Monday, November 5, 2007 - 1:10 PM
43-1

The Susquehanna Watershed Influence on the Chesapeake Bay: Science, Management and Policy.

Thomas Simpson, Department of Environmental Science and Technology, University of Maryland, 1439 An Sci/ Ag Eng Bldg, College Park, MD 20742

The Chesapeake Bay is the nations largest and historically, most productive estuary. It has declined in recent decades due to eutrophication and associated hypoxia caused by watershed sources of nitrogen and phosphorus. The Susquehanna River is the largest tributary to the Bay with about half of the total fresh water flow. Nutrients loads are from a mix of agricultural, municipal wastewater, urban and atmospheric sources. A cooperative watershed program between Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, the District of Columbia and the federal government has been in place for more than 20 years and recently expanded to include all watershed states. The Bay Program has adopted a series of increasingly rigorous goals to restore the Bay and tributary specific strategies have been developed by jurisdictions to meet these goals. Estimation of source contribution, loading goals and reductions from tributary strategies have been developed using watershed and estuarine models. Model output has largely driven tributary strategies, policies, management and fiscal resources. The Bay Program has used the best available science to support the models and to further direct policy, however model output has sometimes been viewed as progress when water quality did not show corresponding improvement. In the last four years, the Bay program has taken a more adaptive management approach that uses science and model output to direct actions but better recognizes the need to frequently update and improve models and management actions based on enhanced knowledge. Efforts have also been made to separately report implementation, water quality and restoration progress and to balance the use of modeling and monitoring data to estimate progress.  The Chesapeake Bay Program is undertaking a review of all management practice efficiencies to support an updated watershed model that will be used to develop a watershed-wide TMDL by 2011.

 


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