Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee

“Ecosystem services” are the benefits ecosystems provide to people. These benefits include providing food, clean air, clean water, recreation, and many other explicit or intrinsic values to people and communities. Investments in Chesapeake Bay restoration are typically designed to improve water quality, given the legal requirements of the Clean Water Act. The Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement sets goals that encompass a wide range of ecosystem services. A narrow focus on water quality can result in the implementation of practices and policies that maximize nutrient and sediment reductions at the expense of feasible alternatives that offer greater ecosystem services or multiple benefits to living resources and communities.

This workshop was designed to gather input from a diverse array of stakeholders to help shape a coherent framework to identify impactful and durable ways to embed ecosystem services considerations in decision-making. This framework is critical to drive change for both the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) and for multiple lagging outcomes in the 2014 Watershed Agreement that provide ecosystem service benefits beyond water quality. As jurisdictions are doubling down on their efforts to meet the TMDL 2025 target date and large investments are being made in environmental restoration and conservation, there is an opportunity to work strategically to achieve a broader set of goals for ecosystems and communities.

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The workshop, “Using Local Monitoring Results to Inform the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Watershed Model”, was held in March 2023 to provide insight on the scope of local water quality monitoring efforts within and outside of the Bay watershed that could be used to inform the CBWM. Scientists and managers developed recommendations that could be used by modelers for either calibration or knowledge generation to inform the Phase 7 version of the CBWM currently under development for a 2028 decision by the CBP, recommendations for how local monitoring efforts could be designed or altered to better inform the CBWM, and recommendations for how monitored trends could be used in management. The preliminary presentations for the workshop provided essential background information on the CBWM and data used to parameterize it. This information was the foundation for discussions on existing data gaps, the importance of current local monitoring networks, and best practices for developing future monitoring networks.

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As solar energy becomes a lower cost and more efficient source of renewable energy, major utility-scale solar panel installations, or solar farms, are being proposed and installed around the Mid-Atlantic region. These solar farms constitute a major land transformation. This transformation is particularly of interest because there can be substantial alteration of land characteristics in the development process, and solar farms also create a unique land cover with impervious surface over pervious surface, generating potential changes in hydrologic and water quality processes. There is currently wide variability in guidance and understanding of best practices relating to the land development and management of solar farms in the Chesapeake Bay region. Thus, a STAC-led workshop gathered speakers and participants from universities, industry, non-governmental organizations, and multiple levels of government across the Chesapeake Bay watershed to address the following questions in April 2023:

1. What is the state of science on how solar farms impact hydrology and water quality under a range of site and management conditions and project scales?
2. What are current best management practices and policies, and where in our region are there opportunities for improving recommendations and/or policies?
3. What are the key gaps with respect to research needs to better answer understand the implications of utility scale solar development.

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