the fall, the study can be used to predict reproduction levels for the next spring, Ihde said.

Tom Miller, a crab specialist who directs the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, said the winter dredge survey supplies the best overall snapshot of the blue crab population. He helps author the annual study.

The Morgan State survey may no longer be as vital for fishery managers as it once was, but it is still useful for spotting long-range trends, Miller said.

“What’s important about it is you conduct it the same way,” he said. “If you see crabs are less abundant than they were in this pot survey, because the methods are the same, that should be a reliable indicator of changes in the overall crab population.”

Last year, the center’s staff converted decades of Abbe’s handwritten notes to digital records. Ihde has begun analyzing the voluminous dataset and hopes to dig up findings that persuade some entity to fund future field work.

A long-term study can survive a year or two without collecting new data, Ihde said. But if the delay goes on much longer, it seriously compromises the survey’s ongoing usefulness to fellow researchers and fishery managers.

“Long-term surveys like this are absolutely critical when it comes to trying to understand population changes over time, especially when the system itself is changing,” Ihde said, referring to the way climate change has led to warmer winters and shorter periods of dormancy for crabs. “It’s easy to lose sight of what things should be like. Fifty years is well beyond most people’s professional career memory.”

By Jeremy Cox

Less Seasonal Help, Virus Deliver One-Two Punch to Bay’s Blue Crab Industry

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Crab season is off to a slow and foreboding start around the Chesapeake Bay, with many crabmeat processors crippled by an inability to import seasonal workers and by watermen worried they’ll be unable to sell all they can catch as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Chilly, windy weather limited commercial harvests of blue crabs through much of April, the first full month of the season. Warming spring weather usually brings better fortunes, but those in the business of catching or picking crabs say they fear for their livelihoods amid the double whammy that’s hit the Bay’s most valuable fishery.

“It’s kind of a really scary situation,” said Bill Sieling, executive vice president of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, which represents Maryland companies. “It just doesn’t look good.”

Many of the crabmeat processing businesses around the Bay are short-handed because they failed to get federal approval to bring in as many foreign workers as they have in previous years.

The Department of Homeland Security held a lottery in January to distribute a reduced pool of 33,000 H-2B visas nationwide to all of the landscaping, construction and other businesses seeking to bring in seasonal labor, mainly from Mexico and Central America. Under pressure, the department announced in March it would hand out another 35,000 visas, but shelved that in early April amid the coronavirus pandemic.

As a result, only three of Maryland’s nine “picking houses,” as the crab processors are known, received any visas in the initial drawing. After missing out on the lottery, Lindy’s Seafood on Hoopers Island was looking at limping along with a half-dozen local workers.

“We could sell more product, we just can’t produce it,” said sales manager Aubrey Vincent.

Then, in late April, she said she got federal approval to bring back 61 workers who’d picked crabmeat at the plant last fall.

“It’s not all of my people,” she said, noting that the plant typically hires more than 100 seasonal workers. Still, she said, “it’s better than no people.”

The luck was as bad or worse in Virginia, where Graham & Rollins Inc., the biggest crabmeat processor in the state and one of the largest on the East Coast, has been idled after coming up snake-eyes in the visa lottery. The company, a fixture on the Hampton waterfront for nearly 80 years, had asked for 85 visas.

“Without workers, we’re looking at closure,” said Johnny Graham. “The plant’s been mothballed, the power’s pretty much cut off [and] the water supply’s being cut off.”

J. M. Clayton Co. in Cambridge was among the lucky ones. Co-owner Jack Brooks said the company got its request granted via the lottery for about 60 visas.

But then coronavirus intervened. Brooks said that with restaurants shut down and many people losing jobs, the demand for crabmeat is off, and he’s not sure when or if it will come back. So, the company has arranged to bring in “a few more than 20” workers for now.

“We’re looking at probably 30–45% capacity at best,” Brooks said.

Though unable to process much crabmeat, processors say they’re still able to sell live or steamed crabs. There appears to be a robust demand for the limited supply available in this slow-starting season.

Graham said the retail seafood store operated by his company has been selling crabs for carryout like it was the 4th of July, the traditional peak of demand for steamed crabs.

Debbie Fitzhugh sells fresh crab meat at a new service window at the J. M. Clayton Co. in Cambridge. Photo by Dave Harp/Bay Journal News Service

J. M. Clayton also has seen an uptick in retail crab sales, Brooks said. In response, the company has set up a makeshift drive-up window where customers can place orders and pick them up.

“People blow a horn, we go to the window and talk to them,” he said. That way, he explained, “people don’t walk in like they used to” and risk getting or spreading coronavirus.

Processors said they’re taking steps to try to keep their workers healthy. Brooks said Clayton is limiting the workforce in the picking room so workers are spaced 6 feet apart and wearing masks.

Watermen aren’t as worried about social distancing but they do wonder if they’ll be able to sell their catch when warmer weather usually brings more crabs into their boats.

“There haven’t been many crabs so far,” said Jeff Harrison, president of the Talbot Watermen Association. But demand is off, with restaurants closed and many markets not buying much seafood.

“Right now,” he added, “there really isn’t a problem selling them.”

Harrison said he’s worried about how long the coronavirus shutdowns are going to last. They already cut short what had turned out to be a good wild oyster harvest, he said. Now, even if restaurants and other businesses start to reopen in the coming month, he foresees a season where watermen won’t earn as much for what they catch — and feel lucky just to be able to sell it at all.

Already, the dockside price has been about 30% or more below what it was at the start of the season last year, Harrison said. Meanwhile, he noted, the price of razor clams used as bait has gone up.

The $2 trillion in COVID-19 economic relief passed by Congress in late March included $300 million for the seafood industry. But that’s to be distributed nationwide, and industry officials say it’s far from enough to keep everyone afloat. Just in Virginia alone, losses to all commercial fisheries are estimated to range from $53 million to $68 million, according to data compiled by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.

“Even if it lasts another month, it’s still going to be a mess,” Harrison said. “And if it goes two months, we’re done.”

Amid news reports that air and water quality have improved as a result of so many businesses closed and people ordered to stay home, Harrison said the effort to halt the spread of coronavirus is probably helping the Bay. But, he added, it’s “not the way we wanted it to happen.”

By Timothy B. Wheeler