Abstract

The size of the human population in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, the Nation's largest estuary, has doubled since 1950, resulting in degraded water quality, loss of habitat, and declines in populations of biological communities. Since the mid-1980s, the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP), a multiagency partnership that includes the U.S. Department of the Interior, has worked to restore the ecosystem of the bay. The U.S. Geological Survey has the critical role of providing scientific information used to to document and understand ecosystem change, which in turn is used to help assess the effectiveness of restoration strategies in the bay and the watershed.

To address the needs of the President’s executive order (E.O. 13508) to restore and protect the Chesapeake Bay, the USGS has four primary science themes:

promote adaptive management and decisionmaking support to enhance ecosystem management
assess and explain water-quality conditions and change
document the status and change of the health fish, wildlife, and critical habitats
forecast and assess impacts of climate and land-use change

First posted June 28, 2012