Measuring the health of the Chesapeake Bay: Toward integration and prediction
The health of an ecosystem is a function of its vigor (useful productivity), organization (complexity of interspecific interactions), and resilience. The health of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem has deteriorated largely as a result of nutrient over-enrichment, concomitant reduction in light availability, and loss of habitats that provide complexity. This has resulted in an ecosystem that is a less vigorous producer of valuable fish and shellfish, less diverse and well organized, and more susceptible to and slower to recover from disturbances. It is not clear that degraded ecosystem health directly threatens human health; in fact sanitation and reductions in loadings of potentially toxic substances have reduced human health risks in recent decades. On the other hand, recently observed outbreaks of the toxin-producing dinoflagellate Pfiesteria piscicida could be a result of deteriorated ecosystem health and pose a human health risk. Monitoring of the environmental conditions, ecosystem health, and human health risks is critically important to the adaptive management of the Chesapeake Bay. Although this monitoring has produced very useful information, monitoring can be more effective if it more directly addressed the multiple uses of the resulting information, applied new technologies, and were more effectively integrated across environmental media, among resources, over space and time scales, and with modeling and research.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of Maryland, Cambridge, MD (US)
- OSTI ID:
- 20023221
- Journal Information:
- Environmental Research, Vol. 82, Issue 2; Other Information: PBD: Feb 2000; ISSN 0013-9351
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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