The Chesapeake Bay Program partnership is involved with a number of programs and projects that help advance Bay science, policy and restoration.
Environmental models are essential for simulating ecosystems that are either too large or too complex to isolate for real-world experiments. These simulations, called scenarios, allow scientists to predict changes within our ecosystem due to management actions.
Monitoring the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries allows Bay Program partners to detect changes that take place; improves our understanding of the natural environment; and reveals trends over time that can provide valuable information to policy makers.
To insure data accuracy, the Bay Program maintains a Quality Assurance Program that monitors and tracks several environmental data sets that look at pollutants, water quality, land use, algae, fish, crabs and submerged aquatic vegetation.
The Resource Lands Assessment (RLA) provides a regional multi-state look at the most important remaining resource lands in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. The RLA uses GIS models and expert knowledge to assess the value of resource lands within the watershed.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released the draft Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), a "pollution diet" that will compel sweeping actions to restore the Chesapeake Bay and its vast network of streams, creeks and rivers.
Watershed Implementation Plans (also referred to as WIPs) are the next step in our continued progression toward a restored Chesapeake Bay. These plans consider such things as ecological restoration and sustainability while allowing for greater transparency and accountability for improved performance.
