Publications

In working toward the goal of restoring the abundance and diversity of living resources in the Bay, monitoring is essential. Many of the actions necessary to improve the quality of Bay habitats have been ideentified and are being implemented. regional fisheries management plans, now under development, have the potential for preventing overharvest of commerical and recreational species. But plans for improving water quality, habitats, and management of resources will always be based on the best possible records of resource abundance, distribution, diversity, and reproduction. This requirement can be met by a wello-designed living resources monitoring program. In addition to tracking living resource trends, monitoring will gradually improve outknowledge of Chesapeake Bay species, their natural cycles, their habitat needs, and how they respond to human activities. To meet these goals, a living resources monitoring program must be integrated with biological research, water quality monitoring, ecological modeling, fisheries management, and stock assessment. Cooperation and coordination among agencies, programs, jurisdiction, and disciplines are essential.

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The Blue ribbon Panel urges that this report be used as the beginning of an inquiry into a range of potential funding sources to help finanace the Tributary Strategies. Such discussion is essential to ensure the participation of all stakeholders in the Bay watershed and to attain the goalos embraced in the Chesapeake Bay Agreements. The newly created Tributary Teams will be leaders in using and developing the ideeas identified in this report. Only a partnership between all leavels of government and the private sector will bring us closer to realizing a restored Chesapeake Bay.

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This document reports on an extensive survey of the distribution and abundance of the Baltic clam (Macoma balthica) and its near relative M. mitchelli in shallow-water zones of major tributaries and subtributaries of the Maryland portion of the Chesapeake Bay. The purpose of the survey was to establish a baseline of iformation for these widely distributed clams that comprise a significant portion of benthic biomass and are important prey of numerous aquatic organisms. Macoma clams are important prey not only to numerous fish and crabs, expecially the blue crav (Callinectes sapidus), but also to several species of wintering waterfowl (Antidae) that are of major management concern to the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service. Foremost among these waterfowl is the canvasback (Aythya valisineria), to which the Chesapeake Bay is a critical wintering ground and for which the Baltic clam is a primary food source.

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This report, "A Comprehensive List of Chesapeake Bay Basin Species," serves three specific purposes:

1. It provides theBay community with a standardized list of Chesapeake Bay aquatic and aquatic-associated living resources;

2. It provides the Chesapeake Bay Program access to toxicity data that will be used to revise and update the Chesapeake Bay Toxics of Concern List; and

3. It supports Chesapeake Bay Program agencies in determining the presence and status of living resources in the Bay.

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The scope of this analysis includes the entire Chesapeake Bay drainage basin, which is illustrated in Exhibit 1-1. This watershed covers approximately 64,000 square miles and portions of six states, including Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, west Virginia, and Delaware, as well as the District of Columbia. Approximately 15 million people live within the watershed. Three major tributaries, the Susquehanna, Potomac, and James Rivers, drain approximately 49,000 square miles or 76 percent of the Chesapeake basin.

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This workplan outlines the steps to be taken to implement the 1988 and 1989 commitments explicitily stated in the Chesapeake Bay Agreement as well as those which are pledged as part of the follow-up work described in commitment reports. These are shown in Figure 1. The workplan covers the work overseen by the Chesapeake Bay Program subcommittee and work groups, but does not attempt to describe the considerable related work through these committees. This workplan is consistent with the budget priorities established by the Implementation Committee, but also includes other related fundings sources such as those provided by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the USDA Soil Conservation Service.

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The technical document Summary of Available Information on Chesapeake Bay Submerged Vegetation has been prepared by the Universityof Maryland Horn Point Environmental Laboratory in order to provide a initial data base on submerged aquatic vegetation in the Chesapeake Bay. Available information has been segregated into six main catergories: biological summaries of dominant plan species; environmental values of aquatic plants' historic documentation; factors related to aquatic plant occurrence and growth; modelling' and management options. This technical document is a literature search and is designed to serve as a reference document for the Chesapeake Bay.

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As part of a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of the tidal Potomac River and Estuary, the U.S. Geological Survey studied the distrivution and abundance of submersed aquatic vegetation from 1978 to 1981. Sites were chosen throughout the tidal river and estuary. The plant species were identified; distribution and abundance of submersed aquatic vegetation were determined at the sites; and volumes, biomass-volume equivalents, and representative stem lengths were measured. Substrate types were identified, and particle size distribution, bottom nutrients, organic carbon, and heavy metals were measured at numerous sites. Water quality parameters that were measured included temerature, condutivity, salinity, secchi depth, photosynthetically active radiation, pH, chlorophyll a, nutrient concentrations, and epiphyte biomass.

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The University of Maryland was contracted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to update tge literature and analtze recent trends in the Chesapeake. The following is a review of the pertinent information available on key esturaine species in the Chesapeake. In the late 1970's it was possible to cover a wide range of the worldwide literature because it was relatively modest compared with the late 1980's. However, our computer searches of literature bases proved voluminous. Thus it was not possible for us to cover species such as Zostera marina comprehensively, because of the huge number of publications on on this seagrass species in recent years. Similar problems were enountered with Hydrilla verticillata. a species with a global literature due to its worlodwide invasive propensity which was introduced to Chesapeake Bay in the 1980's. Thus we focussed our efforts on the Chesapeake literature and those studies from other areas which reveal fundamental relatioships of SAV to environmental factors.

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Perspectives on the Chesapeake Bay, 1994 is the fourth in a series of literature syntheses being published by the Chesapeake Bay Program's Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAV). The purpose of the series is to provide managers, scientists, legislators, and others with informative summaries on research findings and other issues that bear onn the Chesapeake Bay Program's efforts to restore the nation's largest estuary. This volume consists of four papers. Ranging literally over land, sea and air, they not only reflect the diversity of scientific inquiry that is shaping the restoration effort but they also reveal the pervasiveness of two common themes. One is that the anthropogenic factor looms large in any scientific inquiry into the workings of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem, wich each paper providing a scientific perspective on the direct and indirect effects of human activity on estuarine structure and function. The other theme is that both spatial and tekporal issues of scale play a significant role in the relevance and applicability of Bay-based scientific investigation, with each paper raising serious questions of scale in measuring environmental phenomena.

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