NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) - Chesapeake Bay cleanup is making real progress in blue crabs, underwater grasses and other key areas but still lags badly in wetlands and forest buffers, experts say, as a major plan to restore the bay hits the halfway mark.
The “2015-2016 Bay Barometer” released Feb. 1 by the Chesapeake Bay Program indicates Virginia and some other bay states will not only meet their 2017 restoration targets but, in some cases, are already ahead of the game.
“Virginia is on track,” said Will Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a CBP partner. “We’re very pleased by that.
“The dead zone’s getting smaller, bay grasses are at record levels, the crab population has rebounded. Things are working.”
The CBP is a regional partnership of federal, state and local governments, academic and nongovernmental groups to lead and direct restoration efforts throughout the watershed.
Its report claims “significant progress” overall, including reaching half the target for bay grasses and protected lands, and 90 percent abundance for blue crabs. A third of tidal bay segments are meeting water quality standards, while bay waters are “noticeably clearer,” in part because the wastewater sector met its pollution reduction targets 10 years ahead of schedule.
But those achievements stand in stark contrast to the failure to come even close to targets to preserve or rebuild wetlands and to plant forest buffers along streams and rivers.
Wetlands showed a mere 9 percent success rate, while riparian buffers stood at 7 percent.
“My own assessment, and it is a subjective one, is that we won’t make the goal,” said Don Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, another partner. “We won’t accomplish what we set out to do by 2025 without a significant improvement in increasing the ’kidneys’ in the system - those parts of the systems like riparian zones and wetlands that not only trap nutrients and sediments but also provide resilience in terms of runoff and water storage.”
CBP Director Nick DiPasquale said it has become harder to hit targets for forest buffers as aging farmers are less willing to encumber their children by enrolling in federal contracts to install them. Funding for such programs has also declined, he said, and some conservation districts are more successful than others in promoting them locally.
As for wetlands, said Baker, “we as a society in the bay watershed are not only not replacing or restoring them, we’re still losing them.”
He said governments and the private sector should be held more accountable.
The barometer is an annual report compiled by the CBP, CBF and the center, each of which forms its own independent analysis of similar data and information gathered throughout the watershed.
Virginia, five other bay states and the District of Columbia are working under a 2010 federal mandate to put anti-pollution measures in place by 2025 that will lead to a restored bay.
“The indicators show that what we are doing is working,” Boesch said. “We probably will have to do more on some things and do some new things, but we’re on the right pathway, quite remarkably, because there are not many places in the world that have been working on these kinds of problems that can say that.”
But the experts warn there are more challenges ahead as 150,000 people move into the watershed every year.
“We picked the low-hanging fruit,” said Baker of restoration efforts. “We have a lot more fruit to pick. It’s way up in the top of the trees. It’s going to be harder to get. But if we don’t keep up the work to reduce pollution, restore fisheries, manage them better, restore habitat, we’re going to see this recovery start to diminish and go in the other direction.”
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Information from: Daily Press, https://www.dailypress.com/
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