Last week, the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) released its annual Chesapeake Bay and Watershed Report Card. Here’s the widely-reported first paragraph:
“The Chesapeake Bay scored a C+ (56%) overall, the highest it’s ever achieved in 40 years of tracking. In addition to the increase since last year, long‑term trends continue to improve for most regions and indicators.”
Good news? Certainly, though C+ is hardly an Honor Roll grade. What does it really mean?
As usual in Bay Matters, there’s no simple answer. First off, does that grade apply equally to all parts of the Chesapeake ecosystem? No indeed. Consider the broad swath of land and waterways that drain to the Chesapeake’s sprawling but shallow tidal basin, which collects whatever its rivers bring to it. From New York’s Chemung River and Pennsylvania’s Juniata to Maryland’s Choptank and Virginia’s Elizabeth, there is considerable variation in human population, topography, soils, land cover, and nature of waterways. The creatively illustrated report takes eight pages to provide its answer.
Remember that the report is based on data from 2025, which UMCES and its partners collated and reviewed in the first part of this year. That’s the reality of scientific reporting and a hint about how much this is a long-term intellectual enterprise.
A one-point gain is another hint. Ecological restoration is a gradual, uneven process, affected by a year’s periodic, accumulated weather events, overlaid by longer-term trends in climate change. We have been altering the lands and waters of the 64,000-square-mile Chesapeake watershed busily for more than 400 years, to the point that virtually none of it is in exactly the same condition as it was in 1607, when the first English settlers arrived at Jamestown. Moreover, our human population has grown from around 50,000 Native Americans with stone and bone tools then to some 19,000,000 of us now making a transition beyond digital tools to artificial intelligence, even as we demand more power, more speed, and more convenience.
It’s also worth noting that when the UMCES tracking of Bay health began 40 years ago, our watershed population was 12,000,000, so it has increased about 60% since then. Think 60% more houses, more roads, more parking lots, more public facilities, more commerce. The challenge that Bay restoration faces is the absorbing and resolving the cumulative—and continuing—negative pressures of four centuries we have placed on the watershed’s natural ecological systems, on which we are still very much dependent, no matter how spellbinding our technology becomes.
Those negative pressures came gradually, to be sure, and we should be realistic about how quickly we can remediate them. The UMCES scores have varied by small margins from year to year. Even so, the UMCES team finds the long-term trend positive and encouraging, as in its comment that “There were steady, Baywide rises in benchmarks for dissolved oxygen and aquatic vegetation and decreases in harmful nutrient pollutants of phosphorus and nitrogen.
Note: Read the regional segments’ names carefully. The Lower Western Shore refers to Anne Arundel’s short rivers, not Virginia’s big ones. That small region’s dense suburban land cover, requires specific restoration techniques, especially along small streams that drain concentrated populations of people, buildings, and pavement.
That kind of restoration aims to build a network of more resilient local ecosystems able to absorb extreme weather and other stresses such as last winter’s Potomac sewage spill. Over the past forty years, pulling restoration projects of all sorts together has required broad but enduring partnerships and investments between scientists, federal and state governments, nonprofit organizations, local communities, and businesses of all sizes.
As some readers will remember from a Bay News story of July 27, in 2019, the James River Association received the prestigious Thiess International River Prize, considered the most coveted award of river and watershed restoration. The Thiess River Prize “inspires innovative initiatives that promote river resilience, encouraging winners to develop ‘bankable’ projects that provide effective solutions to the most pressing issues faced by our waterways.” When JRA CEO Bill Street asked the Chair of the International River Foundation what common factors he saw in previous River Prize winners, he replied, “Persistent, sustained effort.” This year’s UMCES encourages us to continue. We’re getting somewhere.
