CHESAPEAKEQUARTERLYCHESAPEAKEQUARTERLY

Is the Bay RecoveryLooking Up?

MARYLAND SEA GRANT COLLEGE • VOLUME 11, NUMBER 4

CHESAPEAKEQUARTERLYChesapeake Quarterly explores scientific, environ-mental, and cultural issues relevant to the ChesapeakeBay and its watershed.

This magazine is produced and funded by theMaryland Sea Grant College Program, whichreceives support from the National Oceanic andAtmospheric Administration and the state ofMaryland. Editors, Michael W. Fincham and JeffreyBrainard; Science Writer, Daniel Strain; ProductionEditor and Art Director, Sandy Rodgers. Send itemsfor the magazine to:

Maryland Sea Grant College4321 Hartwick Road, Suite 300University System of MarylandCollege Park, Maryland 20740301.405.7500, fax 301.314.5780e-mail: mdsg@mdsg.umd.eduwww.mdsg.umd.edu www.chesapeakequarterly.net

Is the health ofthe ChesapeakeBay getting bet-

ter or worse? Is theBay cleanup cam-paign a success or afailure? Or some-thing in between?Hard questions toanswer, especially inlight of good newsabout bay grassesand blue crabs andbad news about rising sea levels. Let’s trya simpler question: is the Bay recoverypicking up speed?

The Bay cleanup began in the 1980sbecause there was so much evidenceduring the 1970s that the health of theChesapeake was declining. Bay grasseswere disappearing, and so were stripedbass and shad and oysters, and blue crabharvests were up-and-down affairs. Thewater was getting cloudier and the deadzones of low oxygen were growinglarger every summer and lasting longer.Newspaper headlines were asking thequestion: “Is the Bay dying?” And theChesapeake Bay Foundation was grow-ing into a powerful nonprofit educationand lobbying force by building on a slo-gan that was really a plea: “Save theBay.”

In 1983, nearly 30 years ago, thecleanup campaign was launched at ameeting that included environmentalleaders; state and federal officials; and thegovernors of Maryland, Virginia, andPennsylvania. One primary focus waspollution from excess nutrients likenitrogen and phosphorus, the forcebehind the dead zone, the darkeningwaters, the bay-grass dieoffs. In 1987,exactly 25 years ago, the states and thefederal government first committed

contents5 The Bay-Grass Surprise

Why this explosive surge on theSusquehanna Flats?

9 What Goes Up Must Come DownCutting air pollution is cutting water pollution.

10 The Rise & Fall of the Dead ZoneThe winds of change may bring moreoxygen to the bottom of the Bay.

12 The Little Cove That CouldA local cleanup effort brings grasses &clearer water back to one small cove.

16 Moser Named MDSG DirectorFredrika Moser, research leader & policy analyst, is MDSG’s new director.

December 2012

Volume 11, Number 4

themselves to spe-cific goals and dead-lines: a 40 percentreduction in nutri-ent pollution by theyear 2000. Whenthat deadline wasmissed, another wasset: 40 percent by2010. And whenthat was missed,another goal wasset: 40 percent by

2025. Maybe this time, it would be dif-ferent: a voluntary approach was replacedby a mandatory regime with theEnvironmental Protection Agencyenforcing a “pollution diet” for the Baythat carries penalties for insufficientprogress.

Now 30 years out from that firstpledge, the results seem mixed: nobody isrunning headlines asking whether theBay is dying, but nobody’s saying it’sbeen cleaned up. With the public readingheadlines about missed deadlines, someleaders in the environmental and scien-tific communities worry the campaigncould start losing ground. “What worriesme the most is political complacency,”says Will Baker, president of the Chesa -peake Bay Foundation. “I don’t thinkwe’ll get another chance if we fail,”writes Don Boesch, president of theUniversity of Maryland Center forEnvironmental Science (UMCES).

This 2025 deadline may be the lastchance for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup.It’s hard, after all, to keep building a cam-paign on a slogan that sounds like anexcuse. “It could have been worse” does-n’t make an inspiring call to action —even if it’s true.

But now there are signs the ecosys-tem is beginning to respond — in fits

A Chesapeake Bay Recovery:Half Empty or Half Full?

Michael W. Fincham

Cover & p. 2 photos: An underwater fisheye-lens shot (cover) gives a dramatic view of baygrasses and a fisherman in the SusquehannaFlats. In recent years underwater grassbedshave suddenly expanded across the Flats, thebroad, shoal-like shallows at the head of theChesapeake Bay. Grass species returning to theFlats include redhead grass, coontail, watermil-foil, water stargrass, and this strand of wild cel-ery (p. 2) found by Debbie Hinkle, a researchtechnician with the University of MarylandCenter for Environ men tal Science. PHOTO -

GRAPHS: COVER, OCTAVIO ABURTO; P. 2, DALE BOOTH.

Volume 11, Number 4 • 3

and starts, with ups and downs, in someplaces and not others. Water quality hasimproved in some of the Bay’s largestrivers; underwater grassbeds haveexpanded dramatically in several of thoserivers; and in the mainstem, dead zones oflow oxygen seem to be shrinking morethan we knew, if less than we hoped.Stripers and yellow perch and blue crabshave been rebounding, with natural fluc-tuations, from historic low points forthose species. Even oysters in certain areashave shown some signs of recovery.

A more upbeat slogan might be: “Wemay be halfway home.” It seems accurateenough. The most thorough accountingsto date show that nutrient pollution —first targeted for a 40 percent cutback —has now been reduced by slightly more

than 20 percent. The cleanup campaign isclearly but slowly cutting into the nutri-ent inflow. Cities and towns are upgradingsewage plants and stormwater systems .Many farmers are adopting practices likemanure pits, nutrient management plans,and winter cover crops. Nearly half thecutback on nitrogen pollution came fromtough enforcement of the Clean Air Act,an approach that forced power plants, fac-tories, auto companies, and states to workharder at controlling air pollution. (SeeWhat Goes Up Must Come Down, p. 9.)

As a campaign slogan, “halfwayhome” may be even more hopeful thanyou think. According to some ecologists,ecosystem recoveries, like ecosystemdeclines, can pick up speed pretty quicklyonce they’re well started.

Underwater grasses, for example,recently expanded fourfold in only sixyears up on the Susquehanna Flats nearthe head of the Bay, a recovery scientistscalled “amazing.” Behind that suddenrebound were factors like good weatherand better water quality, the latter result-ing from more controls on both land-based and airborne pollution.

But something else was also in play:the workings of a natural process thatecologists call “positive feedback.” Feed -back is a tricky idea that goes somethinglike this: There are more grasses on theFlats now because the water clarity isbetter . And the water clarity is better, inpart, because there are more grasses onthe Flats. (See The Bay-Grass Surprise,p. 5.)

Positive feedback, however, is a swordthat cuts two ways, according to MichaelKemp, an ecologist at the University ofMaryland Center for EnvironmentalScience Horn Point Lab. When things aregoing bad (when bay grasses are startingto disappear), the feedback will makethem worse (they will disappear faster).But when things are going better (whenbay grasses are starting to come back),then things will get better faster (moregrasses will come back). When the glass ishalf empty, Kemp likes to say, it is morethan half empty. And when it’s half full, itis more than half full.

Feedback may also be at work at aslower pace along the Potomac, the Bay’ssecond largest river, where grassbeds havebeen reappearing along coves and shore-lines that went bare back in the 1970s.The campaign to clean up the Potomac,“the nation’s river,” dates all the way backto 1965 when President Lyndon Johnsoncalled the Potomac “a national disgrace”during his State of the Union Address.Johnson helped set the country and theCongress on a course to eventually pass aClean Water Act that would call for “fish-able, swimmable waters” in all Americanrivers.

The key steps to cleaning up the tide-water reaches of the Potomac Riverincluded a series of expensive upgrades tothe Blue Plains Advanced WastewaterTreatment Plant in Washington, D.C. In1980, the upgrade was a new system to

Often called the nation’s river, the Potomac was also called a “health hazard” back in the 1960s,when it was unsafe for swimming, water skiing, or diving (top left). In 1972, the year Congresspassed the Clean Water Act, Tropical Storm Agnes sent massive loads of sediment flooding down thePotomac in June; in September the muddy water was still flowing past the Key Bridge in Georgetown(top right). Over the decades, the river began to recover water quality, grassbeds, and fish populationsin many areas. In September 2012, the Potomac Riverkeeper and the Water Keeper Alliance (above)staged a river rally near Key Bridge to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. TOP

PHOTO GRAPHS BY ERIK CALONIUS (LEFT) AND DICK SWANSON (RIGHT), FROM THE U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES COLLECTION;

BOTTOM PHOTOGRAPH BY ALAN LEHMAN.

4 • Chesapeake Quarterly

reduce nitrogen, in 1982 it was new fil-ters to reduce phosphorus. By 1983underwater grasses, led by an exoticspecies named hydrilla, began to appearin the river. By 1985 a dozen specieswere growing, most of them nativespecies. Feedback seemed to be kickingin. Since 1996, through up years anddown years, grassbed coverage hasincreased fourfold in the upper reaches ofthe tidal Potomac.

It’s not easy, however, to drawsystemwide lessons from local successes,says Bob Orth, the scientist at theVirginia Institute of Marine Sciencewho’s been running annual aerial surveysof the grassbeds since 1984. “Most of theeffects are local,” he says, “because all ofthe tribs have different watershed charac-teristics.” Where local watersheds havereduced nutrient inputs — as they havein Gunston Cove and Lynnhaven Inlet inVirginia and in the Patuxent River inMaryland — bay grasses have oftenresponded, helping “positive feedback”kick in. (See The Little Cove that Could,p. 12). So maybe those local successes add

up to a useful lesson: systemwide recov-ery may be a piecemeal process, a river-by-river rebound.

The grassbeds of the Bay, however,hold another, more sobering lesson: natu-ral forces like weather and climate candrive ecosystem declines so forcefully, theynearly overpower human campaigns forenvironmental restoration. From 1984 to1993, underwater grasses were expandingin the southern Chesapeake Bay, rangingfrom the mouth of the Bay all the way upto the mouth of the Potomac. The key totheir comeback, says Orth, was betterwater clarity, the result of a series of dryyears when low river flow washed lesssediment and nutrient pollution into theBay. When the weather turned around inthe mid 1990s, dousing the watershedwith wet, high-flow years, the bay grassrecovery turned around, at least in thelower Bay. And feedback probably kickedin to push grasses down. Sometimes theglass is more than half empty.

Climate forces, on the other hand,can sometimes speed up ecosystemrecoveries. A change in climate-drivenwind patterns, for example, may soonhelp shrink that dead zone of no-oxygenwater that appears along the bottom ofthe mainstem Chesapeake every summer.(See The Rise & Fall of the Dead Zone,p. 10.)

Southerly winds are becoming morefrequent in the new pattern, as frequentas they were before the 1980s. Oneresult: as winds out of the south sweep upthe long fetch of the mainstem Bay, theytend to cause vigorous mixing of Baywaters, and that mixing hauls those lower,oxygen-poor waters up for air. The deadzone could start to shrink.

Changes in long-term wind patternsare, of course, well beyond the reach ofany Bay cleanup campaigns. Such pat-terns are tied to shifts in large-scaleclimate patterns such as the Bermuda-Azores High, which is part of the NorthAtlantic Oscillation. And those air pres-sure cycles are altered by changes in seasurface temperatures, including the long-term cycles of warmings and coolingsknown as the Atlantic Multi-decadalOscillation. So the dead zone in the mid-dle of the Chesapeake may be indirectly

tied to water temperatures in the middleof the Atlantic Ocean.

That’s a hard truth, but a hopeful one.“This cycle in my lifetime will probablyshift back,” says ecologist Michael Kemp.If there is less nutrient pollution flowinginto the Bay when that shift occurs —and there’s evidence the shift has alreadybegun — then the dead zone with itshypoxic waters could start shrinkingfaster. “So the Bay all of a sudden is goingto have less hypoxia per unit loading (ofnitrogen) than what we expected,” saysKemp.

Climate and weather clearly matter.But so do good science and smart man-agement — and they are in our control.They mattered a lot in the rebound ofstriped bass and blue crabs, two iconicBay species whose populations are drivenin part by climate-forced wind patterns,in part by management decisions. Thestriped bass recovery grew out of a con-troversial, science-based moratorium onfishing, followed up by stocking of hatch-ery-spawned fish and a quota systemimposed on both commercial and recre-ational fishermen. As a result: striped basspopulations increased nearly eightfoldover two decades. The recent blue crabrecovery followed a science-based cut-back on the harvesting of female bluecrabs. Populations of blue crabs increasednearly threefold in just five years.

Bay grasses, blue crabs, the dead zone— scattered successes like these may beadding up to something more than thesum of their parts. “The Bay is starting todo better, modestly, modestly, on theincrements,” said Will Baker, addressing ameeting of Maryland environmentalistsearlier this year. “It is going in the rightdirection.”

Direction matters. Because thereseems to be another kind of feedback atwork, a feedback between climate forcesand cleanup campaigns. When climateforces start giving us boom years for baygrasses and blue crabs and stripers, thensmart, science-based management canmagnify the booms. And speed up theChesapeake Bay recovery. When theglass is half full, it may be more thanhalf full.

— fincham@mdsg.umd.edu

Sewage from Washington D.C. ranuntreated into the Potomac and Anacostiarivers until 1938 when a rudimentary waste-water treatment plant was built at Blue Plainsto provide primary settling treatment to removesolid wastes. Thanks to numerous and ongoingupgrades, the plant now removes much of thenutrient pollution that led to loss of grasses andcaused poor water clarity. Now the world'slargest advanced treatment center, the BluePlains plant currently handles 330 million gal-lons a day on average, collecting sewage andstormwater from the capital city and nearbyregions of Maryland and Virginia. PHOTOGRAPH,

AECOM, INC..

W hy would the SusquehannaFlats suddenly be full of baygrasses? Two years ago

Michael Kemp was motoring across thenorthern end of Chesapeake Bay with aboatful of scientists and students, check-ing out reports that underwater grass-beds might be expanding along thefamous shoals that sit at the mouth ofthe Susquehanna River. An ecologistwith the UMCES Horn Point Lab,Kemp has spent 35 years studying baygrasses and for most of those years thosegrasses have been declining throughoutthe Chesapeake.

Lanky and lightly bearded, he scannedthe passing water as the 26-foot cruisercrossed the deepwater shipping channelalong the eastern side of the Bay andthen headed northwest towards themouth of the Susquehanna. Moving uponto the Flats, Kemp began spotting baygrasses — a lot of bay grasses. Water star-grass and wild celery were there as wellas redhead grass and coontail, and plentyof watermilfoil and hydrilla, two nonna-tives that also live here now.

Kemp was motoring right into themiddle of a mystery. These grasses weren’texpected to be here, at least not thismany. They began declining nearly 50years ago, and then 40 years ago most ofthe grasses abruptly disappeared whenTropical Storm Agnes unleashed heavyand historic rains across the Chesapeake’shuge watershed and sent floods of brown,silt-bearing water surging down all theBay’s great rivers.

The first victim of Agnes was the baygrassbed that Kemp was now motoringthrough. The Susquehanna Flats are theshallow-water delta at the mouth of thelargest and longest river on the EastCoast, a river that drains a watershed of27,000 square miles, including parts ofupstate New York and nearly half ofPennsyl vania. Carrying runoff from somuch rich farmland, the Susquehannaempties as much water and sedimentinto the Bay as all the other rivers in theestuary combined. In just one week inthe summer of 1972, the floods of Agneswashed 20 years of sediment into theChesapeake, much of it sediment long

trapped upstream behind the big dam atConowingo. Unleashed through roaringfloodgates, all that sediment began bury-ing bay grassbeds and oyster bars, alter-ing the ecology of the estuary fordecades.

Before the flood, the biological abun-dance on the Flats was legendary —especially among fishermen, hunters, andbirdwatchers. The grassbeds were a gath-ering ground for shad and stripers, catfishand largemouth bass; they were a feedingground for millions of ducks and geese.In one survey, biologists in the 1940scounted more than 1.2 million ducks inthe Flats, including canvasbacks, redheads,and widgeon.

After the flood, the Flats went mostlybare for 25 years or more, with somegrasses scattered around the edges, butonly sparse patches of bay grasses dottingthe shoals. The disappearance of thesegrasses on the Flats became an early sig-nal of systemwide decline. When thegrasses failed to come back after Agnes,when they kept dwindling throughoutthe estuary, they came to symbolize the

Volume 11, Number 4 • 5

THE BAY-GRASS SURPRISEMichael W. Fincham

PHOTOGRAPH BY DEBBIE HINKLE.

Bay grasses in theSusquehanna Flats,mainly wild celery(Vallisneria americana),with some water stargrass(Heteranthera dubia).

plight of the Bay and the failure of Bayrestoration efforts.

Gliding across the Flats in 2010,Kemp found himself cutting through baygrasses tall enough to reach up to thesurface through six feet of water andthick enough to clog his propeller at lowtide. In the late 1990s, the scatteredpatches of bay grass that survived Agnesbegan to slowly expand. Starting in 2005,the grass coverage suddenly quadrupledin only six years. As an ecologist, Kempthought this expansion was explosive —and unexplained.

With the boat at anchor, Kemp clam-bered up on the roof of the cabin. Theview from the top: bay grasses stretchedin all directions as far as he could see.According to his maps and his quickmath, he was looking at 25 square milesof healthy grassbed. He was, he admits,amazed. It was a once-upon-a-timevision: the Flats as they used to be.

He saw fishermen working the Flatsfor stripers, and ducks and geese workingthe beds for food. Perhaps it was time forecologists to start working the big ques-tions: why were the grasses coming backso fast? “This was an abrupt change,”Kemp says now. “It was an incredibleresponse to something — but we didn’tknow what.”

Kemp had been surprised by bay grassesbefore. Like many ecologists he had stud-ied examples of abrupt ecosystem change,but most of those changes were abruptdeclines — not recoveries. Some 35 yearsago he launched his career by teaming upwith Walter Boynton at UMCES Chesa -peake Biological Lab and other scientiststo organize a major study investigating thedecline of bay grasses in the Chesapeake.The result was a set of unexpected find-ings about the causes of decline, findingsthat radically altered the scientific under-standing of the Bay’s ecology.

The major culprits, according toKemp and Boynton and their colleagues,were not the usual suspects like toxicsfrom industries or herbicides and pesti-cides from farm fields. Faced with a sys-temwide bay-grass decline, they focused

on systemwide causes.Kemp and Boynton cameto the Chesapeake as pro-tégés of H.T. Odum, afounding pioneer of sys-tems ecology and a pro-ponent of a big-pictureapproach that focuses onhow energy movesthrough biological com-munities, how communi-ties organize into ecosys-tems, how ecosystemsfunction, how theychange. According tothese newly minted sys-tems ecologists, the keyculprit in the bay-grass decline was theoversupply of nutrients that was flowinginto and altering the Bay ecosystem.Washed into the Chesapeake, nitrogenand phosphorus were overfertilizing thegrowth of phytoplankton and other algae,creating enormous blooms that cloudedthe water, blocked sunlight from reachingbay grasses, and in their decay createddead zones along the bottom of the Bay.

Worse yet, nitrogen and phosphoruswere coming into the ecosystem fromeverywhere: from the sewage plants ofcities, suburbs, and towns; from the soil,manure, and fertilizer running off farm-lands; they even came in from theatmosphere that carried the exhaust ofhundreds of power plants and millions ofautomobiles. Cutting back on that inflowof nutrients became the central focusof a multistate campaign to restore theChesapeake Bay.

Bay grasses had always played impor-tant roles in the ecology of the Chesa -peake — and now they began to play akey role in the public’s perception ofecosystem health. When people askwhether the Bay is getting better orworse, they want to know whether thesummer dead zones are going away andwhether the bay grassbeds are comingback.

Bay grasses had another surprise in storefor Kemp. In 2010 the ecologist beganinvestigating the bay-grass comeback by

putting a graduate student to work. Withfunding from Maryland Sea Grant, he hadCassie Gurbisz start pulling together allthe long-range data sets she could find onrainfall, river flow, temperature, salinity,water clarity, and 25 years of bay-grasssurveys.

It’s the kind of grunt work graduatestudents often get stuck with, but Gurbiszwelcomed the opportunity. “We hear a lotof bad news about the environment, butthis is a real example of good news,” saysGurbisz, who once spent several yearsrunning field trips for the ChesapeakeBay Foundation trying to educate peopleabout the problems facing the estuary. “It’scool,” she says, “to be studying really goodnews and trying to figure out why it’shappening and maybe help it happen inother places.”

A search for causes often begins witha search for correlations. When Kempand Gurbisz started digging through thedata, river flow emerged as the one fac-tor constantly connected to changes inbay grasses (either recoveries ordeclines). Gurbisz calls it “the mastervariable.” The remnant bay grasses lefton the Flats after Agnes did poorly dur-ing wet years with high river flows, butthey did much worse during years thatbrought big storms like Agnes (1972) orEloise (1975), Isabel (2003) or Ivan(2004), or the huge, unnamed nor’eastersof ’93 and ’96. During years of averageriver flow, on the other hand, these left-

6 • Chesapeake Quarterly

1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

Hurricane Isabel

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0

1000

20

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3000

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Hurricane Ivan

The bay-grass explosion on the Susquehanna Flats followed aneight-year window that brought no major storms or extreme riverflows from 1995 to 2002. As a result, grassbeds were spreading rap-idly across the Flats by 2001 and 2002. When Hurricane Isabelarrived in 2003, followed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, the grassbedswere strong enough to take a one-two punch and get off the floor.Between 2005 and 2010, grass bed coverage expanded fourfold.FIGURE BY CASSIE GURBISZ.

Volume 11, Number 4 • 7

over grasses usually maintained them-selves. They did better during dry yearswith low flow, and they did best of allduring dry years with no major storms.Drought years may be bad for the farmeconomy, but they are usually good forthe Bay’s ecology.

If you want to write a formula forbringing back bay grasses, then deletestorms from the equation. And deletethem for several years in a row. Here’swhat Kemp and Gurbisz found in thedata: the abrupt, fourfold expansion ofgrassbeds across the Susquehanna Flatsfollowed an eight-year stretch that ran

from 1995 to 2002 with no extremeflow events. That low-flow window,

Kemp says, may have been enough to geta full-scale recovery started.

That’s an important finding andsomething of a surprise. Since the floodsof Agnes, other low-flow windows havecome and gone without unveiling anymajor bay-grass recovery. Even in lowflow years, after all, the Susquehanna wasstill draining sediment and nutrients off ahuge watershed.

Yet water clarity, according to Kempand Gurbisz, was improving on the Flats,suspended sediments and phosphoruswere decreasing in the water column, andall these changes were clearly correlated

with increases in bay grasses. Were allthose sewage plant upgrades, all thosenew controls on farm runoff finallyworking? According to estimates, the flowof nutrients into the Chesapeake hasbeen cut 20 percent in recent years. That’sonly about half the 40 percent nutrientreduction called for in the ChesapeakeBay cleanup plan, but it’s now apparentthat half a loaf can feed a recovery.

Half a cutback and a low-flow win-dow let the grassbeds achieve liftoff,breaking out of a long-term equilibriumthat featured low-density patches ofplants scattered across the broad shoals ofthe Susquehanna Flats. According toKemp’s scenario, the clear water and calmweather helped grass patches spreadquickly and link up into wider, denserbeds. By the summer of 2011, the grass-beds on the Flats seemed to have reacheda new, healthy, high-density equilibrium.But it was an equilibrium untested by bigstorms and high river flows.

In August of 2011, Tropical StormIrene arrived. In September, TropicalStorm Lee also arrived, dumping evenheavier rainfall across the Bay watershed.Lee unleashed the highest river flow in15 years.

By early May of 2012, Kemp and hiscrew were back in their boat. Motoringacross the Flats, they began seeing a lot ofwater that looked like chocolate milk.What they were not seeing was a lot ofbay grass. The Flats held only some scat-tered stands of watermilfoil, but notmuch in the way of wild celery or waterstargrass or redhead grass.

Scanning the water for a spot to takesamples, Kemp decided the storm haddestroyed the big grassbed and it was notcoming back. Even though Lee had notbeen as huge as Agnes, history seemed tobe repeating itself on the SusquehannaFlats.

When he came back in June, Kempwas able to find some grass along theeastern side of the flats, perhaps a rem-nant population, and his team starteddoing some biomass sampling. Bettersome data than no data. With some more

Ecologists Michael Kemp and JeremyTesta gather bay-grass samples on theSusquehanna Flats (above). Graduate stu-dent Cassie Gurbisz hammers away at thesupport pipes that will hold a water sam-pling station, while research technicianDebbie Hinkle lends a steadying hand(left). The station will suck up water everytwo hours and discharge it into 30 sam-pling bottles. Back at the Horn Point Lab,Gurbisz and Hinkle will analyze the sam-ples for nutrients, chlorophyll, suspendedsediments, and other water quality indica-tors. One platform will sit in the middle ofa grassbed, another will sit outside thebed, giving research ers data on how waterquality affects grasses and how grassesaffect water quality. PHOTOGRAPHS BY DEB-

BIE HINKLE (ABOVE) AND DALE BOOTH (LEFT).

hard data, Kemp could do somemore theory building. Over severaltrips, he worked with Cassie Gurbiszand research technician DebbieHinkle to set up water sampling sta-tions inside and outside several grass-bed patches. One of his researchgoals was a more detailed theory forhow water quality could affect baygrasses — and how bay grasses couldaffect water quality.

As she worked, Gurbisz noticed aweird effect: there was more chocolatewater in the middle of the grassbedsthan outside. One of the ecologicalbenefits of grassbeds is their ability totrap sediments and clear up cloudywater, but in the spring and earlysummer it was clear that sediments leftover from Lee were being easily resus-pended by wind and tidal action. Asthe summer progressed, however,more grasses began showing up and manyof them were growing taller. As theybegan stretching to the surface, Gurbiszsaw the water start to clear. And as thewater got clearer, more grasses grew taller.

Were the grasses growing because thewater was clearer? According to one ofKemp’s theories, the causality was run-ning in two directions: the grasses weregrowing on the Flats because the waterwas clearer — and the water was clearerbecause the grasses were growing there.The plants themselves were reshapingtheir environment, making the Flats abetter place for plants to grow. Kempcalls this process a “positive feedbackeffect,” and he says it can be a strongforce for recovery. “There is nothing sub-tle about the impact this bed has on themovement of water, the transport of sed-iments, the removal of nutrients, and avariety of other characteristics,” he nowsays. “It is a dominant factor in thatregion.” How dominant? At full strength,according to Kemp’s calculations, the biggrassbed in the Flats could absorb 5 per-cent of the total nitrogen entering theUpper Bay.

Here’s where the going gets tricky.“Positive feedback” can sometimes havenegative effects. “A simple fact about posi-

tive feedbacks: when things are bad,” saysKemp, “the positive feedback makes themworse.” When only a few bay grass plantsare there, says Kemp, they can’t help clearthe water. Without clear water, new plantswill not get started, and existing plantswill disappear.

So why did bay grasses begin toreturn to the Flats? Part of the answer isa low-flow window with no largestorms. Another part is clearer water, theresult of environmental policies that arecutting down both land-based and air-borne pollution. But an unnoticed pieceof the answer is feedback, a naturalecosystem response unleashed by climateand clear water. There were now morebay grasses on the Flats to help clear upthe water, that meant more clear waterto help more bay grasses to grow, thatmeant more clear water, then more baygrasses, then more clear water, and onand on. “When things start getting bet-ter,” says Kemp, “then positive feedbackmechanisms will make them get betterfaster.”

Systems ecologists talking about baygrasses can sometimes sound like physi-cists talking about the wave-particle para-doxes of quantum mechanics. “Positivefeedbacks” that can also have negative

effects is just one of the concepts inthe intellectual toolbox of contempo-rary ecologists. As Kemp studies therise and fall of bay grasses on theFlats, he also works with conceptslike thresholds, equilibria, ecosystemregime shifts, and resilience, the abil-ity of a biological system to with-stand and recover from a majordisturbance .

If bay grasses can survive on theFlats, they may yet provide a newnarrative for understanding the plightand potential of Chesapeake Bayrestoration efforts. Forty years ago,bad water and a big storm knockeddown the famous grassbed, kickingoff a feedback cycle that helped Bayecology get worse faster. The disap-pearance of bay grasses on the Flatsbecame an early warning signal that aBaywide decline was coming. Now

bay grasses had reappeared, kicking off anew feedback cycle that could help theBay’s ecology get better faster. Perhaps anearly alert that systemwide recoveriescould be coming sooner than we expect?

Were the bay grasses back to stay? Bythe time his team wrapped up their2012 field work on the Flats, Kemp hada better sense of the damage done bythe barrage of big storms in 2011. Therewas deep scouring along the westernside of the bed where the current wasstrongest, pushed there by the Corioliseffect created by the planet’s rotation.“The storms really did have an impact,”says Kemp.

But the bay grasses, at least thosealong the Susquehanna Flats, had one lastsurprise for Kemp: they passed the bigstorm test. He estimates that 60 percentof the grassbed survived the floods fromtropical storms Irene and Lee, achievinglush green growth despite a cool springand a short growing season. Good evi-dence for “resilience,” one of his favoriteconcepts. “I would say that it’s an amaz-ing recovery,” says Kemp. “If it weatheredthat storm, it is going to hang around fora while.”

— fincham@mdsg.umd.edu

8 • Chesapeake Quarterly

“When things start getting better, then ‘positive feed-back’ will make them get better faster,” says Michael Kemp.PHOTOGRAPH BY ANNE GAUZENS.

T he water in the Baymay be gettingcleaner, largely because

the air is getting cleaner.That’s an unexpected andsome what ironic success storythat is emerging from recentresearch on the upper reachesof some of the Bay’stributaries .

In 1997, the U.S. Envi -ronmental Pro tec tion Agencybegan enforcing the Clean AirAct more aggressively, tryingto clamp down harder on therelease of airborne nitrousoxides. And shortly thereafter,hydrologist Keith Eshlemanbegan seeing drops in theamount of nitrogen washinginto the rivers of WesternMaryland and southern Pennsylvania,rivers that run into the Bay.

Nitrogen inflow into the Bay is one ofthe primary causes of many of the Bay’scontemporary ills. It overfertilizes phyto-plankton and algae blooms, causingcloudy waters, dieoffs in bay grasses, deadzones of no oxygen, and frequent fishkills. And nearly a quarter of the nitrogenthat ends up in the Bay begins as nitrousoxides pouring into the air from theexhaust stacks of factories and powerplants that burn coal and oil and from theexhaust pipes of cars and trucks and busesthat burn gas.

A lot of those power plants and facto-ries and cars are located hundreds of milesaway, well outside the Bay watershed.When those nitrous oxides land in thewatershed, they can be washed into riversthat lead down to the Bay. And theirarrivals have been measured by Eshleman,a professor at the UMCES AppalachianLaboratory in Frostburg, Maryland. Hisdata come from river systems with streamgauges that have been recording nitrogeninputs for 25 years. His findings areunambiguous. “On average, we are seeingabout a 50 percent reduction in nitrates,”says Eshleman, who is getting ready to

publish his results. “It’s a really clear-cuteffect.”

More evidence of the effect comesfrom the scientists running the watershedmodel for the Environmental ProtectionAgency’s Chesapeake Bay Program.According to estimates by Gary Shenk, amodeler for the program, total nitrogenloads to the Chesapeake have been cut by20 percent since 1985, thanks in part tocontrols on farm runoff, urban runoff, andwastewater discharges. But nearly half thatreduction in nitrogen, 46 percent, hascome from cutbacks in atmospheric dep-osition of nitrous oxides.

These reductions, according toEshleman, can be traced in part tochanges in the much-amended Clean AirAct. Originally launched in 1963, the Actwas first given teeth in 1970, with strongamendments added in 1977 and 1990.Under President Clinton, the EPA in1997 added tougher rules on nitrousoxide emissions, a decision that was con-troversial and historic and expensivebecause the new rules required manyolder factories and power plants in theMidwest to switch to cleaner-burningfuels or install advanced scrubbers similarto those already in use in the Northeast

states. In addition, many states had tomove more aggressively to reduce auto-mobile emissions and encourage masstransit options. Within a few years thestream gauges in Mid-Atlantic rivers wereshowing declines in nitrates. “From water-sheds with thousands of acres down tosmall watersheds, we are seeing robustreductions,” says Eshleman. “This is a hugesuccess story.”

It’s also an unexpected success story.Protecting human health was always theprimary goal of the Clean Air Act, butprotecting the ecological health of theChesapeake Bay has, ironically enough,been a surprising payoff. According toecologist Michael Kemp, an expert onnutrients in the Chesapeake, these nitro-gen cutbacks are helping both to revivebay grasses along some shallow areas andto slowly reduce the dead zone alongthe deep mainstem of the Bay. These“secondary ” benefits from clean air legis-lation, in his opinion, outweigh thebenefits from clean water legislation orany other effort to improve the waterquality of the Chesapeake Bay. “TheClean Air Act,” Kemp says, “has providedus with a gift.”

— Michael W. Fincham

Volume 11, Number 4 • 9

What Goes Up Must Come Down.. .Somewhere

Chesapeake Bay Watershed

Chesapeake Bay

Airshed

Nearly one-third of the nitrogen entering the Chesapeake Bay arrives through the air, and half of that loadingoriginated as nitrous oxides rising from sources like coal-burning power plants and factories along the Ohio River val-ley (left) and other urban and industrial sites located far from the Bay. While the Bay’s watershed covers 64,000square miles, the Bay’s airshed covers nine times as much territory, stretching over 570,000 square miles and extend-ing into 12 states. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act in 2010 saved 165,000lives and prevented 130,000 heart attacks and 1.7 million asthma attacks. Cutbacks in air pollution are also helpingclean the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. PHOTO GRAPH BY ALFRED T. PALMER (1944), LIBRARY OF CONGRESS COLLECTION; AIRSHED

AND WATERSHED MAPS, CHESAPEAKE BAY PROGRAM.

F ew people will ever see a crabjubilee in Maryland. Duringthese events, whose comings

and goings are hard to predict, bluecrabs, by the dozens or hundreds, scut-tle out from the deep and up thebanks of the Chesapeake Bay. They sitthere in the shallows, right on top ofeach other and often for hours. Forthose who are lucky enough to bewalking by and like seafood, they’reeasy pickings.

But, scientists say, such jubilees areno party. In fact, they’re a sign thatsomething’s rotten down below.Namely, the crabs are escaping the Bay’sdead zone, a wide region of water lyingalong the estuary’s deeper channels thateach year becomes stripped of most ofits oxygen — or, as scientists would say,the water turns hypoxic. This happensbecause excess nutrients such as nitro-gen and phos phorus spill off the landand into the estuary, kicking off biolog-ical and chemical processes that formthe dead zone. Winds will sometimespush those bottom waters up and intothe Bay’s shallower regions, forcingcrabs to get moving in search of waterwith enough oxygen for them to sur-vive. And so the crab jubilee begins.

But one recent report has somegood news for those crabs and forpeople, too. The size of the Bay deadzone has shown signs of shrinking, at leastin the late summer, researchers say. It maynot be the end of crab parties, but it’s astart. At the same time, scientists are alsostruggling to understand why that zonehasn’t shrunk more, especially as humanshave cut the nutrients they’ve sent downto the estuary since the mid-1980s.

The changes seen in the late summerdead zone represent “a slow decline,” saysMichael Kemp, an ecologist at the Uni -ver sity of Maryland Center for Environ -

mental Science’s Horn Point Lab. “But it’senough that we can statistically measurethe changes.”

A Dead Zone World

From his office in Gloucester Point,Virginia, Robert Diaz can see a lot ofdead zones — but few that are shrinking.Diaz, a marine scientist at the VirginiaInstitute of Marine Science, is part of aproject that tracks the formation of oxy-gen-poor, or hypoxic, zones in theChesapeake Bay and worldwide.

Generally, water is considered hypoxic ifit carries less than two milligrams of dis-solved oxygen per liter (most fish needabout three milligrams per liter just tosurvive). So far, he and his colleagueshave listed around 500 sites that fit thatcriterion. The team gives each one theirown dot on a map in Google Ocean.

The Chesapeake Bay’s own dot wasfirst reported in 1938. Then, scientiststaking early dissolved oxygen measure-ments recorded the first hints of low oxy-gen in some of the Bay’s waters. The

THE RISE & FALL OF THE DEAD ZONE

10 • Chesapeake Quarterly

Daniel Strain

The Chesapeake Bay’s dead zone may have finally begun toheal, but progress could depend on the weather.

Volume 11, Number 4 • 11

phenomenon was later called an“oxygen desert.” This desert,eventually renamed a “dead zone,”had been expanding across theChesapeake for decades. But,beginning in the 1980s, its growthtapered off. In recent years, “theBay has just about kept even withthe population growth and theother pressures on it,” Diaz says.While that’s a victory of sorts, henotes, the estuary should havemade bigger gains.

Humans, after all, have reducedthe excess nutrients flowing intothe Bay — and, as a result, the sizeof the dead zone should haveshrunk. The reasoning is this:Every year, nutrients like thenitrogen in farm fertilizers andfactory gas emissions dribbledown to the Bay during the rainyseason. There, they kick off achain reaction. Algae consume thenutrients come spring, and, whenthose algae die in the summer,bacteria binge on their remains,consuming huge quantities of dis-solved oxygen in the process.Voilà, you’ve got your dead zone.So if you reduce the nutrients,you should reduce its size. Inrecent years, those sorts of cutshave come from a number of dif-ferent sources, including sewagetreatment plants, farms, and factories (seeWhat Goes Up Must Come Down, p. 9).

But the dead zone didn’t go away. Infact, things actually got worse. Over thedecades, scientists have noticed, some-thing has been altered about the way thathypoxia builds up in the Bay. The endresult is that in recent years, the sameamount of nitrogen has given rise totwice the volume of dead zone than inthe past. Scientists have pinpointed thattipping point to around 1986. Accordingto Diaz, who’s seen similar trends inother dead zones around the world, it’spossible that these ecosystems have beenfundamentally changed by decades ofpollution. “These large systems have beenhypoxic now for such a long time that

something has changed about them…[so] that it takes less new nitrogen com-ing in nowadays to create the same-sizedead zone,” he says.

But new research suggests that theBay might not be so broken after all.

That comes from a research team atJohns Hopkins University who workedwith Kemp to test a new idea: could thedead zone be growing or shrinking dur-ing only one part of the summer but notanother? In other words, was the deadzone holding as steady in June as it wasin July? The team was onto something, itturns out.

The researchers reported in 2011 thattoday’s dead zone seems to be as big andnasty, on average, as it was in the mid-to-late 1980s — and maybe a bit bigger. But

that bad news story described only theearly summer months. In the late sum-mer, or from mid-July on, the news wasbetter. The dead zone seemed to havebegun to mellow. To be precise, the latesummer dead zone measured, on average,about nine cubic kilometers in the 1980s.By the 2000s, that number had shrunkdown to about seven cubic kilometers,the researchers reported in the journalEstuaries and Coasts. In even more goodnews, the dead zone also seemed to besticking around for less time, too, lastingfor 110 days, on average, in the summeras opposed to 130.

The bottom line is that the Bay mightnot be as stubborn to change as some sci-entists thought. To be sure, the reductionin size of the late-summer dead zone wasrelatively small. Even so, “if we hadn’tcontrolled the nutrients, things would beeven worse,” says William Ball, an envi-ronmental engineer at Johns Hopkinswhose graduate student, RebeccaMurphy, spearheaded the study.

But some big questions remain:despite these hopeful signs, why has thedead zone been relatively resistant tochange? What happened in 1986 so thatfewer nutrients could create the same-sized dead zone, and why was the deadzone shrinking in late July but not June?

Stormy Weather

Malcolm Scully thinks the answer tothese dilemmas largely comes down tothose windy days out on the Chesapeake.“[For] anyone who’s looked at a lot ofdata or even probably spent time in aboat out there, the wind is hugely impor-tant,” says Scully, a physical oceanogra-pher at Old Dominion University.

Important because winds are like asilver bullet to the heart of the deadzone. A good, strong wind can mix upthe Bay, pushing surface waters aroundand drawing bottom waters up. Thosehypoxic waters can then refill theirdepleted oxygen levels by absorbing thegas from the atmosphere. So while somewinds may be bad for crabs — sendingthem scrambling on a jubilee — they’rebeneficial for the Bay as a whole.

The red zone is the dead zone, where the water isanoxic, empty of oxygen. The orange and yellow zones arehypoxic regions, holding a little more oxygen but still notenough for a healthy, life-supporting ecosystem. When thewind shifts, low-oxygen water can slosh out of the deeps,creep up into the shallows, and send blue crabs scuttlingup onto shore, creating a spectacle known as a “crabjubilee” like the one in this photo taken in Delaware(opposite page). PHOTO GRAPH OF CRAB JUBILEE (P. 10) BY KEVIN

FLEMING; MAP, COURTESY OF ECOCHECK, DATA PROVIDED BY THE

CHESAPEAKE BAY PROGRAM.

Scully got a good look at that phe-nomenon in 2011. He left an array ofsensors for monitoring levels of dissolvedoxygen out on the Chesapeake duringTropical Storm Irene. While the stormswept over the Bay in August of that year,the scientist watched as the entire deadzone, which had been sizable, disappeared.Oxygen levels leapt up, beginning alongMaryland’s Western Shore and movingeast.

Not all winds are created equal whenit comes to their effect on the Bay, Scullysays. Southerly winds, or those that blowup from Norfolk toward Annapolis, tendto act a lot more like Irene did. They mixup the Bay. A lot. But around 1980,southerly winds became less common onthe Bay, while westerly winds becamemore so, and they didn’t stir the waterquite as much. That comes down to howwind direction, in combination with therotation of the Earth, sloshes water aroundinside the Bay. Luckily, southerly windsseem to have increased again in recentyears, reaching the normal levels seenbefore 1980. Those changes were drivenby a shift in atmospheric pressure aroundBermuda, Scully reported in a 2010 paperin the Journal of Physical Oceanography.

Such climatic shifts would likely havethe biggest effect on the Bay in the earlysummer, too. During that season, the estu-ary is usually more stratified than at othertimes — its bottom waters, which tend tobe cold and salty, stay separate from thewaters above, which tend to be warmerand fresher. It’s somewhat like how oiland water don’t mix in a jar. For reasonsthat remain unclear, too, that June stratifi-cation has grown even stronger over thepast several decades, slowing the naturalmixing of the Bay’s waters at that time.Winds blowing from the south wouldhelp to mix those waters up, but theycame less often beginning in 1980. Thatmeans that the dead zone would likelyhave been bigger, or more stubborn, inthe early summer than scientists expected— just what the Johns Hopkins team andKemp had found.

And the decrease in southerly windsin 1980 would help to explain why, sev-

eral years later, it began taking fewernutrients to build up the same-sized deadzone. During the early summer, “it wouldappear that things are not getting bettereven though the nitrogen loads havecome down,” Scully says. But “if youaccount for winds, as well, you explain alot of that.”

The science isn’t settled, however, andthere are other explanations for the deadzone’s resistance to recovery. Rising sealevels could explain why the Bay’s watershave become even more stratified, espe-cially in June. Higher sea levels send abigger flux of salt water into the estuary,helping to keep the salty bottom andfresher surface waters more separate thanotherwise.

And, as Diaz suggested, there’s achance that the biology and chemistry ofthe Bay have been altered, too. Specif i -cally, the consistently low oxygen levelsaround the estuary may have made itmore difficult for bacteria, plus chemicalprocesses, to remove nitrogen and phos-phorus from the water column and thesediments below. That, in turn, leavesmore nutrients free for algae to consume,leading, ultimately, to less oxygen in thewater. In other words, when excess nutri-ents are added to the Bay, they may makethe estuary even more susceptible tonutrient pollution — something scientistscall a “positive feedback.” Such a feed-back could help explain the sudden shiftseen around 1986. “This positive feed-back couldn’t have caused this doublingof hypoxia,” on its own, says Jeremy Testa,a graduate student who studies, amongother things, nutrient recycling in theBay with Michael Kemp. “But it couldcertainly support it once the wheels areset in motion.”

Diaz, for his part, buys all of theseexplanations. “I think it’s a mix of all ofthese things,” he says. But regardless ofhow stubborn the dead zone is, restora-tion is possible, Diaz adds. “I don’t thinkthe dead zone will ever go away. But I dothink it can be reduced in size.”

Now, that may be a reason to party.Don’t forget to invite the crabs.

— strain@mdsg.umd.edu

12 • Chesapeake Quarterly

THE LITTLETHAT

R ob Hartwell’s childhood was, in away, vintage Mark Twain. Hegrew up on Mason Neck, a small

peninsula on the Potomac River inVirginia. Located about 20 miles south ofWashington, D.C., the neck forms thesouthern border of a narrow bay calledGunston Cove. “My idea of an ideal daywas to walk a mile or two down the riverbank at low tide and see how manysnakes I could find,” says Hartwell, whostill lives near the banks of that covetoday.

But it was Mark Twain with a twist.Many days, he’d have to play on theopposite side of the neck because deadfish had piled up along Gunston Cove —likely the victims of poor water quality.

Then there was the home movie hewatched over and over again. Shot byhis mother on an eight-millimeter cam-era, the film showed one of their neigh-bors climbing out of the water offMason Neck after a swim. He was cov-ered in green slime. “He looked like thecreature from the black lagoon,” saysHartwell, who today is a Virginia com-missioner for the Interstate Commissionon the Potomac River Basin, a govern-ment group that advocates for thePotomac.

The troubles facing Gunston Cove,which stretches about two-and-a-halfmiles long and reaches widths of morethan three-quarters of a mile, came downto how the region dealt with sewage. Afew miles upstream from this cozy coveon a tributary called Pohick Creek sat awastewater treatment plant — now calledthe Noman M. Cole Jr. Pollution ControlPlant. And every day, this facility, whichwas built in 1970, pumped tons upontons of treated wastewater right towardHartwell’s old stomping grounds. That

wastewater, in turn, was loaded withphosphorus.

And that was a problem. Microbesneed phosphorus to survive, but in fresh-water ecosystems like this one, this nutri-ent tends to be harder to find than others,such as nitrogen. The sewage plant’s dis-charges fed the algae’s craving for phos-phorus, and the microorganisms — par-ticularly, a class of microbe calledcyanobacteria or blue-green algae —feasted, growing out of control. In thedeeper waters of the Potomac, such“blooms” even led to decreases in theoxygen dissolved in the water column,suffocating schools of fish. The regionbecame known for its fish kills and forgenerally bad water quality. “It was noto-rious,” Hartwell says.

In many senses, Gunston Cove’s storymirrored the stories of tributaries up anddown the Chesapeake Bay watershed:never-ending algae blooms and chroni-cally poor water quality. But that notori-ety also inspired change. By the early1980s, a multistate and federal effort toclean up the Bay was beginning toorganize, and its target was excessnutrients .

On Gunston Cove, change beganearly on in that drive. Responding to citi-zen concerns, Virginia’s Fairfax County,which oversaw the plant, opted toupgrade its treatment technology. Thework was finished by 1980. The plant’soperators built new settling tanks and fil-ters to dispose of phosphorus waste.Elsewhere, treatment plant operatorsaround the Bay completed similar over-hauls. The Fairfax County plant managedto winnow out around 85 percent of thephosphorus it was sending downstreamtoward Gunston Cove. But, by the nextsummer, the cove was no less green with

COVECOULD

Daniel Strain

One small waterway on thePotomac River shows thatcleanup efforts can work — with enough time.

Underwater grassbeds, like this patch ofEurasian watermilfoil (Myriophyllumspicatum ), have come back in GunstonCove. The water is clear enough for grassesto survive again, the result of upgrades to awater treatment plant nearby and long-term efforts by activists. PHOTOGRAPH BY

MICHAEL W. FINCHAM; MAP, ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS MAP LIBRARY.

Gunston Cove

algae. Nor was it the following year. Orthe year after that.

“They made a strong managementaction. They invested a lot of publicmoney, and they did what they thoughtwas right. And the response was zero,” saysWalter Boynton, an ecologist at theChesapeake Biological Laboratory of theUniversity of Maryland Center forEnvironmental Science. “They had towait.”

A Lucky FindYears later on Gunston Cove, ChristianJones pulls a clawlike tool called a Ponargrab up out of the water and onto hissmall sport-fishing boat. He dumps itscontents into a bucket — globs of darkgrey mud. He also finds a single sprig ofbay grass. Jones, an ecologist at GeorgeMason University, holds the plant in thepalm of his hand. It’s thin, leafy, and stillwet. Hydrilla, he calls it, talking to a halfdozen college students crammed inaround him.

The scene is quiet this morning. Thewater is smooth, and what few wavesthere are barely jostle our boat. The stu-dents are here with Jones to learn howscientists like him gauge the health offreshwater rivers and bays. And that’swhere the hydrilla comes in.

The small plant says a lot about thehealth of Gunston Cove. Hydrilla, or

Hydrilla verticillata, isn’t native to theregion, but it has been able to colonizerivers up and down the estuary since itsintroduction from Florida in the 1980s,providing habitat for native fish and otheranimals. That’s important because under-water vegetation like this has been disap-pearing all over the Chesapeake Bay —plagued by deteriorating water quality.But here, bay grasses, even native ones, areflourishing. Much of the river bottomstretching out around us is covered in thestuff, Jones says in his casual, southernaccent: “They’re just below the surfaceright now.” In other words, the cove todayis not the same algae-choked waterwaythat Hartwell remembers from his youth— then, only a thin fringe of plants grewalong the Mason Neck shoreline.

Other waterways, including thePotomac itself, have shown similarimprovements in water quality, going fromunswimmable to swimmable — or, atleast, slightly less prone to fish kills. Butfew, if any, waterways the size of GunstonCove have made such a stark turn-around. Still, the cove’s story comes with acaveat: every river and Bay may take dif-ferent times to recover.

“I think it’s a good lesson that we’redealing with a complicated ecosystem,”Jones says. “While we understand thebasics of how it works, we don’t know itwell enough to know exactly when our

management efforts are going to kick inor pay off.”

The Big Wait

Jones spent a lot of time waiting for thatpayoff. He’s monitored the health ofGunston Cove with funding from FairfaxCounty since 1984 and has long beenfascinated by freshwater communities,especially their microscopic members.Even today, the Arkansas native bringshome a jar filled with water every time hetravels to the cove — which is often. Heputs the sample under his microscope andlooks for the tiny animals, bigger thanalgae but too small to see well with thenaked eye, swimming or just floatingaround. “I always find a wonderful thrilllooking at microorganisms,” he says.

Many of those animals and manylarger ones (fish) do best when there arethick beds of bay grass around. But whenJones first began his studies, GunstonCove was still very much the domain ofthe creature from the black lagoon. Thesituation got so bad that in 1983, theMetropolitan Washington Council ofGovernments invited a team of interna-tional experts on water quality to theregion to discuss one topic — whywasn’t the cove getting better?

Here’s what they concluded: the faucetsupplying Gunston Cove with largeamounts of phosphorus had been effec-tively cut off, but algae there were stillthriving off a huge reserve — and it layjust below the surface. Phosphorus mole-cules, by virtue of their chemistry, tend tobind to grains of dirt and silt. Those grainsalso sink, meaning that the mud at thecove’s bottom was likely chock-full of thenutrient. And bit by bit, all that phospho-rus was trickling back up into the watercolumn . The theory was supported byobservations taken later by Jones and hiscolleagues.

But there was good news, too. Withenough time, all that phosphorus wouldlikely be used up, washed away, or trappedunder another layer of sediment. In otherwords, there’d be no more available forthe algae. All Jones needed to do was wait.

The water quality in Gunston Covenever improved in one big leap. No singlemoment arrived when the scientists

14 • Chesapeake Quarterly

Holding up a clump of healthy bay grass, Rob Hartwell can smile about the Gunston Coverecovery. He remembers when Gunston was empty of grasses and covered with green slime. As a long-time advocate, he’s worked to keep this cove healthy. He currently serves on the Interstate Commis -sion on the Potomac River Basin. PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL W. FINCHAM.

clinked champagne glasses, Jones says.Things just got better — slowly butsurely. “By 1995, we weren’t seeing thebig algal blooms anymore,” he says. “By2000, it was obvious that not only werethe blooms not occurring, but the averageamount of algae was going down.” Thosechanges built on top of each other, even-tually clearing the way for bay grasses.Today, underwater plants, like watermilfoiland the hydrilla Jones found, cover about40 percent or more of the cove bottom .

The net result is that Gunston Cove isnow usually a lot less green with algaethan the Potomac. It’s a role reversal forthe two bodies of water. “A lot of times,the cove is clearer than the river channel,”Jones says. “And that would have neveroccurred before.” Part of the differencelies in the fact that the Potomac, likemuch of the Bay watershed, also picks upa lot of nutrients from the fertilizers usedon nearby farms. Gunston Cove, however,is relatively isolated from agricultural land.Still, for many, the inlet shows that, withenough time and effort, ecosystems likethis one can regain some of their losthealth and diversity.

“I love Gunston Cove because it’s thatmagic little story that says if you do theright things, [a waterway] will heal itself,”says Stella Koch, who works to conservestreams for the Audubon NaturalistSociety.

Estuary in Recovery

That’s a relatively new way of looking atriver restoration. For years, scientistsassumed that it might take generations toclean up waterways like Gunston Cove.But while it’s clear today that you’ll haveto wait, you won’t have to wait forever,says Walter Boynton who’s studied ecosys-tems like these for decades. When he wasa young student, “the view of estuaryrecovery followed the theme: we havebeen enriching these estuaries for…hun-

dreds of years, and therefore it will take asimilar time for restoration,” Boynton says.Now, he can say, “that just doesn’t seem tobe true.”

Gunston Cove isn’t the only proof ofthat, either. The Potomac also cleared upin the 1980s after the nutrients spillinginto it from a wastewater treatment plantin Washington, D.C. were cut. The BackRiver, which runs through northernBaltimore, offers an even newer example.In 1998, the operators of a sewage planton this famously polluted waterwayreduced the nitrogen discharged by thefacility. Within three years, measures ofalgae in the river had been halved.

By comparing ecosystems like these,Boynton’s seen that separate bays andrivers may recover at different speeds. Thepace of change, he says, likely comesdown to a number of factors, such as howefficient ecosystems are at storing nutri-ents. But for a scientist who’s spent muchof his career studying the Bay’s decline,such recoveries are a welcome sign.

“It is kind of delightful at this stage oflife to study issues of restoration, whichare significantly more positive,” he says.

Still, both Boynton and Jones say thatrestoration can’t bring back the past. Bothscientists doubt that Gunston Cove willever return to how it was during thedawn of the United States — when,according to reports, one local landowner

used to string a 350-foot-long seine netacross the Potomac not far from the cove,catching tens of thousands of shad eachyear. Even when natural resource man-agers and scientists succeed in restoringwaterways like Gunston Cove, “very sel-dom do they go back to the same systembecause so many things are off in so manyways,” Jones says.

Rob Hartwell, however, is happy allthe same. Algae or no, he’s gone swim-ming around Mason Neck every year,much like his neighbor covered in slime.But these days, he can open his eyesunderwater — a benefit of having fewermicrobes around. There’s still a lot workto be done, he says, but today, the regionis an “oasis close to Washington.” It’s onewhere that old sea monster captured onan eight-millimeter camera won’t be visit-ing anytime soon.

— strain@mdsg.umd.edu

Volume 11, Number 4 • 15

Christian Jones looks at a water sample filled with small crustaceans called copepods, takenfrom the water near the mouth of Gunston Cove. An ecologist at George Mason University, he collectssmall organisms for fun and uses a microscope to photograph them, often posting the pictures on histeam’s website. PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL STRAIN.

“It’s that magic little storythat says if you do the right

things, [a waterway] willheal itself.”

Bay Grass Guide & More InfoWant to iden-tify underwaterbay grasses?Buy a copy ofour field guide,or give it as a

gift to a Bay lover. Go to the link below forinformation about the guide and for moreinformation about all the topics covered inthis magazine.

www.chesapeakequarterly.net/v11n4/info

F redrika Moser has been named directorof the Maryland Sea Grant College fol-lowing more than a decade of service to

the program as its assistant director for researchand, since 2011, its interim director.

Her selection, following a nationwidesearch, was announced by Donald Boesch, pres-ident of the University of Maryland Center forEnvironmental Science, of which Maryland SeaGrant is a part. Maryland Sea Grant is one of34 university-based programs in coastal andGreat Lakes states that support research, educa-tion, and public outreach on marine and coastalissues. These programs, administered by theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),work to promote environmentally sustainable and economicallyviable uses of natural resources.

“Dr. Moser stood out because of her deep experience in SeaGrant, her excellent understanding of Maryland’s marineresource issues, and the administrative leadership she has demon-strated as interim director,” Dr. Boesch said.

As Maryland Sea Grant’s research leader from 2001 to 2011,Moser helped to develop several of the program’s signatureefforts to assist policy makers and natural resource officials inmaking management decisions in the Chesapeake Bay and Mid-Atlantic regions. One such multistate project convened scientificworkshops to improve understanding and management ofaquatic invasive species, including zebra mussels, Chinese mittencrabs, and unwanted “hitchhiker species” spread by the live baittrade.

Moser also played a key role in Maryland Sea Grant’s educa-tion initiatives, leading a summer research program for collegeundergraduates. The Research Experiences for Undergraduates(REU) program, which is supported by the National ScienceFoundation, offers college students the opportunity to work onresearch projects under the guidance of the university’s marine

and coastal researchers. Moser has worked toincrease the number of marine science studentswho come from groups that are underrepre-sented in the marine science community,including women and members of minoritygroups. Most recently, she has worked with theUniversidad Metropolitana (UMET) in PuertoRico to develop a new REU project andundergraduate research program there. Moserhas also overseen Maryland Sea Grant’s graduateresearch fellowship programs, which supportstudent researchers and help them to translatetheir work for audiences outside of academia.Going forward at Maryland Sea Grant, Moser

plans to create new partnerships with other organizations work-ing to preserve the Chesapeake Bay. She wants to expand sup-port for “transformative” science — which tackles some of themost challenging interdisciplinary research problems — to helpMaryland better face critical challenges. Such issues include cli-mate change adaptation and mitigation, water quality, watershedrestoration, sustainable fisheries, and the social and economicconstraints that hinder policy and management responses tochanging environmental conditions.

In addition, Moser wants to expand Maryland Sea Grant’scollaborations with the state’s universities and schools to enhancemarine science education and research opportunities.

“I am excited and honored to accept this new position,”Moser said. “I look forward to working with our many partnersas we find science-based solutions to keep the Chesapeake Bayregion healthy for future generations to enjoy.”

She earned her doctoral degree at the Institute for Coastaland Marine Science at Rutgers University.

Moser succeeds Jonathan Kramer, who resigned as director in2011 to join a new research center at the University ofMaryland, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Centerheadquartered in Annapolis, Maryland.

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Fredrika Moser Named Maryland Sea Grant DirectorM

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