The Chesapeake Bay: Lessons Learned from Managing a Watershed

Ann Pesiri Swanson
Executive Director, Chesapeake Bay Commission

A 25-year campaign to reverse ecological damage in the United States’ most significant estuary has resulted in environmental improvements and important lessons on how to manage a complex water system.

The Chesapeake Bay, center, is on North America's mid-Atlantic coast. Rivers throughout the re- gion drain into the bay, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean. (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)

The Chesapeake Bay, the largest and most productive estuary in the United States, has often been referred to as the “crown jewel” of the nation’s 850 estuaries. Located midway along the east coast of the United States, it extends 290 kilometers from the tidal reaches at the mouth of the Susquehanna River in Maryland to Cape Charles, Virginia, where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. It cuts across virtually the entire north-south length of these two states helping to define their landscape, their cultures, and their economies.

The Chesapeake Bay contains a highly complex range of aquatic environments, from fresh water to nearly full-strength seawater, allowing a broad spectrum of organisms to flourish. It has complicated physical circulation patterns that vary with changes of season, tide, and weather. Outside of its boundaries, adjacent or sometimes remote ecosystems influence the Chesapeake Bay, contributing to its remarkable complexity.

The abundance and diversity of the bay, enjoyed by fishermen, boaters, and nature lovers for centuries, created the false belief that the Chesapeake could withstand any abuse at the hands of humans. By the 1970s, the impact of unrestrained harvests and decades of neglect had sharply impaired the Chesapeake's health and productivity. Efforts to address these problems and begin a recovery started taking shape in the mid-1970s, roughly the same time that a wider environmental consciousness was dawning in the United States as a whole.

Research conducted at that time led to a genuine turning point in understanding the relationship between human beings and the estuary. Land use practices were found to be inextricably linked to the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Thus, the two must be studied and managed as one.

Through the 1980s, a region-wide plan for improving and protecting water quality and the living resources of the Chesapeake was negotiated with the cooperation of all the jurisdictions and agencies that had a stake in protecting the bay. They included the governments of neighboring jurisdictions – Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia, along with the federal government in the form of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a tri-state legislative commission known as the Chesapeake Bay Commission. .

These six leaders formed the Chesapeake Bay Program and made commitments to improve the management of fish and wildlife, restore water quality, plan for development, increase public awareness and access, and promote intergovernmental cooperation. With these steps they created a unique regional institution, guiding and coordinating bay-related activities of hundreds of federal, state, local, and interstate government agencies, and working with dozens of nongovernmental business, civic, and environmental organizations as well.

The complexity of this man-made agreement to save the bay is minor contrasted with the complexity of the resource itself. With a width of between six to 50 kilometers, the water surface of the tidal Chesapeake covers 6,475 square kilometers. The Chesapeake’s 165,760 square kilometers watershed encompasses part or all of six states and includes a variety of geologic formations, from the flat coastal plains to the forested mountains of the mid-Atlantic region, with the fertile, largely agricultural piedmont in between. The bay receives most of its fresh water from about 50 major tributaries and thousands of streams, creeks, and ditches penetrating its sweeping watershed. Eight of these 50 rivers contribute about 90 percent of the fresh water contained in the main stem of the Chesapeake Bay.

A Huge Drainage Basin

But even describing the bay in the context of a watershed does not fully describe the land’s influence on its waters. The Chesapeake Bay, compared to other bodies of water, has a huge drainage basin for the amount of water it contains, a ratio of 2,743 square kilometers of land for every one cubic kilometer of water. The principle reason is the Chesapeake’s extreme shallowness — its average depth is only seven meters, with 75 percent less than three meters.

This shallowness contributes to its amazing productivity. The bay is home for more than 3,200 species of plants and animals, from tiny creatures wallowing in the marsh mud to giant bald eagles, which have made an awe-inspiring comeback around the Chesapeake region. Some 250 types of fish, crabs, clams, and oysters live in the bay — many in extraordinary numbers. Together, they have a commercial value of more than $1 billion annually. Half of the national catch of the Atlantic blue crab is harvested from bay waters. Based on a catch of 36 million kilograms in a good year, it equates to between 150 and 240 million individual crabs. Of the nation’s soft shell crab catch, 90 percent is taken from the Chesapeake.

This productivity remains under constant threat from the pressures of population, pollution, and development that surround the bay. The Chesapeake acts as a giant catch basin for everything that drains from its massive watershed. Today, much of the bay’s watershed lies in some of the fastest developing regions of the United States and is at the southern end of an area of intense urban development from Washington, D.C., to New York to Boston. Two of the country’s five major North Atlantic ports — Baltimore and Hampton Roads — are on the Chesapeake, and more than 10,000 ocean vessels ply its waters each year.

Close to 16 million people live in the watershed that drains into the Chesapeake. Thousands of municipalities, farms, and industries use water from the bay and its tributaries to do everything from irrigate crops to cool nuclear reactors. The same entities in some cases also use the bay as a place to dispose of treated waste.

It is estimated that 5.7 million liters of treated sewage flow into the bay each day from more than 5,000 sources. This does not include the soil, fertilizer, and pesticides running off the farms. By their very nature, pesticides are toxic, while heavy amounts of the nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilizer set off an aquatic chain reaction that ultimately chokes out underwater grasses, the spawning ground for a variety of aquatic life.

The influences of human activity around the bay permeate the ecosystem and have inalterably changed it. The Chesapeake Bay Program recognized that restoration of the bay depended upon reducing the levels of nutrients pouring into the bay, and jurisdictions set targets for reversing the damage done by fertilizers.

The Chesapeake Bay Program is currently guided by an agreement among its partners called Chesapeake 2000: A Watershed Partnership. It couples hard-hitting, specific, and often deadline-driven goals with the clear cry for the participation of all — public and private sector alike. Without that partnership, the bay simply cannot be saved.

Chesapeake 2000 takes an aggressive stance by calling for the reduction of sediments as well as nutrients, ambitious recovery goals for oysters and subaquatic vegetation, a sustainable crab catch, a measurable decrease in the rate of conversion of farms and forests to developed lands, the permanent preservation of 20 percent of the watershed’s land, and more effective community-based stewardship of the bay’s rivers and subwatersheds.

Requirements of Success

Success in reaching the goals requires a substantial investment of time and money from every citizen in the watershed. It requires incentives to promote proper environmental management practices. It requires upgrading waste treatment to prevent the influx of nutrients. It requires using less fertilizer on farm fields, and building ponds, pits, and other protections against nutrient runoff. It requires developing our landscape in more environmentally sensitive patterns. It requires levying heavy fines against scofflaws who continue to pollute. The current restoration effort attempts to seek a balance whereby the human population can prosper while the native fish and wildlife are provided with the ample habitat, clean water, and harvest restrictions sufficient to sustain their populations.

A quarter-century has passed since the EPA began its research on the Chesapeake Bay and the multi-jurisdictional management effort was launched. We now have declining or at least leveling nutrient loads in spite of a growing population in the watershed. There has been restoration of some commercially important resources like the striped bass. There is an increased environmental awareness on the part of our citizenry that many visitors to our region quickly observe.

Much has been accomplished, yet many more challenges lie ahead. In our almost quarter-century campaign to improve environmental quality in this resource, the commission has learned some key lessons. Some of these lessons may be transferable to other large-scale environmental management and restoration efforts.

1. Begin with comprehensive scientific studies that combine theory, detailed knowledge, monitoring, and modeling. Comprehensive coastal management programs must be based on the best available science and technology.

2. Involve the highest levels of leadership possible. High-ranking political figures in each participating jurisdiction should be visibly involved in a coastal management program. Only these officials have the authority to endorse and implement policies developed by the program infrastructure.

3. Embrace clear, strong, specific, comprehensive, and measurable goals. The commitments should be realistic, but they should also challenge the programs to implement significant change. In addition, they should form the basis for periodic reevaluations of progress.

4. Encourage the participation of a broad spectrum of participants. Ecosystems like the Chesapeake’s are extraordinarily complex, and managing them requires a complex array of representatives from all levels of government, the private sector, science, and the general public.

5. Provide incentives and methods for institutional cooperation. Behavioral change, such as the implementation of a phosphate detergent ban in the Chesapeake region, can have a huge multiplier effect. Effective coastal management cannot reside solely with governmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations.

6. Inform and involve the public. An informed and vocal public is the policy makers’ greatest ally. Over two-thirds of the world’s population lives close to a coastal sea or great lake. In addition to formal announcements and newsletters, nations can take advantage of their education infrastructure to teach ecological principles and environmental stewardship to the next generation of citizens.

7. Balance management strategy with available resources. No coastal management program will be successful if it exceeds available financial resources. When choices must be made, combating known sources of pollution must be the immediate goal. Most programs begin with point sources: improving wastewater treatment or regulating toxic discharges. However, the phosphate detergent ban taught us not to ignore the opportunities for large- scale change that are possible by changing peoples’ behavior.

8. Choose pollution prevention before restoration or mitigation. Restoration of a polluted waterway or habitat is a complex, expensive process. In the bay region, the prevention of pollution at its source has repeatedly proven to be the preferred approach, and a regional consensus to achieve that goal must be built.

9. Test scientific theories and management approaches on a small scale. In many cases, small-scale project testing can be melded with local jurisdiction program development. This provides for development of partnerships and encourages more participants to become vested in the demonstration project.

10. Focus on integration of the work of government agencies. Integration requires the cooperation of diverse players who are often worlds apart. It involves constant communication and collaboration of multiple agencies at numerous levels of government to assure that activities complement, rather than conflict or duplicate. We strongly recommend that a coastal program provide for the integration of management, science, and citizen stewardship as a critical first step.

11. Regularly reassess goals and progress. Periodic assessments involving the full range of stakeholders should be undertaken to gauge progress toward goals. That process must also allow for changes in goals or the establishment of new ones as a result of advances in research.

12. Demonstrate and communicate results. Measuring progress and publicizing results are key to sustaining leadership commitment and public support. Honesty, even when the findings are disheartening, is critical. The frequent and open sharing of information--whether good or bad --has been essential to maintaining the trust and commitment of the stakeholders involved.

Conclusion

The Chesapeake Bay Program was officially launched in 1983. Since that time, its efforts have held the line on nitrogen and achieved a 20-percent reduction in phosphorus in the Chesapeake Bay. The outlook remains optimistic. We are, at the very least, stabilizing our pollution loads and are beginning to see significant improvements in many of our rivers. We have seen demonstrable gains in the ways we manage land, provide fish passage, restore sea grasses, manage fisheries across state lines, and ban the use of toxic chemicals known to have an impact on our ecosystem.

Through the course of these achievements, the bay program has undergone its own evolution. What began as a water-quality program has grown to involve integrated management of land, air, water, and living resources, including humans. Ecology, sociology, and culture all play a role in the commission’s decision-making and management. We must constantly look for new and creative approaches to managing our resources, integrating and financing our programs, structuring our agencies, and soliciting our citizens’ support.

This article was abridged and adapted from a report the author prepared in 1997 and updated in 2003. It is available online at www.chesbay.va.state.us. More information about the Chesapeake Bay Commission is available at http://www.chesbay.state.va.us/home1.htm.

Ann Pesiri Swanson has been a policy leader on the Chesapeake Bay for more than two decades. For the past 15 years she has served as the executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, a tri-state legislative authority serving Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. She was named Conservationist of the Year, the region's highest award, in 2001.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.