Improving Chesapeake Bay Water Quality By Creating Sustainable Coastal Watersheds.

The Chesapeake Bay is on an unsustainable trajectory. Due to increasing human populations and intensive agriculture, there are multi-decadal trends of increasing turbidity, N, and P in non-tidal streams, and tidal estuarine waters exhibit high algal biomass in surface waters and low dissolved oxygen in bottom waters. We are testing whether stakeholder attitudes towards best management practices (BMPs) can be improved through outreach and education and whether increased adoption of BMPs within specific watersheds will reduce watershed sediment, N, and P output. This research is being conducted in four small agricultural watersheds (6-17 km²) with high stream N and P concentrations in the Choptank basin, a microcosm of Chesapeake Bay on the Delmarva Peninsula. One of the watersheds is a control which is monitored but will not be manipulated, while the three experimental watersheds will have focused applications of a single group of BMPs on water retention, soil retention, and fertilizer reductions to increase N and P use efficiency. This research will be a cross-disciplinary study of the people, landuse, and biogeochemistry of these four watersheds to reduce N, P, and sediment in streams draining to estuarine waters. We will work with stakeholders to encourage adoption of better land management through education and outreach, and we are directly measuring watershed export. The main goal of this research is to provide flexible, watershed-based approaches to improved water quality which can spread to other communities and persist beyond the lifetime of this research.