Coupling Water Quality and Upper Tropic Level Models for Chesapeake Bay: A Planning Workshop
- Published:
- March 1, 2005
- Originator:
- Chesapeake Bay Program
- Categorized in:
- Report
Recent publications such as the Chesapeake 2000 agreement and the Fisheries Ecosystem Plan reflect the growing interest in integrated management of water quality and fisheries. The US EPA Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) has invested in a variety of numerical modeling approaches that address issues related to management of the estuary. One of these approaches is the Chesapeake Bay Water Quality Model which has been a primary tool used to simulate estuarine ecosystem responses to alternative nutrient and sediment watershed management policies. The NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office (NCBO) has sponsored development of a fisheries-oriented trophic network model for the Bay using a widely applied software package, Ecopath with Ecosim. Members of the CBP Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC), working with the CBP Modeling Subcommittee and NCBO, organized a meeting to examine the potential for coupling these two modeling approaches to address questions pertaining to integrated management of water quality and fisheries. The workshop discussions led to several tentative conclusions regarding model coupling and recommendations for future actions which are contained in the workshop report.