This fact sheet provides water monitoring information about water clarity and turbidity, including why they're important and how they're monitored.

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This set of fact sheets provides useful information about water monitoring parameters like dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll, and benthic macroinvertabrates.

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Low dissolved oxygen (DO) conditions pose a persistent threat to aquatic life in coastal ecosystems. In Chesapeake Bay, DO criteria are used to evaluate restoration progress, but traditional assessment methods—such as binary pass/fail outcomes and attainment deficit metrics—can obscure important spatial and temporal variability across tidal segments.

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In October 2024, the COAST Card team made their final site visit to the Chesapeake Bay. There, they participated in field trips, a workshop on the Chesapeake Global Collaboratory, and discussed the final year of the COAST Card Project. This trip marked the end of the site visits for the project and the final of four countries visited for the project.

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The 1925 Chesapeake Bay Report Card was produced to celebrate the UMCES Centennial. Inspired by 1920s design, this report card offers a glimpse of what a Chesapeake Bay Report Card might have been like in 1925, when UMCES was founded. The state of the Bay in 1925 is not an accurate scientific assessment, but an estimation based on informed opinions and broad historical generalizations.

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This report card provides a transparent, timely, and geographically detailed assessment of Chesapeake Bay and its Watershed. Since 2016, UMCES has engaged stakeholders throughout the watershed to transform the report card into an evaluation of the Chesapeake Watershed health. Watershed health includes traditional ecological indicators, but also economic and societal indicators.

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El Reporte de Salud de la bahía de Chesapeake de 1925 se elaboró ​​para celebrar el centenario de la UMCES. Inspirado en el diseño de la década de 1920, este informe ofrece una visión de cómo habría sido un Reporte de salud sobre la bahía de Chesapeake en 1925, cuando se fundó la UMCES. El estado de la bahía en 1925 no es una evaluación científica precisa, sino una estimación basada en opiniones fundamentadas, y generalizaciones históricas generales.

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Este informe proporciona una evaluación transparente, oportuna, y geográficamente detallada de la bahía de Chesapeake y su cuenca. Desde 2016, UMCES ha involucrado a las partes interesadas de toda la cuenca para transformar el informe en una evaluación de la salud de la cuenca de Chesapeake. Los indicadores de la bahía evalúan la salud del ecosistema acuático, mientras que los indicadores de la cuenca hidrográfica cubren las condiciones ecológicas, sociales, y económicas.

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On April 1, 2025, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) and University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) co-hosted the first joint Chesapeake Bay Report Card Networking Meeting at CBF’s Annapolis headquarters. Over 30 stakeholders from nonprofits, government, academia, and community groups gathered to advance a shared vision for more inclusive, responsive, transparent, and collaborative socio-environmental reporting across the watershed.

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Reductions of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment loads have been the focus of watershed restoration in many regions for improving water quality, including the Chesapeake Bay. Watershed models and riverine monitoring data can provide important information on the progress of load reductions but do not always generate consistent interpretations.

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