The USGS Chesapeake Science Strategy, 2021–2025

By Kenneth Hyer and Scott Phillips, U.S. Geological Survey. Fact Sheet 2021–3037, June 2021.

Why it matters

The Chesapeake Bay ecosystem provides almost $100 billion a year in goods and services to the 18 million people in its watershed. The Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP), one of the nation's largest federal–state restoration partnerships, rests on rigorous science, and the USGS is a key provider. Despite real progress, climate change and competing demands on land mean progress toward the 10 goals of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement must speed up. The USGS is expanding integrated science and working with stakeholders to guide restoration and conservation for fish, waterfowl and people.

Four themes:

1. science for managing stream health, fish habitat and water quality;
2. the risks to coastal habitats and migratory waterbirds;
3. better landscape data and forecasts for watershed management;
4. integrating science and informing stakeholders.

Theme 1: Streams, fish and water quality

The watershed's recreational and commercial fisheries are worth more than $20 billion a year, but in places fish populations and health are declining from poor water quality, lost habitat and invasive species. The USGS studies how management (restoration and conservation), drivers (land-use and climate change) and stressors combine to affect habitat, fish and the economies that depend on them.

• Drivers: land-use and climate change reshape landscapes; forecasting their combined effects is key to new strategies.
• Stressors: excess nutrients, sediment and toxic contaminants, altered flow, rising temperatures, disease and invasive species — managers need their cumulative effects.
• Management: practices are being put in place, but managers need to know where to place them and how ecosystems respond.
• Habitats studied: cold headwaters (for brook trout), smaller streams (where most management happens), large rivers, and the links between the watershed and the estuary. More than 3,600 species of fish, plants and wildlife live in the watershed.

Figure 3: predicted 2090 change in stream health under different land-use and climate scenarios; red: improvement, yellow: degradation. USGS (Maloney and others, 2020).

• Regional assessments predict stream health and fish habitat across the watershed and forecast changes, to target conservation and restoration.
• Status and trends: the USGS leads streamflow measurement, water-quality monitoring and trend analysis in the nontidal watershed, with uniform methods and partners, showing whether conditions are improving or degrading and whether management is working.

Figure 4: changes in total nitrogen yield, 2009–2018 — blue improving, orange degrading. USGS (data from Moyer and Langland, 2020).

Theme 2: Coastal habitats and waterbirds

The Chesapeake's coasts shelter fish, crabs and migratory waterfowl, and nearly 10 million people live, work and play there. Sea-level rise, changing storms, development and emerging biological threats make balancing these uses hard.

• Sea-level rise: the USGS maps and assesses coastal habitats to predict their vulnerability or resilience, and builds decision tools for restoration, by (1) measuring land subsidence and elevation change to forecast relative sea-level rise, (2) studying effects on marsh restoration and marsh migration, and (3) using paleoecology to guide long-term restoration.
• Waterbirds: studies of food resources, bird abundance and movement, and new threats — disease, harmful algal blooms and emerging contaminants.
• Avian influenza: the USGS assesses its possible spread from wild birds to poultry, a major industry in the watershed.

Theme 3: Land data and forecasts

The CBP aims to keep watersheds healthy and conserve more land — with a chance to conserve 30 percent of lands by 2030. But new high-resolution data show an alarming loss of forests and other vital lands to development.

Figure 6: the new 1-meter land-use data (left) against the 30-meter National Land Cover Dataset (right). USGS.

• High-resolution mapping: the USGS oversaw 1-meter land-use data for the whole watershed, and now tracks where and how fast land is converted, for local decisions.
• Best management practice data: partners trust the USGS with privacy-protected local BMP data to explain water-quality change.
• Forecasting: the USGS Land-Change Model is being upgraded to simulate infill development, agriculture and forests, with the latest data and climate scenarios, to guide land protection and planning.

Theme 4: Science for decisions

The Watershed Agreement commits to science-based decisions. The USGS provides unbiased, non-regulatory science, brings together scientists from centers across the country, and works with the CBP teams pursuing the agreement's 10 goals and 31 outcomes — many due in 2025 — translating findings to guide adaptive management. Its Chesapeake approaches are also applied to other regional ecosystem studies nationwide.

Sources

Based on USGS Chesapeake Science Strategy 2021–2025, by Kenneth Hyer and Scott Phillips, USGS Fact Sheet 2021–3037, U.S. Geological Survey; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The import scrambled the fact sheet's layout; the order and three figures are restored from its PDF. Its photographs — several credited to the Chesapeake Bay Program or to individuals — and its conceptual diagrams are not reproduced.