From the mouth of the Patuxent River to the upper shore, the scores for the health of the Chesapeake Bay range from an improved B to a dismal D-minus.
And though the entire Bay is ailing, comparing each tributary can help focus restoration efforts and push local jurisdictions to improve the health of the Bay, officials said.
“Until we are able to deal at the [tributary level], it will be fundamentally difficult to return the Bay to a healthy state,” Jeff Lape, director of the Chesapeake Bay Program, said Thursday at a news conference on the bank of the Severn River in Annapolis.
Two report cards released Thursday show what countless report cards have shown in recent years: The overall health of the Bay is not improving.
But more localized reviews of the tributaries can increase the pressure to change local policies to curb urban and agricultural stormwater runoff, officials said.
“These report cards can catalyze restoration efforts,” said Bill Dennison, project leader at the University of Maryland?s Center for Environmental Science, which released one of the reports Thursday.
The university?s evaluation, the Chesapeake Bay Health Report Card, gave the Bay overall a C-minus in 2007, only a slight improvement over 2006?s D-plus.
The upper Bay region saw improvement through increased growth in aquatic grasses, but the middle region of the Bay still received poor marks. For example, the Patapsco and Back rivers area, which includes Baltimore City and parts of Anne Arundel, Carroll, Howard and Baltimore counties, scored a D and has shown consistently poor water quality, the report states.
Later this month, researchers will be releasing more detailed regional reports on the Chester and Patuxent rivers, with plans to expand to other areas of the Bay, Dennison said.
The Chesapeake Bay Program?s report also showed declining health, with just 12 percent of the Bay?s waters having acceptable water clarity in 2007, and the Bay grasses have not recovered to the 2002 high of 90,000 acres.
