On the Bay

All year long, hundreds of crab legs arrive in the mail at Baltimore’s Columbus Center, home of the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology.

A decade ago, Donald Webster could count the number of oyster farms in the state of Maryland on two hands. 

The water quality of American streams has declined for years, and a leading cause is fertilizer and pesticide runoff from agricultural land. The policy tool most often employed in Maryland to reduce this pollution has been cost sharing, where the state pays farmers to adopt more sustainable farming methods.

Researchers presented new methods for studying harmful algae in the Chesapeake Bay and other locations during the ninth U.S. Symposium on Harmful Algae held in Baltimore this November. One emerging idea was to use satellite imagery to identify individual species of harmful algal blooms and monitor their activity.

The more they grew, the better they did: New research shows that underwater grasses in the Susquehanna Flats in the upper Chesapeake Bay created conditions favorable to their resurgence there, by removing excess nitrogen from the water.