Science For Restoration

To help return the Chesapeake Bay to something approaching its former productivity — when underwater grasses and oyster reefs lined the Bay's shallow edges — scientists and resource managers alike must explore new ways to improve water quality, to experiment with grass planting and oyster reef construction, and to find better methods for spawning and raising finfish and shellfish.

Restoring the Chesapeake will also mean looking beyond the Bay itself to the 64,000-square-mile watershed that feeds it. What happens on that sprawling landscape is intricately linked to what happens in the water. Nutrients (mostly nitrogen and phosphorus) from human sewage and farm fertilizer can enter the Bay as stormwater runoff or in groundwater, sometimes taking decades or more to wend their way to the estuary.

We need better techniques for slowing those nutrients and for controlling sediment washing from construction sites and farm fields. We need ongoing stream restoration efforts throughout the watershed to correct the effects of erosion and channel degradation. Such projects have built momentum in recent years, but we need sufficient monitoring to accurately gauge their success.

Restoring the Bay will require aggressive actions on both land and water, and will take all the technical savvy, public participation and political will that we can muster. Our goal is to restore the Bay's healthy resilience, moving it from a persistent degraded state to a persistent restored one.