Our Bay: Why bay grades matter
Annapolis Capital
by CHRIS TRUMBAUER

Temperatures are warming up, tulips are blooming, and allergy sufferers are sneezing up a storm. These days, there is also another sure sign that spring is here: the release of report cards grading the health of our waterways.

Each year, various groups including riverkeepers, watershed groups, the University of Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay Program release report cards designed to assign grades or scores to the Chesapeake Bay or particular tributaries.

The underlying reasoning for each of these efforts is simple. We need to measure our progress.

The effort to restore Chesapeake Bay is vast and complex. New policies and regulations are enacted each year. Meanwhile more and more people are moving to the area and land continues to be developed. Stormwater is the major driver of water quality in many rivers, while agriculture runoff is the primary concern in others.

A few rivers are showing signs of improvement, while many more are either stagnant or becoming worse.

Report cards are a valuable tool for quantifying monitoring data and measuring current water quality conditions. In addition, many watershed organizations have found that report cards are important outreach tools for generating community interest and increasing citizen understanding of ecosystem health.

Water quality data by itself is frankly not very sexy, but packaged in a report card format, the information can be communicated effectively.

Many watershed groups are now part of the Mid-Atlantic Tributary Report Card Workgroup, led by scientists from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. This group works to standardize methodology used to assess water quality and lends assistance to watershed groups producing report cards. This helps ensure the various report cards are credible, comparable and relevant.

Since I am a riverkeeper, people often approach me and ask me how the rivers are doing. This question isn't idle conversation - they really want to know. Report cards help us to give a credible answer to those questions.

It's important to remember that many things affect water quality and there is variability in the data from year to year. However, grading water quality indicators annually is valuable, especially when compared to long range data trends.

For instance, water clarity in the West and Rhode Rivers was slightly worse in 2009 than 2008. Even more significant is the fact that the water clarity in these rivers seems to have slowly but steadily gotten worse since the Chesapeake Bay Program started tracking it in 1985.

Unfortunately, low grades are very common in most of the water quality report cards for the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. In fact, bad news for the bay is so constant that we risk becoming immune to it.

We cannot let our enthusiasm for clean water be dampened by bad news. The dead zones, algae blooms and bad grades should be a wake-up call that our current policies and regulations are not sufficient to bring the positive change we all want to see.

However, not all the news is bad. In the West and Rhode Rivers report card, we profile a study being conducted by scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center which is investigating mercury in our waterways.

New regulations on power plant emissions are reducing the amount of mercury going into the air. Researchers are hopeful that this will bring about a quick response in terms of lower mercury levels in our waterways and the fish that live in them. If so, perhaps this model of regulation also could be used as a model to help address nutrient pollution in our waterways.

We know that nutrient pollution is the chief contributor to the Chesapeake Bay's poor water quality. Yet developers fight new stormwater regulations, new ideas on oyster management are met with fierce opposition and enforcement of environmental regulations continues to be weak.

If we are serious about improving our grades, it is time to make tough decisions. That includes holding elected officials and other decision-makers accountable for their actions.

While the actual grades are given to indicators of water quality, what we are really grading is our effort to restore the bay. Indicators like dissolved oxygen levels show symptoms of an ecosystem out of balance.

The causes of those symptoms are what we really need to address: land use, pollution sources, fisheries management, etc. We all need to work harder to tackle these issues if we want to improve our grades.