Matt Rath is a multimedia associate with the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay at the Chesapeake Bay Program.
Manassas Park Elementary School in Northern Virginia has installed a rainwater collection system and other great green features that are helping the environment and the Chesapeake Bay. Check out this video to learn more about the school's awesome efforts!
The Chesapeake Bay Program had great success in Beijing from
March 28 to April 5, 2009, when we worked with the World Bank and United
Nations Global Environment Facility (UN-GEF) to develop the first-ever
watershed program in China for the Hai River watershed, a 123,000-square-mile area
that includes the 31 million people in Beijing and Tianjin.
Several of the goals of the World Bank and UN-GEF project were
to:
-
Decrease water pollution to the Hai watershed and the
adjacent Bohai Sea.
-
Reduce the groundwater overdraft in the Hai watershed.
-
Reduce pollution loading to the Bohai Sea
from coastal counties.
-
Develop Integrated Water and Environmental Management Plans
(IWEMPs) for ten selected counties in the Hai watershed and for the Tianjin Municipality.
At a five-day conference, we worked with Chinese federal
level equivalents of the EPA, Department of Agriculture and the Department of
Water Resources. Representatives and experts from the province (state) and
local levels were also present. What our
Chinese colleagues brought to the table was energy, a passion to begin their
first watershed program, and knowledge that the status quo of polluted water
and air wasn’t good enough.
They also brought legacy baggage: inexperience with
watershed programs, ministries and departments that have never worked together
on a watershed scale, and the perspective that their ministries treat what
should be public domain data as private property. If data is to be had, it has to be purchased
from the agency that collected it, generating problems in a watershed program
that is short on monitoring, discharge and emission data to begin with.
This sounds pretty grim, but it’s really not too different
than in the 1980s when the Bay Program began, and, ya’ know, ya’ gotta start somewhere.
The conference began with two days of six interrelated presentations
that told the story of the Chesapeake Bay Program’s integrated air, watershed,
estuary and living resources models. Our Chinese colleagues were particularly
interested in the air and watershed models, as they’re developing an assessment
of the overall proportions of point and nonpoint source loads to the Bo Hai watershed. This
is exact same question the Bay Program set out to answer with the first watershed
model in the early 1980s.
In our discussions on the first day, it came out that there
was a real interest in estimating the land export factors for the Hai watershed,
so we went back to the hotel after dinner and worked pretty much though the
night to put together a new presentation specifically on this topic. It’s kind of cool we can do this with the
internet. Even on the other side of the
world, we were able to use our web-served documentation and reports to make
this new presentation happen.
The Bay Program’s open web-based approach was also a
revelation to our Chinese colleagues, as was our program’s office, which holds
EPA, university, U.S. Geological Survey, National Park Service, Forest Service,
state agency personnel, and representatives from other organizations all
working on the same watershed. This is
completely different from the insular and closed approach in Chinese public
agencies today.
By the end of the technology transfer conference, we heard
consensus about taking an overall mass balance approach for nutrient inputs and
outputs in the Hai
River watershed – a key
first step that needs to be taken in any study.
We encouraged them to begin a spreadsheet of the mass balance right away,
taking into account the numbers of animals in each county and the estimated
loads from animal and village populations.
The important thing was to get some momentum going on this project, as well
as to get an early sense of the data gaps and problems that would need to be
sorted out. There will be a thousand areas of compromise and best professional
judgments that will be key to putting this first watershed assessment together.
Overall, our participation was a great success. Rarely have we felt the Bay Program have such
a large impact over such a short period of time. Our Chinese colleagues saw the
Bay Program as an example to follow. After 30 years of our watershed protection
program, we are at a Phase 5 level of watershed modeling, while they’re able to
start at a Phase 1 or Phase 2 level and build from there.
We congratulate and applaud our Chinese colleagues for
beginning this watershed approach. It’s the right track and will in the long
run provide the most complete and cost-effective environmental protection. A
new cooperation among the different Chinese agencies leading this project has
begun, which will be key to any success with their first watershed program. Our
colleagues in Beijing
have made good progress in this direction and have the right mix of environmental,
agricultural and water resource agencies at the table, as well as a good
representation from the federal, provincial and local levels.
We thank our Chinese colleagues for their kind hospitality
and for making the Chesapeake Bay Program a part of their conference.
Background on the Hai watershed and Bohai Sea:
Covering a catchment area of 123,000 square miles, the Hai River is
a crucial river in North China formed by the convergence of five rivers in Tianjin: the Chao
River, the Yongding
River, the Daqing River, the Ziya River and the Hutuo
River. The Hai
River flows into the Bohai Sea.
China
is a country of mixed messages. I
noticed on my first night in Beijing
that in the sink of my hotel bathroom was a large red sign with an
international red circle and slash over a picture of a drinking water
glass. Clearly, an indication not to
drink the water. Next to it were two
drinking water glasses that were set out ready for use.
The theme of mixed messages seems to sum up the dichotomy in
China
between increasing prosperity on one hand, and huge environmental problems on
the other. Sure, there’s a growth, but
increasingly voices are being raised about the air that can’t be breathed, and the
water that can’t be drunk. One hears, “Where’s the fish? They were here in my father’s day.” With the
growing prosperity in China,
one also hears, “This is my air clean it up!” or, “This is my river – fix it!
For us in the Chesapeake
region, this sounds all too familiar. In fact, there are parallels to where we
were in this region in the 1970s and 1980s, when the environment all around us
seemed to be heading irretrievably downhill. It was about then that citizens here
said “Enough!” and started restoring the Chesapeake Bay, just about one decade
after the citizens of the entire country said “Enough!” on the first Earth Day
in 1970, and we began the long process of cleaning up our air and waters. China now seems to be on the cusp
of that same decision.
This, then, was the backdrop for the Chesapeake Bay
Program’s visit to Beijing this April, when we
spoke with Chinese scientists and managers from three different agencies about
setting up China’s
first watershed program. In this
workshop, there were three federal-level Chinese agencies, roughly equivalent
to our EPA, Department of Agriculture, and U.S. Geological Survey, as well as
provincial and local government representatives. People from these different agencies were
meeting together for the first time and taking about the first watershed
program ever in China.
They were totally wowed with the Bay Program's work as we
relayed the different tools of research, monitoring and modeling we used in the
Chesapeake. At the close of a week of intense discussion
and technology transfer, we left them charged up, and convinced that they're on
the right track with this new watershed approach. They were going to first
apply it to the Bo-Hai basin, a watershed of 123,000 square miles that contains
the mega cities of Beijing, Tianjin, and the adjacent coastal bay. With what they learned in the Bo-Hai basin,
they’ll expand to other watersheds in China.
This is an example of an environmental jump-start, similar
to the economic leapfrogging the Chinese have mastered. We can hope that their watershed programs
avoid our mistakes, and profit from our successes. For example, we shared with our Chinese colleagues
our knowledge of atmospheric deposition, the highest nutrient input load to the
Chesapeake
watershed. Higher than fertilizer
loads. Higher than manure loads. And about a third of the nitrogen load
delivered to the Chesapeake.
Our Chinese hosts were incredulous and suggested that this could
not be a feature of Chinese watersheds. We
suggested, in the face of evidence of rapidly expanding industrialization with
little or no controls of nitrogen oxide emissions, that the nitrogen deposition
in China
may be on the order of about 20 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare. The older, more experienced Chinese
professionals were most skeptical. Point
sources, manure and fertilizer loads, they knew, and they planned to track
these loads in their nascent watershed program.
They even had work underway to track “village loads,” a euphemism for
human wastes used as fertilizer in agricultural fields, still a feature of
Chinese small plot village agriculture.
But atmospheric deposition loads of nitrogen? They just couldn’t believe it.
The very next day one of the bright Chinese managers found a
reference for an atmospheric deposition study in China. The verdict?
Serendipity and happenstance put that referenced Chinese atmospheric
deposition load right at 20 kilograms per hectare, the load we has suggested just
the previous day as what may be found in China. The Bay Program’s reputation
was secured!
That bright young manager was one of what we’ll call the
“young innovators”: up-and-coming men and women from junior management with a
whole career ahead of them and ready to move up. My impression was that the young innovators
were the key to China’s
environmental future. These mid-level
managers seemed to be the most eager to learn about the Bay Program’s long-established
triad of monitoring, modeling and research that develops the plans that drive implementation
of restoration efforts in the Chesapeake. We shared with them the importance of open-source,
public-domain data, information, models and analysis.
Most importantly, we shared with them the idea that
information wants to be free. That is,
the power of information is magnified and more fully applied when it’s
available to all, and we have “every brain in the game.” The status quo in China today is
that Chinese agencies use information as a zero sum game. They think, “If I have the information, then
I know something that you don’t, and if you want that information you’re going
to have to pay for it.” This is no way
to run a watershed program! Imagine what
would happen to our Chesapeake
partnership if USGS, NOAA, EPA, and every state agency wanted to be paid for
the data that they collected as part of their publicly funded mission?
China
clearly needs to innovate, throw out their old-think that “power comes from
tightly held information” business model, and become more “Google-like.” China needs to
ask, “What would Google do?” Google’s business model is to develop useful
information and then give it away. Hence, these Google products: Google Search,
Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Images, Gmail, You Tube, and Google just
about everything.
This develops a huge customer base that Google uses for
subtle targeted ad placement.
Public agencies, especially in China, need to think of how to best
apply a form of this business model.
Public agencies like ours don’t advertise, of course, but we do need to
reach people with information, make it downloadable, web-browsable, relevant
and useful. And so we also want to build a large customer base just the same as
Google.
For China,
and for us at the Bay Program, the “What Would Google Do?” questions take the
form of:
-
How can information best move down to the smallest units of
decision-makers (i.e., citizens/local governments)?
-
How do we move innovation better, faster, and into more
hands, at the same time learning from the interaction of having “every brain in
the game”? And how do we best harness
the power of many eyes and minds?
-
What can we learn from others and how can we build an
effective two-way street so that our customers can help shape the product?
There’s reason for hope in China’s new watershed program and
other environmental programs. They’re
learning from us and they’re anxious to begin the hard work. I was questioned by a Chinese Department of Agriculture
colleague who works at the local level to encourage rural villages to install
biogas digesters for human and animal manure.
He asked me, “Why aren’t these beneficial biogas digesters more widely adopted
in American villages?” He had little understanding of how North American
large-scale agriculture works and how it’s different from the small-scale
village plot farming in China,
but the man’s drive and passion to implement good environmental management
practices in Chinese villages was clear.
Change and environmental restoration won’t come easy in China. It’ll be one village biogas digester at a
time, along with a hundred different types of best management practices. But it can come. Like with the Chesapeake
Bay, the Chinese will need to gird themselves for a long, hard
struggle. But given time, a lot of hard work, and a chance for the young innovators
to apply their skills and passion, change will come.
Chesapeake Bay Program models in a Chinese garden
At the cusp of change
Read part two of this blog series.
Welcome to this week’s installment of the BayBlog Question
of the Week! Each week we'll take a question submitted through the Chesapeake Bay Program
website and answer it here for all to read.
This week, Dave is trying to get a sense of “who is causing
what” in relation to the Chesapeake Bay’s pollution
issues. He wants to know: what are the main sources of nitrogen, phosphorous
and sediment to the Bay?
It’s important to know where Chesapeake
Bay pollution comes from because we can use that knowledge to do
our part to reduce the amount of pollutants each of us contributes to the Bay
and its local waterways.
Nitrogen
Nitrogen occurs naturally in soil, animal waste, plant
material and the atmosphere. However, most of the nitrogen delivered to the Bay
comes from:
- Manure, emissions and chemical fertilizers from farmland and
animal operations (38 percent)
- Nitrogen oxide emissions
from sources including vehicles, industries and electric utilities (27 percent)
- Human waste treated and discharged from municipal wastewater
treatment plants and wastewater discharged from industrial facilities (19
percent)
- Chemical fertilizers applied to lawns, golf courses and
other developed lands (10 percent)
- Septic systems that treat household wastewater and discharge
effluent to groundwater
in the Bay watershed (4 percent)
Phosphorus
Phosphorous, like nitrogen, occurs naturally in soil, animal
waste and plant material. But these natural sources account for just 3 percent
of the phosphorous loads to the Chesapeake Bay.
Here are the major sources of the Bay’s phosphorus pollution:
- The
largest source is agriculture: manure and chemical fertilizers from farms
contribute 45 percent of the total phosphorus load to the Bay.
- Runoff
from developed cities, towns and suburbs, as well as legacy sediments from
streams, account for 31 percent of the Bay’s phosphorus pollution.
- Municipal
and industrial wastewater is the source of the remaining 21 percent of
phosphorous loads.
Sediment
Sediments are loose particles of clay, silt and sand. When suspended
in the water, sediment can block sunlight from reaching underwater bay grasses.
As sediment settles to the bottom of the Bay and its rivers, it smothers
bottom-dwelling animals (such as oysters). Sediment can also carry high concentrations
of phosphorus and toxic chemicals.
Most of the sediment to the Bay comes from agriculture. Natural sources, stormwater runoff and erosion from streams make up the rest of the sources of sediment to the Bay and its local waterways.
While some sources of pollution may be larger than others, one
source is not more important to prevent than any other. We must take any and
all steps to reduce nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment loads to the Bay. Think
about how your daily actions contribute pollution to the Bay and its rivers. Be
sure to check out our Help the Bay
tips to learn how you can do your part.
Kristin Foringer is a staffer with the Chesapeake Research Consortium at the Chesapeake Bay Program.
If someone were to ask you what an average twenty-something
would be doing before noon on a Saturday morning, what would you say? I’m going
to guess sleeping. Well, I am proud to say that a few Saturdays ago, some of my
co-workers and I broke this mold.
When I started working for the Chesapeake Bay Program about
two months ago and moved from just north of D.C. to Annapolis,
a former co-worker recommended I look into attending St. Martin’s Lutheran Church. On my first Sunday there, I
noticed a write-up in the bulletin about a rain garden planting that would be
taking place a few months down the road, and I thought it would be a great
opportunity to get involved.
St.
Martin’s received a $109,000 Small Watershed Grant from the Bay
Program and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to plant 23 rain gardens
and 23 trees on its property. One rain garden and all 23 trees were to be
planted on a Saturday in November, while the rest of the project was to be
finished in the spring. The Spa Creek Conservancy, which is responsible for
managing the grant, predicts that the new trees and rain gardens will reduce runoff
from the property by 97 percent. The church’s day school plans on incorporating
the plantings into its lesson plans and engaging the young students as much as
possible in local environmental issues.
Most of the volunteers that arrived that Saturday were
either senior members of the church community or children who attend the day
school. This made the job of planting the 23 trees and rain garden seem like much
more of a challenge. But I was surprised to find that everyone found a task to complete
and the group finished the plantings on time.
Two church members plant a tree on the church grounds
A young student at the church's day school helps with planting a rain garden
I remember looking up from the tree we were planting and
seeing all of the volunteers working together on this early Saturday morning. I
thought that if everyone planted a rain garden, or even a tree, what a
difference it would make for the health of the Chesapeake
Bay.
The completed rain garden at St. Martin's Church
Many of my co-workers who joined me at the planting used the
event for certain projects that they were working on for the Bay Program.
Members of our communications team took pictures and video to post on our
website, while other staffers were interested in learning more from the Spa
Creek Conservancy about similar projects. Although we each came with our own
agenda, in the end, our biggest accomplishment was that we did something
positive for the Bay.
Sometimes when you work for an environmental program, like
the Chesapeake Bay, you forget what it really
takes to make a change. Sure, making policy or informational videos and
collecting data have a large impact, but what is really going to save the Chesapeake Bay are voluntary actions made by people in
communities around the watershed. That Saturday at St.
Martin’s, we were actually practicing what we preached, and I
think that was the best message of all. A Saturday morning well spent.
Welcome to this week’s installment of the BayBlog Question
of the Week! Each week we'll take a question submitted through the Chesapeake
Bay Program website and answer it here for all to read.
Alvina asked: “What role do oysters play in the heath of the
bay? What role might oysters play in the Bay’s future?”
Every native species is vital to the
health and survival of any ecosystem. The eastern oyster in the Chesapeake Bay is no
exception.
One major role oysters play in the Bay is filtering the water. Oysters are filter feeders, meaning they pump large volumes of water through their gills to sift out plankton and other particles they need for nourishmnet. But this
process serves a double purpose: As the oysters feed,
they also filter out harmful pollutants from the Bay's waters, helping to keep the
water clear and clean for bay grasses and other underwater life.
Oysters also provide habitat for many species
in the Chesapeake Bay. By forming reefs, oysters create small ecosystems with nooks and crannies where tiny aquatic animals hide from predators. Reefs can create 50
times the surface area of a flat, muddy Bay bottom of the same size, which is vital to sponges, sea squirts, skilletfish and other organisms that live attached to a hard surface.
Chesapeake Bay oysters are also a food source for various other Bay creatures. Anemones and sea nettles depend on oyster larvae for survival, while flatworms and
mud crabs feed on new oyster spat. Older spat and first-year oysters are
consumed by blue crabs and some types of fish. Some adult oysters even end up as prey for shorebirds like oystercatchers.
The roles of this important species are dramatically
affected by variations in the oyster population. A diminished oyster population is not the sole
reason for the Bay's poor health, but it is certainly detrimental. One of the challenges of Chesapeake Bay restoration is to restore and maintain a healthy oyster
population for ecological purposes while also supporting an oyster fishery.
The future of the Chesapeake's oyster population depends on restoration and management efforts today. For instance, Maryland just introduced a proposal to increase the amount of oyster sanctuaries to one-quarter of the remaining quality reefs in that state's portion of the Bay. Oyster sanctuaries are reefs where harvesting is off-limits, allowing the reefs to expand and provide the important ecological services.
As with every living thing in the Bay, there is a domino effect. Because of all their important roles in the Bay, if oysters suffer, other creatures do as well.
For more information, check out our pages on oysters and oyster management and restoration.
Do you have a question about the Chesapeake Bay? Ask us and we might choose it for our Question of the Week!
Greetings from the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation
and the American Water Research Association conferences in the beautiful Pacific Northwest!
Sometimes you just get lucky and it all just comes
together. Right as we finished a major
milestone of completing our initial nutrient target loads and began our watershed
plans with those targets, the Bay Program modeling team goes off to two national/international
conferences. In those conferences, the
team chaired two sessions, presented eight papers, ran a session synthesis, and
sat on a panel session. What an
excellent opportunity to tell the larger research community about the progress
we’re making on all fronts in the Chesapeake,
as well as the challenges before us.
But while the execution looks smooth and planned, the
reality is that when the abstracts were written a year ago for these
conferences, we thought we’d be further along in much of our technical
analysis. This isn’t unique to us; it’s
by and large the standard operating procedure for all our colleagues in all
conferences.
After all, presenting material at these conferences is a lot
like painting the room in a new house.
The presentation, like the painted room, is just the showy surface. To get to the point where we could add nice
shiny paint, some people had to work on the foundation, some erected the
framework, while others finished the walls. Finally, like the small visible tip
of an iceberg or the fraction of the overall time of working on a house when a room is painted, the presentation is made.
Still, when making these presentations I’m reminded of how
far we’ve come as we put together the largest and most complex TMDL ever
developed. And I’m reminded too, as the
last presentation is made and we pack up ready for home, of how many people
worked to get us this far, and how far we have yet to go together.
Welcome to this week’s installment of the BayBlog Question
of the Week! Each week we'll take a question submitted through the Chesapeake Bay Program
website and answer it here for all to read.
This week’s question comes from Tom: I recently purchased a
house on the Potomac near the Chesapeake Bay
and I want to fertilize the lawn this fall. Is it safe to use an
organic fertilizer?
Fertilizing your lawn in the fall rather than in the spring
is a great step toward protecting the Bay. Many people believe the spring is
the best time to fertilize, but heavy seasonal rainfall can actually wash fertilizers
off your lawn and carry them into your local creek or stream. This polluted
runoff, which contains nitrogen and phosphorus, fuels the growth of algae in
the Chesapeake Bay. Algae blooms are harmful
to fish, crabs, oysters and other species that call the Bay home.
Organic fertilizers are a safer choice to use on your lawn
because they tend to release nutrients more slowly than regular fertilizers,
thus reducing the pollution that could run off your lawn. A variety of organic
fertilizers are available, made from all sorts of natural materials. Check out The Organic
Gardener for more information.
One of the easiest ways to naturally fertilize your lawn is to
recycle your grass clippings and compost the leaves that fall from your trees
this time of year.
- After
mowing your lawn, instead of bagging up the clippings, leave them on the
grass. The clippings will slowly break down and release up to half of your
lawn’s nitrogen needs.
- In
autumn, as leaves cover your yard in a blanket of reds and oranges, consider
mulching them with a lawn mower instead of raking and bagging them. Using
leaves as a natural mulch for your lawn and garden will not only reduce
nutrient pollution from fertilizer, but will cut back on the waste
generated from lawn and leaf bags.
Visit our Help
the Bay in Your Backyard page for more tips on how to fertilize your lawn
for a healthy Bay.
Do you have a question about the Chesapeake Bay? Ask us and we might choose it for our Question of the Week!
For high-quality video, watch on Vimeo.
At 79 years old, Arthur Tuers has been fishing, crabbing and
boating on the Chesapeake Bay for quite some time. He began working at
McNasby's Oyster Company in Annapolis at the youthful age of 10. In his time, he has seen the
harvest of oysters plummet and noticed dramatic changes in crabbing, the clarity of the water and amount of pollution in the Bay. Like the rest of us, Art hopes for a restored Bay; but like few of us, he knows what it was like when you could "see your toenails" in five feet of water.
This is the first video in a new series called "Chesapeake Stories," where we explore the people, history and culture of the Chesapeake Bay region. If you have an idea for a Chesapeake story, contact us.
Welcome to the latest installment of the BayBlog Question of
the Week! Each week we take a question submitted through the Chesapeake Bay Program
website and answer it here for all to read.
This week’s question is one a lot of people have been asking
in recent days: With the nor’easter from Hurricane Ida blowing through the region,
high winds, flooding and stormwater are on everyone’s minds. So what effect
does a storm like this November nor’easter have on the Chesapeake
Bay?
The amount of rain that falls on the Bay watershed has a
direct effect on river flow, which is the volume of fresh water that flows into
the Chesapeake
from its tributaries. Typically, fresh water makes up about half of the Bay’s
entire volume. When large amounts of rain fall in the region, such as during
this nor’easter, it can tip the balance of fresh and salty water in the Bay.
A major issue associated with more rainfall is an increase
in stormwater runoff, which carries dirt, trash, nutrients and other pollutants
from our roads, lawns and parking lots into the Bay and its local waterways. Once
in the water, this pollution can fuel the growth of algae blooms and harm
underwater life, including crabs, oysters and bay grasses.
We’re already seeing the effects of this storm in Virginia, where
officials have implemented a temporary ban
on shellfish harvesting. The fear is that clams, oysters and scallops could
become contaminated due to human and animal waste being washed into the Bay
from tidal flooding.
High tides and flooding are certainly of concern to those
who live by the Bay’s shores, but large storms like this have an effect on
every stream, creek and river throughout the region. You can do your part to
minimize the impact of storms and eliminate as much pollution as possible by
picking up litter on the ground and covering bare spots in your yard to reduce
erosion.
For more information about how weather affects the Bay and
its watershed, check out our weather page.
Do you have a question about the Chesapeake
Bay? Please send
it to us through our web comment form. Your question might be chosen for
our next BayBlog Question of the Week!