This report card provides a transparent, timely, and geographically detailed annual assessment of 2006 Chesapeake Bay habitat health. A report card will be released each year, in early to mid April, providing an assessment of the previous year’s habitat health. 2006 is the first year that the report card has been released. This report card rates 15 reporting regions of the Bay using six indicators that are combined into a single overarching index of habitat health.

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This technical document provides a detailed of the methodology employed in generating the Bay Habitat Health Index used in the Chesapeake Bay Report Card.

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A Mid-Chesapeake Bay Marshlands Restoration project is being developed by the Integration and Application Network, the US Army Corps of Engineers, Maryland Port Administration, US Fish & Wildlife Service, and Maryland Department of Natural Resources. This newsletter discusses the ecological, economic, and engineering issues associated with using dredged material to restore the eroding marshes of the mid-Chesapeake Bay.

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This paper proposes a neural network (NN)-embedded genetic algorithm (GA) approach for solving inverse water quality modeling problems to overcome the computational bottleneck of inverse modeling by replacing a water quality model with an efficient NN functional evaluator. An existing one-step, NN-embedded GA approach is found incapable of solving an inverse water quality modeling problem because it tends to fail in guiding the global search process to converge toward the near optima.

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SINCE ITS INCEPTION, the National Park Service (NPS) has been charged with preserving the natural and cultural heritage of the United States for future generations. It is only recently, however, that the NPS has fully embraced the need to understand and describe the ecology of parks. The infusion of an ecological perspective into the natural resource management of the national parks is what separates today's park management from much of that which preceded it (Sellars 1997).

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This newsletter describes current and future directions of Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management (EBFM). While the standard approach to fisheries management has been to focus on one species at a time, EBFM characterizes a greater number of ecosystem components, including the physical and chemical properties of systems. The newsletter explores the current and potential applications of the ecosystem-based approach.

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This newsletter addresses the extreme weather conditions that the Bay area experienced during the spring and summer of 2006 and how these weather conditions affected the summer ecological forecast that was released in May 2006 and other aspects of Bay health. The forecast focuses on dissolved oxygen in the mainstem, harmful algal blooms in the Potomac River and aquatic grasses in three locations in the Bay.

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This newsletter summarizes ongoing development of a model that describes fluctuations in the number of young menhaden within Chesapeake Bay. Using both menhaden spawning stock and striped bass predation potential, the model successfully accounts for most of the variability (~70%) seen in Chesapeake Bay menhaden recruitment.

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This newsletter describes some of the monitoring data and the response from the Chesapeake Bay community to the high rainfall event that moved through the Bay watershed from June 24 to June 28, 2006. In some areas of the watershed, up to 15 inches of rain fell and much of the area received 5 inches or more. The Chesapeake Bay Program quickly organized an effort to monitor and analyze dissolved oxygen, turbidity, chlorophyll a and aquatic grass in the Bay.

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This newsletter describes the methods used and the predictions for the 2006 summer ecological conditions in Chesapeake Bay. The forecast focuses on three important elements of the Bay's health-dissolved oxygen (DO), harmful algal blooms (HABs) and changes in bay grass distribution.

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