Bay Blog - Chesapeake Bay Program

Krystal Freeman is a Living Resources Subcommittee staffer with the Chesapeake Research Consortium at the Chesapeake Bay Program.

Yesterday morning, a group of college students from Hampton University’s Multicultural Students at Sea Together (MAST) program came to our office to learn about the Bay Program. We the Chesapeake Research Consortium (CRC) staffers are generally only a few years removed from our Bachelor’s degrees, making us perfect candidates to represent CBP for this particular group.

As the group approached the Fish Shack, I couldn’t help but think they looked very clean and well put-together to have been sailing the Chesapeake for close to two weeks!

Everything about this group varied: one was a graduate student and another will be starting college as a freshman this coming semester. Majors ranged from marine biology to women’s studies and political science. English is not the first language of several of the students, and they allowed me to use my Spanish with them as we continued discussing CBP during the break. The students in this program create a fun and enthusiastic group — once they started talking, you could tell that they would continue talking about the summer of 2008 for a lifetime.

I and the rest of the CRC staffers were able to share with the group many of the opportunities afforded us by working here through the CRC Career Development Program: projects we have played a role in, people we have met, and volunteer activities we’ve completed. In addition to information about the subcommittees we support, we shared things from our own college experiences such as internships, research projects, study abroad…even ID pictures and school spirit. It was definitely a different feeling standing in the Fish Shack as the “seasoned veteran” passing on words of wisdom.

Krystal speaks with MAST students in the "Fish Shack," the Bay Program's conference room.

Lewis Linker is a modeling coordinator with the U.S. EPA at the Chesapeake Bay Program.

The world’s a pretty big place. So when a group of water resource experts from different parts of the world come together, and all describe the same problems (though seen through different lenses of geography, culture, and language), that’s a notable thing.

That’s what happened at the 2008 World Water Expo in Zaragoza, Spain, where water resource experts from across the globe — including Australia, Israel, Jordan, Spain, South Africa, and the United States — participated in a scientific symposium as a kick-off to the Expo. All invited speakers there spoke of problems with growth, water supply, water quality, and climate disruption. The water resource conditions in the various countries were as varied as the languages spoken, but the underlying problems were the same. Jordan, for example, is arid with a developing economy, whereas Australia is arid with a post-industrial economy — yet both face the same challenges of growth, water supply, water quality, and climate disruption.

Where does the Bay Program fit into this picture? As an invited participant, the Bay Program described our approach of integrating models, monitoring, and research for restoration of the Chesapeake. Our presentation of the linked airshed, watershed, estuarine, and living resource models, along with the supporting and corroborating monitoring observations and research was well-received, and was seen as a world-class example of the information systems needed to support water resources under pressure from population growth, climate change, and past environmental degradation.

All of the invited speakers spoke to problems of growth and water quality. In the Chesapeake, we’ve been working a long time to restore water quality despite growth pressures in our watershed, so these are issues we’re familiar with. But just like in other parts of the world, the issues of providing an adequate water supply and climate disruption are also emerging issues for the Chesapeake. Last year, the city of Fredrick, Maryland, had to curtail construction permits due to concerns over the sufficiency of water supply. This may be a harbinger, because our Chesapeake water supply infrastructure is designed for average annual flows different from the decreased annual flows we may see with future climate change, as the Bay Program has described in presentations at the 2007 American Water Resources Society and the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation.

At the World Water Expo we saw that the challenges of growth, adequate water supply, water quality, and climate disruption were ubiquitous. The world’s a big place and a watery place. How ironic that we’re all in the same boat.