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.

Marine megaherbivores, particularly green turtles Chelonia mydas, graze on tropical seagrasses worldwide and play a substantial role in determining the structure and function of these ecosystems.

The 2025 CCMP is the third in a series of original and revised CCMPs designed to guide the Maryland Coastal Bays Program.

In February 2024, the COAST Card team visited the study site in Goa, India. There, they participated in a conference on sustainability work occuring in Goa, listening to presentations from students of all ages, as well as professors from the local university. Students also created posters on their work in Goa and participated in a Listening Session on their values and concerns for the area.

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.

In March 2023, the COAST Card Team made their first site visit to Manila Bay in the Philippines. There, they attended a conference and participated in workshops on ecological work being done in Manila Bay, they facilitated the first international Listening Session at the local Philippine Coast Guard station, and took field trips around the study site. This trip marked the beginning of the international site visits for the COAST Card Project.

In 2022, IAN staff and the interning Global Sustainability Scholars began hosting community Listening Sessions in the Potomac River Watershed. These Listening Sessions were designed to gather data on the values, concerns, and future characteristics that are important to each town's residents.

Many waterbodies undergo nutrient decline, called oligotrophication, globally, but a comprehensive dataset to understand ecosystem responses is lacking. The OLIGOTREND database comprises multi-decadal chlorophyll a and nutrient time series from rivers, lakes, and estuaries with 4.3 million observations from 1894 unique measurement locations. The database provides empirical evidence for oligotrophication responses with a spatial and temporal coverage that exceeds previous efforts.

How communities of organisms come together has long fascinated scientists, with renewed interest in using functional and evolutionary patterns to infer mechanisms of community assembly. Ecological theory predicts that biotic interactions could lead to either divergence in the event of niche partitioning or convergence through the exclusion of competitively inferior species, but most macroecological studies attribute the latter to environmental influences.

Nitrogen (N) legacy effects are widely recognized as a primary obstacle to the improvements of water quality following mitigation efforts. The exploration of long-term nutrient trajectories for nitrogen model (ELEMeNT-N) has been applied to estimate legacy effects in several watersheds globally. However, ELEMeNT-N does not account for the accumulation-release processes of nitrate within soil profile, introducing potential uncertainty in long-term simulations.