Chesapeake Bay's Water Quality Condition Has Been Recovering

Description

To protect the aquatic living resources of Chesapeake Bay, the Chesapeake Bay Program partnership has developed guidance for state water quality standards, which include ambient water quality criteria to protect designated uses (DUs), and associated assessment procedures for dissolved oxygen (DO), water clarity/underwater bay grasses, and chlorophyll-a. For measuring progress toward meeting the respective states' water quality standards, a multimetric attainment indicator approach was developed to estimate combined standards attainment. This study, published in Science of the Total Environment, applied this approach to three decades of monitoring data of DO, water clarity/underwater bay grasses, and chlorophyll-a data on annually updated moving 3-year periods to track the progress in all 92 management segments of tidal waters in the Chesapeake Bay. 

Citation

Zhang, Q., R.R. Murphy, R. Tian, M.K. Forsyth, E.M. Trentacoste, J. Keisman, and P.J. Tango, 2018. “Chesapeake Bay's water quality condition has been recovering: Insights from a multimetric indicator assessment of thirty years of tidal monitoring data”, Science of the Total Environment, 637-638: 1617-1625, doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.05.025.