Publications

Every major source of energy used by modern society has an environmental impact-and all too often these impacts are negative. Today, the Chesapeake Bay region has an unprecedented opportunity to take the lead in a new era of energy production that could produce a wealth of positive impacts for our economy, farms and families, as well as our forest, rivers, and the Chesapeake Bay. The opportunity lies with the new biofuels inducstry, which is currently exploding on both the national and itnernation levels.

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The purpose of this project was to perform a cost evaluation of implementing nitrogen limits of treatment (LOT) technology at wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. LOT technology was defined as technology that would produce a 12 month average effluent total nitrogent (TN) concentration of 3mg/L from each of the WWTPs. Most of this effort was a follow up to the evaluation of 51 WWTPs performed under a previous project entitled, "Evaluation of Wastewater Treatment Plants for BNR Retrofits using Advances in Technology".

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A Comprehensive List of Chesapeake Bay Basin Species 1997 is an update of a 1992 document published by the Environmental Protection Aency Chesapeake Bay Program Office 9CBP/TRS 70/92). It provides a list of aquatic and aquatic-associate organisms found in recent decades in the Chesapeake Bay Basin. The list was originally extracted from moitoring data collected by federal and state agencies and private institutions. An extensive search identified other available aquatic Chesapeake species information. Newly identified species int he Maryland and Virginia Chesapeake biomonitoring programs were added and the list reviewed to remove duplications and erros. Species were then matched by scientific name to their National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) codes. any remaining species that could not be matched by either NODC code or scientific name were reexamined. It they proved to be valid species, they were given temporary codes.

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The Sustainable Fisheries Goal Implementation Team releases a biannual newsletter to their team members and interested parties biannually, in March and September, to keep their members informed of the Sustainable Fisheries Goal Implementation Team's efforts and achievements throughout the year. Topics often include blue crab, oysters, invasive catfish, forage, and fish habitat.

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The goal of the project was to design a more effective way to harvest invasive catfish (predominantly blue catfish, Ictalurus furcatus) in Virginia waters stunned by low-frequency electrofishing (LFE). LFE was conducted from May 18, 2015 to October 6, 2015; however, no weight was harvested on October 6 when water temperatures were 19oC . None of the data collected from the October 6 trip was used for catch statistics. Seventy-five trips were made during the LFE season; 37 in the James River and 38 in the Pamunkey River (Figure 1). The last day enough blue catfish (BCF) were susceptible to make commercial harvest worthwhile was September 29, 2015 when water temperatures were 23oC. In 2014 only large hooped (handle length about 2.5m long with a 0.4m2 net opening) were used to collect stunned fish. During the 2014 study 155,161lbs of catfish were harvested electrofishing for 5430 minutes resulting in a catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) of 28lbs per minute. In 2015 a total of 334,680lbs of catfish were landed electrofishing for 12850 minutes resulting in a CPUE of 26lbs per minute (Figure 2, Table 1). Three different new harvest techniques methods were attempted to increase the harvest efficacy of invasive BCF compared to regular dip netting: 1) a modified butterfly skimmer (Figure 3), 2) pulling a hoop net along the side of the boat, 3) dragging a surface trawl behind the boat (Figure 4). All three techniques were compared to a chase boat that utilized simple dip nets. The chase boat using dip nets harvested significantly more weight than the new techniques (Table 2). One modification that substantially helped harvest of small fish was using dip nets with smaller openings (0.24m2) and handles 3.5m long. The smaller nets had a wire mesh which allowed fish to be dumped out quicker without hanging in the mesh.

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This document describes how to access biological monitoring data at the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) Data Center in Annapolis, Maryland. It provides information:

*currently available and soon-to-be released CBP databases;

*how to obtain biological and living resources monitoring data online from the CBP's CHESIE computer, online from the CBP Internet Home Page, online from other Home Pages, or directly fromt he Biological Monitoring Data Manager;

*data dictionary tables

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In the years since the conference on the Chesapeake Bay that was held at the Wye Institute in September, 1968, the people of the Chesapeake Region, together with the rest of the nation, have increasingly recognized that environmental matters must be considered in planning and governing in both the pubic and private sectors. Aware of a vigorous mixture of completed, ongoing and projected studies, and of strong public environmental concern the principal state officials of Maryland and Virginia, requested the Chesapeake Reserach Consortium, Inc. to plan and convene a conference that would focus on the governance of Chesapeake Bay. This publication contains the task force reports from the workshop, the panelists' conference participants.

On June 28, 2000, the Chesapeake Executive Council signed a new agreement for the restoration of the Bay, entitled Chesapeake 2000. Unprecedented in scope and complexity, the new accord called for a range of actions, most with specific goals and a timeframe of 2010 for completion. While many of the goals were related to the Bay's water quality improvements, others dealt with the need for healthy and productive natural systems throught the 64,000 square mile watershed. Among the most important means to achieve the goals is the permanenet protection of open lands, including farms, forests and wetlands.

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Rich Batiuk, EPA, Chesapeake Bay Program Office, described the objectives of the critical issues forum, the questions posed to the forum participants by the Toxics Subcommittee, and the process for incorporating forum findings into the reevaluation of the 1988 Basinwide Toxics Reduction Strategy. To ensure the findings from the Chesapeake Bay Water Column Containation Critical Issues forum are fully considered in continuing efforts to reevaluate the revise the Basinwide Toxics Reduction Strategy. Representatives from the Bay basin jurisdictions presented findings from their respective water column contaminant monitoring programs, with emphasis on concentration ranges observed at Bay tidal water station. No formal presentations of water column data from the New York, Delaware, and West virginia portions of the Chesapeake Bay basin were made as the available data were very limited.

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