If you have questions about your account, please The commercial seafood industry in Maryland and Virginia alone brings $3.4 billion in sales each year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.And the bay is a summer destination for thousands of families. An estimated 600 million blue crabs live in the bay, nearly double the number that lived there last year. If you have questions about your account, please Besides decades of ongoing cleanup efforts, experts point to a daily pollution limit set in 2010. Ms. Felver notes that the sheer size of the watershed and the number of governments, businesses, and landowners in the system will make progress slow to realize.There will be a continued focus on tackling agricultural runoff, addressing toxic contaminants, and promoting best management practices for the bay – many of which are part of a plan that will culminate in 2025.Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox.Ms. Your subscription to “It is going to be a little bit harder to get the job done.” Still, he believes that the findings in the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Barometer report indicate an overall trend of improvement. The TMDL identifies how much nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment pollution the bay can handle and still support aquatic life, and requires the states in the watershed, as well as the District of Columbia, to take action to reduce levels below that maximum load. You don’t have a Christian Science Monitor That’s the highest count in seven years.William Ball, director of the Chesapeake Research Consortium, sees reason for hope. The regulation charges states within the watershed to reduce what they dump. subscription yet.
Fishing, tourism, and agriculture are among the bay’s key industries, all of which rely on clean water. “It’s a testament to how well the restoration process is going.” Both Dr. Ball and Ms. Felver attribute much of the progress to the establishment in 2010 of a total maximum daily load pollution limit by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. While Bay waters are the healthiest they've been since 1985, restoration challenges remain“Everyone who contributed to the new research published in the The Chesapeake Bay Program measures progress toward the achievement of water quality standards in the Bay using three environmental factors: dissolved oxygen, underwater grass abundance (to measure water clarity) and chlorophyll-The water quality of the Bay is also impacted by the pollution that flows into it. “An estimated 42% of the whole bay has met its water quality standards.” That 42% milestone is a 2 percentage point increase over the previous year’s report. New preliminary data from the Chesapeake Bay Program indicates that about 42 percent of the bay and its tidal tributaries met clean water standards … This is a slight improvement over the … Additionally, populations of the bay’s famed blue crab have doubled over the past year, to 600 million animals. 1 RESTORE CLEAN WATER ACTIONS: Federal Water Quality Two-Year Milestones for 2018 – 2019 The Executive Order (EO) 13508 Strategy calls upon federal agencies to join the Chesapeake Bay watershed jurisdictions in establishing two-year milestones, many of which are designed to support the If you have questions about your account, please Management actions taken by Chesapeake Bay Program partners, including local governments and communities to reduce pollution have shown modest success under the Bay TMDL, but the challenge of putting enough conservation practices on the ground to further reduce “The hard work of more than 1,800 local governments across the Chesapeake Bay watershed is paying off as water quality in the Bay, and in our local streams, is showing significant progress,” says Penny Gross, member of the Bay Program’s Local Government Advisory Committee and Fairfax County Board of Supervisors.