Celebrating 40 Years of Chesapeake Bay Restoration

On December 9, 1983, the governors of Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the Mayor of the District of Columbia, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the chair of the Chesapeake Bay Commission came together to sign the first Chesapeake Bay Agreement. This agreement, which was based on a five-year study conducted by the EPA, committed the signatories to addressing the issues plaguing the Chesapeake Bay. Within a year, the signing partners developed their plan for carrying out the Agreement and thereby formed the Chesapeake Bay Program.

Prior to 1985, water quality monitoring occurred at the state level, which made it difficult to compare and synthesize the data for the full watershed. In 1985, the Chesapeake Bay Water Quality Monitoring program was created to ensure that Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. were monitoring Chesapeake waters the same way. This program has grown to include over 250 monitoring stations in the tidal and non-tidal portions of the Bay, collecting data on water quality, benthic macroinvertebrates, underwater grasses, land use and land change.

The Chesapeake Bay Program created its first nutrient management plan in 1986 after identifying the impacts of nitrogen and phosphorus on water quality. At first, efforts were focused on the tidal water of the Chesapeake Bay, but by 1987, the partnership began using tributary-based management strategies that focus on reducing nutrient pollution in major rivers. This effort eventually evolved into the Watershed Implementation Plans now used to reduce nutrient and sediment pollution from all seven jurisdictions of the watershed.

As the partnership evolved and new research came to light, the Chesapeake Bay Program signed its second Chesapeake Bay Agreement in 1987. This agreement expanded the scope of the 1983 agreement with 29 commitments for action and set a goal to reduce nutrients entering the Bay by 40% by 2000.

By the late 1980s, the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Executive Council became increasingly concerned over the impacts of phosphate detergent, a common laundry detergent used in households at the time. At the request of the Executive Council, the Chesapeake Bay Commission produced a report on the issue that led to regional bans on the product in Maryland (1985), Washington, D.C., (1986), Virginia (1988) and Pennsylvania (1989). The bans played a significant role in limiting nutrient pollution to the Bay and demonstrated successful collaboration amongst the Chesapeake Bay Program’s partners.

In 1989, the Chesapeake Bay Program developed its first Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab Fishery Management Plan to promote collaboration among the three jurisdictions that manage commercial crabbing in the watershed: Maryland, Virginia and the Potomac River Fisheries Commission (PRFC). Nearly a decade later, in 1997, we developed a committee to provide advice to those managing the blue crab fishery. This committee, known as the Chesapeake Bay Stock Assessment Committee, meets annually to review survey data and make its recommendations.

By 1993, the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Executive Council signed the Chesapeake Bay Policy for the Introduction of Non-indigenous Aquatic Species. This policy established a joint review process for Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania to carefully assess first-time introduction of non-native species to the watershed. It also committed to collaboration among jurisdictions to prevent the unintentional introduction of new species.

Starting in the early 1980s, the Chesapeake Bay Program led an effort to restore a dwindling striped bass fishery. Following in-depth research, Maryland placed a moratorium on commercial and recreational fishing of striped bass in 1987, and Virginia did the same two years later. The moratoriums were lifted in 1992 and limited harvest seasons continued in each state. By 1995, striped bass were officially declared restored. Today, protection of striped bass continues with harvest restrictions and efforts to improve habitat.

In 1995, the Local Government Partnership Initiative was signed, engaging the watershed’s 1,650 local governments in the Bay restoration effort. This demonstrated a commitment from the Bay Program to work closely with local governments on implementing restoration projects that met the needs of their residents. Nearly two decades later, the Executive Council reaffirmed this commitment by signing the Resolution to Support Local Engagement in 2016.

In 1998, the Chesapeake Bay Gateways and Watertrails network (Chesapeake Gateways) was formed by the Chesapeake Bay Initiative Act, which called on the National Park Service (NPS) to identify, conserve, restore, interpret, and provide equitable access to natural, recreational, historic, and cultural resources within the 41-million acre Chesapeake Bay watershed. The NPS has provided approximately $26 million in financial and technical assistance for more than 397 projects in communities across the watershed through Chesapeake Gateways, improving Bay access and fueling the region’s outdoor recreation economy. The network bolsters the Bay Program’s ongoing efforts to add public access sites to the Bay, which started in 1987 and continues today.

Chesapeake 2000 was the third Bay agreement to be signed and the first to emphasize ecosystem-based fisheries management. The Agreement established a record-high 102 commitments to reduce pollution, restore habitats, protect living resources, promote sound land use practices and engage the public in Bay restoration. The Agreement committed to strengthening partnerships with Delaware, New York and West Virginia which led to them signing on to the partnership’s water quality goals, marking the first time that these states were officially included in the partnership.

Initially, the Chesapeake Bay Program was focused on protecting wetlands mainly in the tidal areas of the Chesapeake Bay, which required significant attention. But by 2001, both Maryland and Virginia passed state laws protecting wetlands in non-tidal rivers. This greatly expanded the protection of wetlands against development.

In 2009, the Chesapeake Bay Executive Order was signed by President Barack Obama, calling on the federal government to renew the effort to protect and restore the Chesapeake Bay watershed. This Executive Order fostered collaboration between federal agencies including the Department of Defense, United States Department of Agriculture, United States Geological Survey, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In 2010, the Chesapeake Bay Program met its Riparian Forest Buffer Goal of planting 2,010 miles of riparian forest in the watershed in 10 years. In 2014, a new goal for riparian forest buffers was set in the most recent Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement.

For decades, the Chesapeake Bay Program has worked to conserve lands with both environmental and cultural significance. In 2014, state and federal partners within the Chesapeake Bay program came together to establish the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park along Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The park tells the story of Harriet Tubman and the lives of enslaved people living in the region. It also includes forest and wetland areas that are critical for wildlife habitat and water quality in the Bay. Efforts such as these continue with the work of the Bay Program’s Protected Lands Outcome.

The 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement established 10 goals and 31 outcomes to restore the Bay, its tributaries and the lands that surround them. All seven jurisdictions of the Chesapeake Bay watershed signed on to the goals of this agreement, which included the pollution limits set in the Chesapeake Bay Total Daily Maximum Load established four years prior. This 2014 agreement was the first agreement to include goals related to climate change, environmental literacy and diversity.

In 2016, the Chesapeake Bay Program met its goal for reducing wastewater runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. A primary factor for this achievement was the use of Biological Nutrient Reduction (BNR) technology, which we began piloting in 1997 at the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant in Washington, D.C. The partnership began implementing BNR at other plants and now uses it across the watershed, except in certain northern plants where it is too cold for the technology to work.

The Chesapeake Bay Program greatly advanced its understanding of how land is being used in the watershed when it completed the Chesapeake Bay High-resolution Land Cover Project in 2016. The data set became even more detailed in 2022 with the release of the Very High-Resolution Land Cover and Land Use and Change Data, which provides a 1-meter resolution of land cover and land use in 206 counties across the watershed.

Since forming, the Chesapeake Bay Program has used various physical or computer-based models to estimate how factors such as weather, land-use, geography and restoration projects will affect pollution in the Bay. In 2017, we released the sixth phase of our Watershed Model: the Chesapeake Assessment Scenario Tool (CAST). CAST is a landmark tool that jurisdictions across the Bay watershed use to plan their pollution reduction projects. The seventh phase of this model is currently in development.

After a years-long process, the Bloede Dam on the Patapsco River was finally breached in 2018. The dam had been selected for removal by the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Fish Passage Workgroup to allow migratory fish such as American shad and river herring to have better access to spawning grounds. Since 1987, the Chesapeake Bay Program has opened up over 31,000 miles to fish passage within the Bay watershed.

In 2020, the Chesapeake Executive Council signed a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice (DEIJ) Statement to commit the Chesapeake Bay Program to “equitable, just and inclusive engagement of all communities living throughout the watershed.” The statement commits the partnership to grow the racial and ethnic diversity in the partnership and prioritize DEIJ needs in restoration efforts.

In 2021, the Chesapeake Executive Council signed a directive that commits the Chesapeake Bay Program to address the increasing threats of climate change in all aspects of the partnership’s work. In particular, Bay Program partners will utilize their world-class scientific, modeling, monitoring and planning capabilities to prioritize the communities, working lands and habitats that are most vulnerable to the risks that a changing climate is bringing to the region.

In 2022, a workgroup coordinated by the Chesapeake Bay Program completed the world’s largest oyster reef restoration project in the Piankatank River, where 438 acres of healthy oyster reef have been added to the tributary. This milestone is part of a goal from the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement that seeks to fully restore oyster habitat in 10 major tributaries—five in Maryland and five in Virginia. So far, oyster habitat has been restored in six of the 10 originally selected tributaries.