Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chesapeake Bay Watershed
Languages : en
Pages : 54

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Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309210798
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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The Chesapeake Bay is North America's largest and most biologically diverse estuary, as well as an important commercial and recreational resource. However, excessive amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment from human activities and land development have disrupted the ecosystem, causing harmful algae blooms, degraded habitats, and diminished populations of many species of fish and shellfish. In 1983, the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) was established, based on a cooperative partnership among the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the state of Maryland, and the commonwealths of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the District of Columbia, to address the extent, complexity, and sources of pollutants entering the Bay. In 2008, the CBP launched a series of initiatives to increase the transparency of the program and heighten its accountability and in 2009 an executive order injected new energy into the restoration. In addition, as part of the effect to improve the pace of progress and increase accountability in the Bay restoration, a two-year milestone strategy was introduced aimed at reducing overall pollution in the Bay by focusing on incremental, short-term commitments from each of the Bay jurisdictions. The National Research Council (NRC) established the Committee on the Evaluation of Chesapeake Bay Program Implementation for Nutrient Reduction in Improve Water Quality in 2009 in response to a request from the EPA. The committee was charged to assess the framework used by the states and the CBP for tracking nutrient and sediment control practices that are implemented in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and to evaluate the two-year milestone strategy. The committee was also to assess existing adaptive management strategies and to recommend improvements that could help CBP to meet its nutrient and sediment reduction goals. The committee did not attempt to identify every possible strategy that could be implemented but instead focused on approaches that are not being implemented to their full potential or that may have substantial, unrealized potential in the Bay watershed. Because many of these strategies have policy or societal implications that could not be fully evaluated by the committee, the strategies are not prioritized but are offered to encourage further consideration and exploration among the CBP partners and stakeholders.

Author: Steven T. Seagle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chesapeake Bay Watershed
Languages : en
Pages : 81

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Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Best management practices (Pollution prevention)
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chesapeake Bay (Md. and Va.)
Languages : en
Pages : 16

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Author: Julia Biertempfel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The Chesapeake Bay watershed is home to over 18 million people and contains over 87,000 working farms, which are two aspects that have led to the Bay's long-standing impaired status. In response to the federal mandate to reduce pollutant loadings to the Bay and to meet its portion of the watershed-wide load reduction goals, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has divided its counties into four prioritization tiers based on potential pollutant reduction. Twenty watersheds within the Susquehanna and Potomac portions of the Chesapeake Bay were selected from among the tiers to compare watersheds with varying levels of documented agriculturally-focused best management practice (BMP) implementation to those dominated by forested land cover. Although spatial targeting of BMPs has been extensively studied for reducing nutrient and sediment loads from agriculturally-dominated landscapes of the Bay watershed, effectiveness of BMP implementation to restore natural biogeochemical variability to the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles remains unknown. Furthermore, the time frame between widescale BMP implementation and watershed recovery at the county level is a complex subject which requires more assessment. Both these research inquiries could affect policy decisions, as available funding constraints often force BMPs to be implemented where they will be most effective. Research results could help land managers and policymakers assess the effectiveness of BMP implementation for achieving load reduction goals, as well as provide a better understanding of their effectiveness not only in reducing loads, but in restoring variability to nutrient cycling. This research investigated the hydrologic, biogeochemical, anthropogenic, and physiographic factors that influence the degree of temporal inequality exhibited by nutrient time series data in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Temporal inequality was assessed via Lorenz inequality curves and their corresponding Gini equations, as well as testing and comparing the concentration-discharge relationships of TN and TP, within twenty targeted watersheds within the Susquehanna and Potomac portions of the Chesapeake Bay. Spatial analysis was additionally conducted to analyze the relationship between Gini values, nutrient reduction progress, forested and agricultural land use percentages, coefficients of variation, and b values. Specifically, this thesis examined how the implementation of BMPs affects the degree of temporal inequality exhibited by nutrient transport at individual gauging stations over time and how quickly improvements are reflected within flow and load data. The watersheds of interest were selected using tier ranking from Phase III of the Pennsylvania Watershed Implementation Plan (WIP). The goal of this thesis was to compare watersheds with varying levels of documented BMP implementation to those with largely forested land cover in order to assess comparisons in degrees of temporal inequality of flow and nutrient load, as well as whether BMPs restore variability to nutrient dynamics within the studied timeframe. Hydroclimic variables were also scrutinized based on how they affect Gini Coefficients for nutrient loads. The hypothesis that drove this research was that agriculturally-dominated watersheds would show less variability of nutrient concentrations observed in streams due to nutrient legacy sources and current-day TN and TP sources, while less impacted watersheds would exhibit higher variability. I anticipated that if BMPs have helped to restore the natural variability of nutrient concentrations, then the degree of temporal inequality exhibited by a given gauging station location will increase over time after the BMPs have been implemented. However, due to the different pathways TN and TP pollution take in the environment, I anticipated TP to respond faster to BMP implementation than TN. Results drawn after data analysis indicate that there were few significant data markers of the improvement in TN variability, even after looking at both time series data and spatial analysis. Though this was the expected result for watershed sub-catchments with a higher percentage of agricultural land-use, this persisted even in more forested sub-catchments. No sub-catchment investigated in this thesis had a CVTN:CVQ value above 0.3 by the end of the data series, which highlights how difficult it is to restore TN variability in a landscape. Ultimately, I concluded that noticeable trend changes in TN variability may not be detectible only eight years after the TMDL model was implemented. Conversely, I concluded that there were visible signs that indicated several sub-watersheds within the scope of this research that displayed improving variability patterns for TP. The Gini coefficients of TP were overall more responsive to change than TN, particularly when looking at tier 1 and 2 sub-catchments. This is likely due to a combination of more progress completed towards TP reductions via infrastructure implementation (BMPs) and the different pathways TN and TP pollution take in the environment. A discussion of the implications and limitations of using the Weighted Regression on Time, Discharge, and Season (WRTDS) method to analyze long-term surface water-quality data is included at the end of this thesis.

Author: Lake Barcroft Watershed Improvement District
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Barcroft, Lake, Watershed (Va.).
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Author: Chesapeake Executive Council
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chesapeake Bay (Md. and Va.)
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Author: Timothy M. Gieseke
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1498718027
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Sustaining our agricultural landscapes is no longer just a technical, scientific or even political problem, but it has evolved into a socially complex, so-called wicked problem of conflicting social governance and economics. This creates an extreme economic obstacle where the value of ecosystem services remains low and diffuse and the transactions costs remain high and multiple.Using Uber-like business platform technology and a shared governance model, a symbiotic demand for environmental benefits is created. Enabling multi-sector transactions for environmental benefits, this platform innovation would remedy the "tragedy of the commons"; the economic nemesis to achieving landscape sustainability. In a nutshell, to sustain our agricultural landscapes a transdisciplinary approach supported by a shared governance model housed within a multi-sided platform in needed. This book introduces an assessment framework identifying governance actors, styles and ratios for socio-ecological systems. The assessment uses a new governance compass to identify the types of actors completing which tasks and identifies the styles of governance used to complete the tasks. It is aimed to anyone involved in sustainability science, agricultural policy planning, or integrated landscape design.

Author: Chesapeake Executive Council. Implementation Committee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chesapeake Bay Watershed
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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