Plastic pollution is a persistent and widespread feature of nearly all ecosystems today and poses a risk to both human and animal life. The extent of plastic pollution has not yet been quantified nor characterized for the Chesapeake Bay. Ocean Research Project, an Annapolis-based nonprofit, will fill this knowledge gap by spearheading the first-ever plastic survey of the Chesapeake Bay.

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Protect Local Waterways supports and informs decision-making by local government leaders across the Chesapeake Bay watershed, showing elected officials how their actions to protect and restore the environment can support education, economic development, public health and safety, and infrastructure. It was developed in coordination with the Local Government Advisory Committee to the Chesapeake Executive Council and the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Local Leadership Workgroup.

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To facilitate watershed management, watershed models are often developed and used to assess the expected impact of scenarios of past and future management policies and practices and the impact of watershed conditions. However, the level of load reductions estimated using monitoring data often does not match with model predictions, leading to questions around the level of effort and investment being made in restoration activities and the reliability of the model.

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The Coastal Ocean Assessment for Sustainability and Transformation (COAST) Card is a transnational and transdisciplinary research program funded through the Belmont Forum, a consortium of research funders that have targeted funds towards research that engages stakeholders into a co-design and co-development process, to foster solutions to global sustainability challenges. The project brings together researchers from the United States, Philippines, Norway, India, and Japan.

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Coordination between the Chesapeake Bay Program and it's partners is integral to the improvement of the health of people and lands within the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. IAN personnel spearhead this coordination and ensure communication channels are open and information is readily shared between partners.

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IAN staff help to lead the State’s efforts in identifying new restoration practices for water quality restoration through Maryland’s Innovative Technology Fund. Our team integrates emerging data into programs that prioritize restoration strategies and highlights how policy, regulation and legislation can enhance the implementation of cost effective best management practices.

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Translation of scientific research into accessible documents is relevant to USGS’s overall mission and goals but specifically germane to the Chesapeake Bay science and restoration community. The Chesapeake Bay Program partnership, in which the USGS plays a key role, is working toward restoring the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

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The main objective of this project is to leverage machine learning approaches -- more specifically, the combined use of hierarchical clustering and random forest (RF) classification -- to reveal regional patterns and drivers of nitrogenand phosphorus trends across the Chesapeake Bay watershed. This work involves three objectives:

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The objective of this project is to develop an extension of the flow-normalization (FN) procedure of the WRTDS (“Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge, and Season”) method. This extension is being applied to the Chesapeake Bay Nontidal Monitoring Network to quantify water-quality trends under different flow conditions and to guide the direction of additional analysis for capturing the underlying drivers, which can inform management strategies toward improving water quality.

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Continuation and improvement of the Chesapeake Center for Collaborative Computing (C4) under US EPA cooperative agreement CB-96365601. C4 provides computing and IT infrastructure and support for the Chesapeake Bay Program, particularly cloud computing resources, support, administration, and coordination.

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