For the last decade, the State of Maryland has invested in and made progress toward adaptation. Through increased funding, planning, regulatory changes, and restoration, Maryland has become a leader in coastal and climate adaptation. However, there is a need to clarify adaptation goals in order to measure progress and hold the state accountable.

This document describes the scoring processes for the 15 indicators used in the 2021 Maryland Coastal Adaptation Report Card.

The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Integration and Application Network has partnered with Council Fire, LLC, the Clinton River Watershed Council, Friends of the Detroit River, Huron River Watershed Council, River Raisin Watershed Council, and Friends of the Rouge to create socio-environmental report cards for five rivers in southeast Michigan. An overall report card that integrates the results into an assessment of the southeast Michigan region will also be produced.

In Chesapeake Bay in the United States, decades of management efforts have resulted in modest reductions of nutrient loads from the watershed, but the corresponding improvements in estuarine water quality have not consistently followed. Generalize additive models were used to directly link river flows and nutrient loads from the watershed to nutrient trends in the estuary on a station-by-station basis, which allowed for identification of exactly when and where responses are happening.

Nitrogen, a critical element in all forms of life, is continuously being passed from nonliving to living matter and then back again, but an excess of this nutrient can have adverse effects on aquatic environments. An understanding of the past, present, and future sources, movement, and fate of nitrogen in the Chesapeake Bay watershed can help inform efforts to bring this cycle back into balance (fig. OV.1).

This newsletter was created in collaboration with the Chesapeake Bay Science and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) to summarize the rational for the STAC Rising Water Temperatures workshop.

The aim of this report card is to provide a transparent, timely, and geographically detailed assessment of 2019-2020 Coastal Bays health. Coastal Bays health is defined as the progress of four water quality indicators (total nitrogen, total phosphorus, chlorophyll a, dissolved oxygen) and two biotic indicators (seagrass, hard clams) toward scientifically derived ecological thresholds or goals.

The Darwin Harbour Integrated Report Card has been developed through extensive consultation with stakeholders from the Darwin Harbour region and relies heavily on their knowledge and expertise. Initiated by the Darwin Harbour Advisory Committee, a series of workshops were held in March 2020, representing the first step in this report card journey.

Published in 2021, the 2020 Severn River Report Card summarizes data collected in the summer of 2020. The Severn River received a C- grade in 2020. All three indicators--water clarity, dissolved oxygen, and underwater grasses--declined from 2019 to 2020. However, more samples were collected in 2020 than in 2019, so comparing the two years is not apples to apples.

Effective stewardship of ecosystems to sustain current ecological status or mitigate impacts requires nuanced understanding of how conditions have changed over time in response to anthropogenic pressures and natural variability. Detecting and appropriately characterizing changes requires accurate and flexible trend assessment methods that can be readily applied to environmental monitoring datasets. A key requirement is complete propagation of uncertainty through the analysis.