But last year’s cloud-shrouded skies and rough boating weather complicated researchers’ efforts to survey the Bay’s health, Dennison said. UMCES has been compiling its report card annually since 2007. A January checkup by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation did, though, and lowered the Bay’s grade from a C-minus to a D-plus. That didn’t include the effects from 2018’s storms.
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In April, the state-federal Chesapeake Bay Program said 42% of the Bay and its tidal tributaries met water quality standards during 2015–17, a 2-percentage point gain from the previous period. The UMCES evaluation follows closely in the footsteps of two other Bay report cards released earlier this year. For the first time since 2014, the Patapsco and Back rivers in the Baltimore area received an “F” grade, falling to 19%. The greatest deterioration took place in the Elizabeth River, the southeastern Virginia tributary where the overall health score fell from 46% to 21%. “The Bay is in fact showing resilience in the face of climate change and extreme weather events, underlining that the restoration efforts must remain vigilant to continue these hard-won efforts,” he said.Īlmost all regions saw water quality declines in 2018, though. The long-term trajectory continues to point toward a recovery in ecological health, UMCES President Peter Goodwin said. “That’s what I’m encouraged by,” Dennison said. Last year, the decline halted at 8 points. In 2003, Hurricane Isabel caused the score to plummet 19 percentage points. The UMCES report bears out those projections, showing reductions in the scores for water clarity, nitrogen, phosphorus and aquatic grasses.īut Dennison pointed to how the Bay ecosystem reacted in 2018 compared with another unusually wet year. Many scientists predicted that last year’s rains would dampen the restoration gains. About 72 inches of rain inundated the Baltimore area during 2018, about 30 inches more than normal, according to the report.įrom a scientific perspective, the deluge offered a glimpse of how the recovering ecosystem may respond as climate change leads to increasingly erratic weather, Dennison said. The resilience of that recovery faced one of its biggest tests last year. The federal government and the states within the 64,000-square-mile Bay watershed are working on a plan to reduce nutrient and sediment pollution under an agreement signed in 2010. “The good news is it took a hit, but it did not crash.” “We don’t have as good of news to report because of some record rainfall,” said Bill Dennison, UMCES vice president for science application. It marked the lowest grade since 2013 and reversed a streak of four years of improving or steady scores. The estuary’s overall health score in 2018 dropped from 54 percent to 46 percent but retained its “C” grade for a seventh consecutive year, according to the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s latest report card. A year of historically heavy rainfall strained the Chesapeake Bay’s ecosystem - but not past the breaking point, according to a wide-ranging assessment released Tuesday.