Small islands can guide visualization of the diverse information requirements of future context-relevant coastal governance. On small marine islands (<20 000 km2), negative effects of coastal challenges (e.g., related to population growth, unsustainable resource use or climate change) can develop rapidly, with high intensity and extreme impacts.

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To protect the aquatic living resources of Chesapeake Bay, the Chesapeake Bay Program partnership has developed guidance for state water quality standards, which include ambient water quality criteria to protect designated uses (DUs), and associated assessment procedures for dissolved oxygen (DO), water clarity/underwater bay grasses, and chlorophyll-a. For measuring progress toward meeting the respective states' water quality standards…

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The response of estuarine ecosystems to long-term changes in external forcing is strongly mediated by interactions between the biogeochemical cycling of carbon, oxygen, and inorganic nutrients. Although long-term changes in estuaries are often assessed at the annual scale, phytoplankton biomass, dissolved oxygen concentrations, and biogeochemical rate processes have strong seasonal cycles at temperate latitudes.

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Derived from river monitoring data, concentration-discharge (C-Q) relationships are useful indicators of riverine export dynamics. A top-down synthesis of C-Q patterns was conducted for suspended sediment (SS), total phos- phorus (TP), and total nitrogen (TN) for nine major tributaries (15 monitoring sites) to Chesapeake Bay, which represent diverse characteristics in terms of land use, physiography, and hydrological settings.

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River water-quality time series often exhibit fractal scaling, which here refers to autocorrelation that decays as a power law over some range of scales. Fractal scaling presents challenges to the identification of deterministic trends because (1) fractal scaling has the potential to lead to false inference about the statistical significance of trends and (2) the abundance of irregularly spaced data in water-quality monitoring networks complicates efforts to quantify fractal scaling.

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Seagrass ecosystems are inherently dynamic, responding to environmental change across a range of scales. Habitat requirements of seagrass are well defined, but less is known about their ability to resist disturbance. Specific means of recovery after loss are particularly difficult to quantify. Here we assess the resistance and recovery capacity of 12 seagrass genera.

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Humans strongly impact the dynamics of coastal systems, yet surprisingly few studies mechanistically link management of anthropogenic stressors and successful restoration of nearshore habitats over large spatial and temporal scales. Such examples are sorely needed to ensure the success of ecosystem restoration efforts worldwide.

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Chronic seasonal low oxygen condition (hypoxia) occurs in the deep waters of Chesapeake Bay as a result of eutrophication-induced phytoplankton blooms and their subsequent decomposition. Summertime hypoxia has been observed in Chesapeake Bay for over 80 years, with scientific attention and understanding increasing substantially during the past several decades after rigorous and routine monitoring programs were put in place.

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Chesapeake Bay has undergone profound changes since European settlement. Increases in human and livestock populations, associated changes in land use, increases in nutrient loadings, shoreline armoring, and depletion of fish stocks have altered the important habitats within the Bay. Submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV) is a critical foundational habitat and provides numerous benefits and services to society.

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Two statistical approaches, weighted regression on time, discharge, and season and generalized addi- tive models, have recently been used to evaluate water quality trends in estuaries. Both models have been used in similar contexts despite differences in statistical foundations and products. This study provided an empirical and qualitative comparison of both models using 29 years of data for two discrete time series of chlorophyll-a (chl-a) in the Patuxent River estuary.

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