BayScaping: going the whole yard to help the Bay
Bay Naturalist / By Kathy Reshetiloff - Bay Journal
Now that spring has sprung, our attention turns toward our yards. Today, few of us have the time or resources needed to maintain a formal landscape. As a result, people are exploring alternatives to traditional landscapes, and many have responded with a more natural yard. In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, this style is called BayScaping. BayScapes are environmentally sound landscapes benefiting people, wildlife and the Chesapeake Bay. BayScaping advocates a holistic approach through principles inspired by relationships found in the natural world.
The BayScapes program teaches homeowners and landowners how to practice conservation landscaping, conserve water, create diversity, use native plants, create wildlife habitat, use Integrated Pest Management and plan for the long term.
Conservation landscaping works with nature to reduce pollution and enhance wildlife habitat. It encourages a low-input formula for yard care: less fertilizers and pesticides, proper lawn care and alternatives to turf.
The wise management of soil, water and vegetation is the key to conservation landscaping. This includes maintaining a healthy vegetative cover, preventing soil erosion from wind and water, and maintaining proper soil pH and fertility levels.
The increasing human population puts a serious strain on natural resources. At some homes, as much as 40 percent of the water used each month finds its way into the landscape. Excess or wasted water runs off the land carrying nutrients, sediments and even traces of toxic products into nearby creeks and streams. Protection of local waterways depends upon reduced water runoff. You can reduce the amount of water used to maintain your yard by as much as two-thirds, with little expense or effort. Some key elements include timing and thoroughness of watering, proper equipment and plant selection. Diversity in the landscape provides for the needs of people and wildlife. No matter how large or small an area, you can create diversity by using different types of plants. Native grasses, ground covers, wildflowers, shrubs and trees provide a variety of shapes, colors, smells and habitats. Even very small or urban yards can be transformed using container gardens, patio and deck plantings and wall gardens for an esthetically pleasing and dynamic landscape.
Native plants may be defined as those species that were present when the first Europeans arrived in the New World. Because they are well-adapted to local climate and soil types, native plants require little maintenance such as trimming, watering and fertilizer applications. The most beneficial plants are those species that are native to your particular region or state. This ultimately saves time, labor and money. By planting native plants at home, we can reduce the amount of nutrients and chemicals running off our yards and gardens into local waterways, and help to improve water quality.
Habitat refers to the food, water, cover and nesting sites needed by all living creatures to survive. Forests, meadows and wetlands are rapidly being converted to other uses to accommodate the growing number of people.
Whether developed for homes or businesses, the result is the same: Wildlife habitat is lost. We can help to restore wildlife habitat one backyard at a time. Backyard habitats provide safe havens for animals to live and move among. We can provide food and cover by planting a variety of locally native plants. Nesting boxes and sources of water also provide habitat components critical for wildlife.
Integrated Pest Management is the combination of biological, physical and chemical methods to control pests. IPM offers a variety of choices to manage pests, including many natural and biological controls. It includes the proper identification of pests, the use of beneficial insects and animals to get rid of undesirable pests, the use of organic pesticides and careful and directed pesticide use. While IPM does not totally eliminate chemical pesticides, it can reduce the volume used on the land. This approach minimizes impacts on wildlife and the Chesapeake Bay.
BayScaping also involves long-term planning. Don't try to change your whole yard all at once. Start small and build over time. Decide what kind of landscape you want in five, 10 or even 20 years and then work toward those goals. By looking at the big picture, you can design a landscape that meets your needs, expectations, budget and time while incorporating the BayScapes principles. Planning involves four basic steps: inventory existing site conditions; realistically plan uses for different parts of your yard; select plants that are best suited for each use; and determine costs of maintenance.
By BayScaping, you can reduce the time and labor spent maintaining your yard, create wildlife habitat, reduce pollutants to waterways, and even save money. For information or to receive a BayScapes Information Packet, contact: the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service at 410-573-4593; any Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay office; or the Chesapeake Regional Information Service at: 800-662-CRIS.
Kathryn Reshetiloff is with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Chesapeake Bay Field Office in Annapolis.
BayScaping: going the whole yard to help the Bay
Article from Bay Journal - April 1998
Showing posts with label Save The Bay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Save The Bay. Show all posts
2011-04-04
2011-03-18
Chesapeake Bay Restoration - Don Heinle
Don Heinle helped to turn tide of opinion toward Bay restoration
Past is Prologue / By Dr. Kent Mountford - Bay Journal
As I was leaving my job with the Chesapeake Bay Program, I explained to my colleagues that by giving up my daily and interminable 100-mile commute, I would gain almost 535 hours a year. I made a pledge to them, and myself, to spend at least 100 of those hours seriously looking at the extraordinary natural world I live in and at least 100 hours a year writing about what I saw. My logbook, in part, records:
“Received word today of a memorial service for Don Heinle who died at 63 … in Washington (State). Honoring my own bargain, I spent some time watching the creek today and must now write about it.”
Donald R. Heinle is a name not widely known among today’s Chesapeake pundits, but he was a respected and courageous scientist during his more than a decade of work on the Bay. I had reason to ponder his work this chilly, but sunny morning.
Ice had formed overnight, just a thin layer, but it covered a couple of square miles and was enough that diving ducks could not feed. As it began to break up, loose flocks of about 500 ruddy ducks (Oxyura jamaicensis) moved silently up the creek and began eagerly diving for the shoots and rhizomes of horned pondweed (Zannichellia palustris), one of the Bay’s submerged aquatic grasses which had been slowly growing since autumn.
Our creek is turbid in summer, being fed nitrogen from the Patuxent’s upstream sources far in excess of its biological needs. But with winter’s clearer water, enough light reaches the bottom, even at about an 11 foot-depth that millions of shoots — perhaps 200 million plants in this creek — begin to sprout in late autumn. They grow slowly in the cold, by February rising 1–3 inches, but when the creek warms, they can reach a meter above the bottom along the shallow creek margins.
Turbidity and nutrient-fed plankton rob the deeper areas of light in spring but the grasses still survive until June down to 8 feet or so and are marvelous habitat for fish larvae and young crabs
Looking back to the Bay of the 1960s, when my colleague Don Heinle came to work at Solomons, other SAV species, wigeon grass (Ruppia maritima) and eelgrass (Zostera marina) took over to populate the Bay’s shallows through autumn, but eutrophication largely brought an end to that succession in the Middle Bay.
Chesapeake Biological Laboratory professor Joe Mihursky said that when he came to Solomons about 1962, he and Andy McErlean (now at EPA) were early Chesapeake scuba divers and recalled 10–15-foot visibility in warm weather. “Gradually” Joe said, “little by little it got murkier and in a few years we had to do our diving in winter. One afternoon in 1970, Don (Heinle) came up to the lab and said: “‘C’mon, you guys have to see this’ and took eight or 10 of us out the CBL pier to look at a deep red ‘mahogany tide,’ which was still unusual at the time.”
Mahogany tides, turbid blooms formed by billions — even trillions — of microscopic dinoflagellate plankton cells are fed by excess nitrogen and are now an annual feature of Chesapeake tributaries, where they drastically cut light penetration. In 2000, their widespread occurrence made most regional newspapers and the failure of many submerged grass beds was attributed to their theft of the necessary sunlight.
This winter morning in 2001, it was just 34 degrees as I launched my kayak to inspect the thin sheet of ice. As I paddled through the shallows, I could see the shoots of SAV beneath me, about 8–15 per square yard — except where mute swans (Cygnus olor) could reach down with their long necks to root them up, and leave in their place shallow, dark pits about 10 inches across. The ruddy ducks were working in much deeper water, staying down an average of 30 seconds and only resting and preening on the surface about 14 seconds between dives.
The ice reflected light from the early morning sun in all manner of patterns, but as I nosed into this razor thin sheet, there were hundreds of almost perfect equilateral triangles 1–3 inches on a side, sometimes consolidating into rhomboidal shapes a full foot long.
I picked up some near the edge, finding they were only a few hundredths of an inch thick and themselves made up of a beautiful crystalline network branching out at an angle close to 110 degrees.
In the clear water, I could see the small slightly pinkish forms of juvenile comb jellies, or sea walnuts, (Mnemiopsis leidyi) members of the taxonomic group Ctenophora. It never fails to surprise me that these delicate wraiths can prosper in cold clear water, though their relatives do so in Arctic waters.
Ctenophores feed by capturing zooplankton on adhesive organs called colloblasts and sweeping their prey along pathways lined with undulating hairlike cilia, down the body and into their mouths. These rows of cilia are also the animal’s means of locomotion and are called ctenes. They appear and grow longer as the critters leave their larval stage. (These are truly “ctene-age” jellyfish!)
At any one time, I could look down and count eight or so, each with sunlight flickering a rainbow of colors from them as the ctenes beat in rhythm. They are voracious feeders on zooplankton crustaceans called copepods, which also feed on the explosion of phytoplankton as excess nutrients pour into the Bay with the spring freshet.
By summer, they will grow from fingertip-size to the dimension of plum tomatoes, and in the process they can strip the water column of larger zooplankton forms at the same time that larval and juvenile fishes are competing for the identical food supply.
Back on my beach, I walked along the shore with just a foot of sandy bottom exposed by the falling tide. There — like sunlit globs of glass — were nearly a hundred more comb jellies, stranded as the water level dropped. By late spring, their surviving companions would number in the millions.
This has probably happened each spring in the Chesapeake since it was formed at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch. The ctenophores are harmless to human swimmers, indeed with their brilliant phosphorescence at night, they are fascinating to bathe among, or to watch as your boat passes through swarms of them, leaving a trail with bursts of bright blue luminance in the wake.
Comb jellies themselves become food for the Bay’s hated sea nettles (Chrysaora quinquecirrha) which in early summer will plague those of us seeking to cool off as hot weather descends. As the ctenophores disappear, one pretty much knows that nettles are on the rise.
Meanwhile, both are prey for sea turtles entering from the Atlantic as the Chesapeake Bay warms each spring, especially the omnivorous loggerheads (Caretta c. caretta).
Don Heinle encountered this cycle of gelatinous plankton species back in the mid-1960s when Drs. L. Eugene Cronin and Joe Mihursky hired him to work at the CBL, then part of Maryland’s Natural Resources Institute. He was fresh out of graduate school in College Park and his job was to study zooplankton, especially the fertile copepods which were believed to support the entire base of the estuarine fishery food chain.
“Joe,” he told Mihursky one day, “there are too many damn jellyfish out there, I just can’t get a clean sample in my plankton nets.” A net towed behind one of the CBL’s research vessels might, in a 10-minute haul through rich zooplankton, come up with a small cup of dense, pinkish copepod “paste” concentrated by the net’s fine mesh filtering many cubic meters of water. But, when “blooms” of jellyfish throng the waters feeding on zooplankton, the net would quickly — sometimes immediately — clog with thousands of bulky jellyfish, pounds, sometimes tens of pounds of them, from which the intermingled tiny copepods could never be counted or identified. It was a mess, and when formaldehyde (the usual preservative) was added, all that remained was an amorphous gelatinous mass.
Heinle could not do his job under those conditions, so he invented what Mihursky described as a “cow catcher,” a network of coarse mesh formed as an inverted cone over the mouth of the conical plankton net as it was drawn through the water. This did a pretty good job of tumbling off the larger jellyfish and excluding them from the sample.
Heinle’s subsequent work formed some of the best basic research done on zooplankton in the Chesapeake Bay and its subestuaries from the late ’60s until 1980. He was an early user of bomb calorimetry to look at the food value of copepods and was among the first to attempt to work out a food budget for the Patuxent Estuary. He found that phytoplankton production appeared insufficient to support the number of copepods he found, and he was an innovator in postulating that detritus (organic debris) and bacteria were significant energy sources.
Heinle was also innately fun-loving and curious. At an Ocean City conference one night, he and biologist Chuck Gibson took the door off their motel room and went “surf-dooring” in the Atlantic. The door was restored to its rightful place by morning and no one was the wiser.
One day, Heinle was rummaging in the attic at the CBL, where boxes of materials had been squirreled away since Reginald Van Trump Truitt started started work in Solomons around 1919. Among the Niskin bottles and reversing thermometers he found early papers by R.P. Cowles, who sampled the Bay 1915-21, and Carroll Blue Nash, the first biologist to look in detail at the Patuxent in the 1930s. Amazed by their content, he trotted these down and pushed them under his colleagues’ noses. “Look,” he said, “There are dramatic differences from what we get today. The Secchi disk visibilities have decreased and the deep water oxygens are lower. This river’s in trouble.”
The fun-loving Heinle also played slow-pitch softball on Mihursky’s team in Prince Frederick. They called themselves the “Drive-ins” because their field was the site of Bunky Hipple’s abandoned drive-in movie theater.
A lanky young local who owned the laundromat joined their games. His boat livery business had gone down along with water quality in the Patuxent. He’d also just been elected county commissioner, on a campaign budget of $164, all out of his own pocket, because he thought outside donations would make him beholden. His name was Bernie Fowler.
After the games, Fowler would talk to the biologists about the river to try to figure what had happened. He heard about the old manuscripts and together, they decided that development upstream and massive increases in sewage discharge were killing the estuary.
Fowler galvanized the Tri-County Council for Southern Maryland, composed of Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s, all with strong and struggling watermen’s communities. They resolved to sue the upstream counties for the damage they were doing.
To some extent, Mihursky said, the damage, given the state of knowledge at the time, was inadvertent. The upstream counties had been advised by Johns Hopkins University, where expert sanitary engineers such as Abel Wolman and John Geyer had done a study estimating that the mixing coefficients in the Piedmont Patuxent should be sufficient to metabolize and purge the river during its long flow downstream. This was a new science at the time, though, and their mixing coefficients were too low for the placid, Coastal Plain section of the Patuxent.
USGS researcher Bob Cory’s continuous recordings from dissolved oxygen meters on the Benedict Bridge showed deep sags in oxygen, enough to jeopardize aquatic life in the river.
Scientists signed on to contribute their knowledge to the fray, and Don Heinle found himself in many ways the point man. He gave a deposition, testimony in which he brought out the old studies and contrasted them with the new data. The resulting judicial decision has been called the first in America to recognize the external economics of environmental impact, and to recognize upstream responsibility for downstream damages. The effect was electrifying.
Very quickly, Heinle was under extraordinary pressure from very highly placed economic and sometimes anonymous interests. There were phone calls at 2 a.m. to University of Maryland officials. (The University runs the CBL.) One source reported words to the effect of “curb your dog or euthanize him.”
There were also threats to close the Laboratory; it was no longer relevant now that land had been donated over at Horn Point on the Eastern Shore’s Choptank River.
Heinle had a wife and baby daughter; the pressure was tremendous, but he stood by his convictions and upon the principal of academic freedom. He was up for promotion and tenure, name of the game for university scientists. He got tenure (his job was no longer threatened) but he was denied the promotion, and thus recognition of his stature as a scientist.
Discouraged and disheartened by 1980, he returned to the West Coast, where he’d worked in the salmon fishery during his student days, and entered the private sector, becoming senior biologist at the firm of Ch-2M Hill and eventually a respected and well-compensated mentor to his colleagues.
He was contemplating retirement to the 60 acres of coastal land he owned when that fatal heart attack intervened.
During the ’60s and most of the ’70s the EPA was resistant to any claims that nitrogen from upstream sources would damage the estuary. It was only years later that the CBL and Academy of Natural Sciences biologists Chris D’Elia and Jim Sanders would conclusively link mesohaline eutrophication with nitrogen from upstream sewage and nonpoint sources. Most of today’s Chesapeake restoration effort is founded on that one conclusion.
Our society will continue to pay billions of dollars for the lack of attention paid to nitrogen for decades, while its loads poured off the land and out of wastewater plants.
We can thank Don Heinle for the intelligence and fortitude he showed during the time it took us to learn that lesson. Godspeed, and peace, old friend. I will never see those glistening ctenophores in the late winter Chesapeake without remembering your contributions.
Dr. Kent Mountford is an environmental historian and estuarine ecologist.
Don Heinle helped to turn tide of opinion toward Bay restoration
Article from Bay Journal, March 2001
Past is Prologue / By Dr. Kent Mountford - Bay Journal
As I was leaving my job with the Chesapeake Bay Program, I explained to my colleagues that by giving up my daily and interminable 100-mile commute, I would gain almost 535 hours a year. I made a pledge to them, and myself, to spend at least 100 of those hours seriously looking at the extraordinary natural world I live in and at least 100 hours a year writing about what I saw. My logbook, in part, records:
“Received word today of a memorial service for Don Heinle who died at 63 … in Washington (State). Honoring my own bargain, I spent some time watching the creek today and must now write about it.”
Donald R. Heinle is a name not widely known among today’s Chesapeake pundits, but he was a respected and courageous scientist during his more than a decade of work on the Bay. I had reason to ponder his work this chilly, but sunny morning.
Ice had formed overnight, just a thin layer, but it covered a couple of square miles and was enough that diving ducks could not feed. As it began to break up, loose flocks of about 500 ruddy ducks (Oxyura jamaicensis) moved silently up the creek and began eagerly diving for the shoots and rhizomes of horned pondweed (Zannichellia palustris), one of the Bay’s submerged aquatic grasses which had been slowly growing since autumn.
Our creek is turbid in summer, being fed nitrogen from the Patuxent’s upstream sources far in excess of its biological needs. But with winter’s clearer water, enough light reaches the bottom, even at about an 11 foot-depth that millions of shoots — perhaps 200 million plants in this creek — begin to sprout in late autumn. They grow slowly in the cold, by February rising 1–3 inches, but when the creek warms, they can reach a meter above the bottom along the shallow creek margins.
Turbidity and nutrient-fed plankton rob the deeper areas of light in spring but the grasses still survive until June down to 8 feet or so and are marvelous habitat for fish larvae and young crabs
Looking back to the Bay of the 1960s, when my colleague Don Heinle came to work at Solomons, other SAV species, wigeon grass (Ruppia maritima) and eelgrass (Zostera marina) took over to populate the Bay’s shallows through autumn, but eutrophication largely brought an end to that succession in the Middle Bay.
Chesapeake Biological Laboratory professor Joe Mihursky said that when he came to Solomons about 1962, he and Andy McErlean (now at EPA) were early Chesapeake scuba divers and recalled 10–15-foot visibility in warm weather. “Gradually” Joe said, “little by little it got murkier and in a few years we had to do our diving in winter. One afternoon in 1970, Don (Heinle) came up to the lab and said: “‘C’mon, you guys have to see this’ and took eight or 10 of us out the CBL pier to look at a deep red ‘mahogany tide,’ which was still unusual at the time.”
Mahogany tides, turbid blooms formed by billions — even trillions — of microscopic dinoflagellate plankton cells are fed by excess nitrogen and are now an annual feature of Chesapeake tributaries, where they drastically cut light penetration. In 2000, their widespread occurrence made most regional newspapers and the failure of many submerged grass beds was attributed to their theft of the necessary sunlight.
This winter morning in 2001, it was just 34 degrees as I launched my kayak to inspect the thin sheet of ice. As I paddled through the shallows, I could see the shoots of SAV beneath me, about 8–15 per square yard — except where mute swans (Cygnus olor) could reach down with their long necks to root them up, and leave in their place shallow, dark pits about 10 inches across. The ruddy ducks were working in much deeper water, staying down an average of 30 seconds and only resting and preening on the surface about 14 seconds between dives.
The ice reflected light from the early morning sun in all manner of patterns, but as I nosed into this razor thin sheet, there were hundreds of almost perfect equilateral triangles 1–3 inches on a side, sometimes consolidating into rhomboidal shapes a full foot long.
I picked up some near the edge, finding they were only a few hundredths of an inch thick and themselves made up of a beautiful crystalline network branching out at an angle close to 110 degrees.
In the clear water, I could see the small slightly pinkish forms of juvenile comb jellies, or sea walnuts, (Mnemiopsis leidyi) members of the taxonomic group Ctenophora. It never fails to surprise me that these delicate wraiths can prosper in cold clear water, though their relatives do so in Arctic waters.
Ctenophores feed by capturing zooplankton on adhesive organs called colloblasts and sweeping their prey along pathways lined with undulating hairlike cilia, down the body and into their mouths. These rows of cilia are also the animal’s means of locomotion and are called ctenes. They appear and grow longer as the critters leave their larval stage. (These are truly “ctene-age” jellyfish!)
At any one time, I could look down and count eight or so, each with sunlight flickering a rainbow of colors from them as the ctenes beat in rhythm. They are voracious feeders on zooplankton crustaceans called copepods, which also feed on the explosion of phytoplankton as excess nutrients pour into the Bay with the spring freshet.
By summer, they will grow from fingertip-size to the dimension of plum tomatoes, and in the process they can strip the water column of larger zooplankton forms at the same time that larval and juvenile fishes are competing for the identical food supply.
Back on my beach, I walked along the shore with just a foot of sandy bottom exposed by the falling tide. There — like sunlit globs of glass — were nearly a hundred more comb jellies, stranded as the water level dropped. By late spring, their surviving companions would number in the millions.
This has probably happened each spring in the Chesapeake since it was formed at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch. The ctenophores are harmless to human swimmers, indeed with their brilliant phosphorescence at night, they are fascinating to bathe among, or to watch as your boat passes through swarms of them, leaving a trail with bursts of bright blue luminance in the wake.
Comb jellies themselves become food for the Bay’s hated sea nettles (Chrysaora quinquecirrha) which in early summer will plague those of us seeking to cool off as hot weather descends. As the ctenophores disappear, one pretty much knows that nettles are on the rise.
Meanwhile, both are prey for sea turtles entering from the Atlantic as the Chesapeake Bay warms each spring, especially the omnivorous loggerheads (Caretta c. caretta).
Don Heinle encountered this cycle of gelatinous plankton species back in the mid-1960s when Drs. L. Eugene Cronin and Joe Mihursky hired him to work at the CBL, then part of Maryland’s Natural Resources Institute. He was fresh out of graduate school in College Park and his job was to study zooplankton, especially the fertile copepods which were believed to support the entire base of the estuarine fishery food chain.
“Joe,” he told Mihursky one day, “there are too many damn jellyfish out there, I just can’t get a clean sample in my plankton nets.” A net towed behind one of the CBL’s research vessels might, in a 10-minute haul through rich zooplankton, come up with a small cup of dense, pinkish copepod “paste” concentrated by the net’s fine mesh filtering many cubic meters of water. But, when “blooms” of jellyfish throng the waters feeding on zooplankton, the net would quickly — sometimes immediately — clog with thousands of bulky jellyfish, pounds, sometimes tens of pounds of them, from which the intermingled tiny copepods could never be counted or identified. It was a mess, and when formaldehyde (the usual preservative) was added, all that remained was an amorphous gelatinous mass.
Heinle could not do his job under those conditions, so he invented what Mihursky described as a “cow catcher,” a network of coarse mesh formed as an inverted cone over the mouth of the conical plankton net as it was drawn through the water. This did a pretty good job of tumbling off the larger jellyfish and excluding them from the sample.
Heinle’s subsequent work formed some of the best basic research done on zooplankton in the Chesapeake Bay and its subestuaries from the late ’60s until 1980. He was an early user of bomb calorimetry to look at the food value of copepods and was among the first to attempt to work out a food budget for the Patuxent Estuary. He found that phytoplankton production appeared insufficient to support the number of copepods he found, and he was an innovator in postulating that detritus (organic debris) and bacteria were significant energy sources.
Heinle was also innately fun-loving and curious. At an Ocean City conference one night, he and biologist Chuck Gibson took the door off their motel room and went “surf-dooring” in the Atlantic. The door was restored to its rightful place by morning and no one was the wiser.
One day, Heinle was rummaging in the attic at the CBL, where boxes of materials had been squirreled away since Reginald Van Trump Truitt started started work in Solomons around 1919. Among the Niskin bottles and reversing thermometers he found early papers by R.P. Cowles, who sampled the Bay 1915-21, and Carroll Blue Nash, the first biologist to look in detail at the Patuxent in the 1930s. Amazed by their content, he trotted these down and pushed them under his colleagues’ noses. “Look,” he said, “There are dramatic differences from what we get today. The Secchi disk visibilities have decreased and the deep water oxygens are lower. This river’s in trouble.”
The fun-loving Heinle also played slow-pitch softball on Mihursky’s team in Prince Frederick. They called themselves the “Drive-ins” because their field was the site of Bunky Hipple’s abandoned drive-in movie theater.
A lanky young local who owned the laundromat joined their games. His boat livery business had gone down along with water quality in the Patuxent. He’d also just been elected county commissioner, on a campaign budget of $164, all out of his own pocket, because he thought outside donations would make him beholden. His name was Bernie Fowler.
After the games, Fowler would talk to the biologists about the river to try to figure what had happened. He heard about the old manuscripts and together, they decided that development upstream and massive increases in sewage discharge were killing the estuary.
Fowler galvanized the Tri-County Council for Southern Maryland, composed of Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s, all with strong and struggling watermen’s communities. They resolved to sue the upstream counties for the damage they were doing.
To some extent, Mihursky said, the damage, given the state of knowledge at the time, was inadvertent. The upstream counties had been advised by Johns Hopkins University, where expert sanitary engineers such as Abel Wolman and John Geyer had done a study estimating that the mixing coefficients in the Piedmont Patuxent should be sufficient to metabolize and purge the river during its long flow downstream. This was a new science at the time, though, and their mixing coefficients were too low for the placid, Coastal Plain section of the Patuxent.
USGS researcher Bob Cory’s continuous recordings from dissolved oxygen meters on the Benedict Bridge showed deep sags in oxygen, enough to jeopardize aquatic life in the river.
Scientists signed on to contribute their knowledge to the fray, and Don Heinle found himself in many ways the point man. He gave a deposition, testimony in which he brought out the old studies and contrasted them with the new data. The resulting judicial decision has been called the first in America to recognize the external economics of environmental impact, and to recognize upstream responsibility for downstream damages. The effect was electrifying.
Very quickly, Heinle was under extraordinary pressure from very highly placed economic and sometimes anonymous interests. There were phone calls at 2 a.m. to University of Maryland officials. (The University runs the CBL.) One source reported words to the effect of “curb your dog or euthanize him.”
There were also threats to close the Laboratory; it was no longer relevant now that land had been donated over at Horn Point on the Eastern Shore’s Choptank River.
Heinle had a wife and baby daughter; the pressure was tremendous, but he stood by his convictions and upon the principal of academic freedom. He was up for promotion and tenure, name of the game for university scientists. He got tenure (his job was no longer threatened) but he was denied the promotion, and thus recognition of his stature as a scientist.
Discouraged and disheartened by 1980, he returned to the West Coast, where he’d worked in the salmon fishery during his student days, and entered the private sector, becoming senior biologist at the firm of Ch-2M Hill and eventually a respected and well-compensated mentor to his colleagues.
He was contemplating retirement to the 60 acres of coastal land he owned when that fatal heart attack intervened.
During the ’60s and most of the ’70s the EPA was resistant to any claims that nitrogen from upstream sources would damage the estuary. It was only years later that the CBL and Academy of Natural Sciences biologists Chris D’Elia and Jim Sanders would conclusively link mesohaline eutrophication with nitrogen from upstream sewage and nonpoint sources. Most of today’s Chesapeake restoration effort is founded on that one conclusion.
Our society will continue to pay billions of dollars for the lack of attention paid to nitrogen for decades, while its loads poured off the land and out of wastewater plants.
We can thank Don Heinle for the intelligence and fortitude he showed during the time it took us to learn that lesson. Godspeed, and peace, old friend. I will never see those glistening ctenophores in the late winter Chesapeake without remembering your contributions.
Dr. Kent Mountford is an environmental historian and estuarine ecologist.
Don Heinle helped to turn tide of opinion toward Bay restoration
Article from Bay Journal, March 2001
2011-03-15
Save The Bay Photo Contest
This year's contest is open to both amateur and professional photographers, and CBF is seeking photographs that illustrate the positive aspects of the Bay and its rivers and streams. We want to see your vision of the Bay region—from Pennsylvania to Virginia, from the Shenandoah Mountains to the Eastern Shore. Images depicting people, wildlife, recreation, and farms within the watershed will all be considered. All photos must include water from the Chesapeake Bay or a river, stream, creek, or other body of water inside the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
Official judging will be conducted by a panel of CBF employees who will judge entries on subject matter, composition, focus, lighting, uniqueness, and impact. The public will also be able to vote online for their favorite photo in the Viewers' Choice Gallery. All winners will receive a cash award:
- First Prize: $500
- Second Prize: $250
- Third Prize: $150
- Viewers' Choice: $100
Submissions must be mailed to CBF and postmarked between March 14, 2011 and April 15, 2011. There is a $10 entry fee for up to three photographs, and $3 for each additional photo. All winners will be notified of the outcome, and their images will be posted on the CBF website by May 27, 2011.
- Official rules and guidelines
- Entry form
- Release for adult models (photographs featuring identifiable people must be accompanied by a photo release for each individual pictured)
- Release for minor models (photographs featuring identifiable people under the age of 18 must be accompanied by a photo release for each individual pictured)
Save The Bay Photo Contest information came from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation www.cbf.org
2011-02-26
Gardeners for the Bay - Chesapeake Bay Foundation
Gardeners for the Bay Take the Pledge
You love your garden, and you love the Bay. The Chesapeake Bay and its rivers and streams are in trouble. Pollution from many sources is degrading our water and threatening the habitat of fish, blue crabs, and other wildlife.
With your support, we can Save the Bay. Lend a hand by joining the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Gardeners for the Bay program. Membership is FREE!
Take the Gardeners for the Bay pledge now and receive:
With your support, we can Save the Bay. Lend a hand by joining the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Gardeners for the Bay program. Membership is FREE!
Take the Gardeners for the Bay pledge now and receive:
- Two Gardeners for the Bay stickers to demonstrate your support for healthy water and a clean environment.
- A pledge card with useful Bay information.
- Automatic enrollment in CBF's Action Network, our e-mail alert system for important Bay issues.
- Discounts on merchandise from CBF's online store.
As a Gardener for the Bay, I will:
- Conserve water by diverting runoff downspouts and paved surfaces to rain barrels, rain gardens, or garden beds.
- Plant with native, non-invasive species that are adapted to conditions in my area.
- Enrich my garden beds and lawn naturally with compost, leaf mold, or other organic matter.
- Eliminate my use of toxic chemicals (synthetic chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides).
- Reduce my lawn area by planting native trees and shrubs and enlarging garden beds.
- Encourage other gardeners to join the fight to protect and restore the waterways, farmlands and forests for the Bay Region.
- Speak out for decisive action to save the Chesapeake Bay a national treasure.
* I support clean water and a healthy environment. I pledge to avoid toxic chemicals, reduce runoff and care for my garden and lawn naturally.
Take the Pledge - Click Here
Gardeners for the Bay information came from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation www.cbf.org
2011-01-28
Buy Fresh, Local Chesapeake Food, Eat Local - Save The Bay
BUY FRESH BUY LOCAL CHESAPEAKE®
EAT LOCAL—SAVE THE BAYChesapeake Bay Foundation - We're happy to introduce the new "Buy Fresh Buy Local Chesapeake" website! Find out what local foods and the Chesapeake Bay have in common, as well as where to buy local foods, how to get involved, and more.
EAT LOCAL—SAVE THE BAY
Chesapeake Bay Foundation - We're happy to introduce the new "Buy Fresh Buy Local Chesapeake" website! Find out what local foods and the Chesapeake Bay have in common, as well as where to buy local foods, how to get involved, and more.
ABOUT BUY FRESH BUY LOCAL CHESAPEAKE
Why Buy Fresh and Local?
- Fresh food and produce is healthier and more nutritious (and delicious!)
- More of your food dollars stay in the community to support local farmers and build local economies.
- When local farmers farm sustainably, they preserve open space, keep their lands productive, and protect their land from urban and suburban development, which harms the Chesapeake Bay.
Buy Fresh Buy Local Chesapeake is one of nearly 80 chapters throughout the country (and currently the only one in Maryland), working to promote locally grown food to the public, connect consumers to local food producers, and change local food priorities. The Buy Fresh Buy Local brand, under the auspices of the Food Routes Network, is nationally recognized.
The Chesapeake chapter began in 2006 with a group of dedicated individuals who had farming, restaurant, and food policy backgrounds. Since May 2010, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) has been the coordinating organization for the chapter, providing staff and organizational support.
For over 25 years, CBF has been making the connection between local sustainable agriculture and the Chesapeake Bay's water quality by:
- advocating for policies and legislation that benefit farmers and the Bay.
- educating students, teachers, and the public about sustainable agriculture.
- putting conservation into practice at CBF's Clagett Farm with its CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), grass-fed beef, native tree nursery, and education center.
What's Next?
We're just getting started. In the future, check this website for:
- an online food guide with lists of farmers, producers, farmers markets, and more resources.
- outreach events at fairs and festivals to educate consumers and promote sustainable agriculture and healthy local food.
- invitations to special events, such as a Graze Fest at CBF's Clagett Farm, highlighting grass-fed beef and local produce or an Oyster Fest featuring aquaculture oysters.
FIND LOCAL FOOD (MARYLAND)
Maryland's Best: Searchable database of local products from Maryland farmers. From produce, seafood, grass-fed beef, grains, and specialty items to CSA's, nurseries, wine, agri-tourism, and more.
marylandsbest.net
So Maryland So Good: Farm and product guide for Anne Arundel, Calvert, St. Mary's, Charles, and Prince George's counties.somarylandsogood.com
Maryland Direct Farm Market and Pick Your Own Directory: Find out what's in season then find a local farm market or "pick-your-own" farm to get it fresh.
mdpyofarmmarkets.com
Local Harvest: A national searchable database for organic food sources--from local farms and CSA's to restaurants, grocers, and more.
localharvest.org
Amazing Grazing Directory: Produced by Future Harvest, which is helping to create a viable and sustainable local food system, this directory is your source for local grass-fed meat, poultry, and dairy products.
futureharvestcasa.org
OTHER REGIONAL BUY FRESH BUY LOCAL CHAPTERS
Pennsylvania: buylocalpa.org
Virginia Chapters: buylocalvirginia.org
Hampton Roads, Va: buylocalhamptonroads.org
Fredericksburg, Va: farmtofredericksburg.com/
Shenandoah Valley, Va: buylocalshenvalley.org/
West Virginia: wvfarmers.org/buylocalwv/
Outside the Bay Watershed: foodroutes.org/bfbl-chapters.jsp
BUY FRESH BUY LOCAL CHESAPEAKE® EAT LOCAL—SAVE THE BAY Buy Fresh Buy Local Chesapeake® is part of the FoodRoutes Network Credit: Chesapeake Bay Foundation |
2010-12-20
Give a Gift to the Chesapeake Bay - Help Save The Bay
Chesapeake Bay Foundation - Help Save The Bay
Make a tax deductible gift to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. You can help Save The Bay! Click to make your gift today at CBF.org
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The Chesapeake Bay Foundation's (CBF) mission is to Save the Bay, and keep it saved, as defined by reaching a 70 on CBF's Health Index.Chesapeake Bay Foundation Mission and Vision sourced from http://cbf.org/Page.aspx?pid=387
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