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May 15, 2025

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Ecosystem Eco Lead

Raking Up Bay Grass Beds in a Bid to Restore Them

September 13, 2021 by Bay Journal

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

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Eco Lead Tagged With: bay, chesapeake, Ecosystem, environment, grasses, restore, SAV, underwater

Environmentalists Bash Leaders of Chesapeake Bay States for Backsliding

August 20, 2020 by Maryland Matters

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

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Maryland News Tagged With: bay, chesapeake, environment, pollution, runoff, stormwater

Long-running Chesapeake Crab Study Threatened with Shutdown

May 1, 2020 by Bay Journal

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

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Eco Lead, Eco Portal Lead Tagged With: bay, chesapeake, crabs, environment, study

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