Scientific Guidance for Rehabilitation of the Chesapeake Bay Ecosystem under the Changing Climate.
Abstract
While the Chesapeake Bay is an estuary and not a marginal sea on the scale of the Baltic Sea or the Gulf of Mexico, it has a complex set of environmental issues and multiple political jurisdictions such that it can serve as a test bed for science-informed management in larger marine systems. In particular, the Chesapeake Bay possesses a relatively advanced effort to ameliorate eutrophication, reduce toxic stresses, rehabilitate critical habitats, and sustainably utilized resources. Furthermore, both scientists and managers are addressing these challenges while now beginning to incorporate the effects of changes in temperature, precipitation and runoff, sea level, ocean boundary conditions, and pH. Increases in temperature and sea level are already apparent and future conditions can be estimated from global model projections, although sea level and ocean exchanges are also affected by variations in Gulf Stream flows and mesoscale climate. Changes in the volume, seasonality and variability in freshwater delivery from the multiple rivers discharging to the bay are harder to project with confidence, but may have pervasive consequences for circulation, reducing nutrient loads to ameliorate eutrophication, biogeochemical processes, and biotic distributions and dynamics. Science is now challenged to inform multiple adaptation strategies, including minimizing the vulnerability of humans and infrastructure, sustaining important tidal wetlands, managing sediment resources, sustaining living resources, redefining achievable ecosystem rehabilitation goals, and achieving shifting goals for nutrient load reductions. At the same time, science will also have to identify effective means to meet these challenges while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFMGC21I..03B
- Keywords:
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- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1637 Regional climate change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 4243 Marginal and semi-enclosed seas;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERAL;
- 6334 Regional planning;
- POLICY SCIENCES