Little light makes it through the turbid waters of the West River, according to these data from a team of volunteer monitors. Much of the river sees too little light for submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) to grow, and the outlook for 2007 looks no better. Increased monitoring by volunteers, state and federal agencies, and research laboratories is painting a stronger picture of conditions in the shallows. Source: Richard Crenshaw and West River Water Quality Team.

All this tracking provides unprecedented information about nutrient levels, water clarity, salinity, oxygen levels, and other factors. It does not necessarily provide a coherent picture

Consider, for a moment, the riverkeepers.

All around the Bay, riverkeepers are keeping score. Much like the annual report card the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) uses to grade the whole Bay, riverkeepers are tracking large amounts of data to come up with scores for oxygen, clarity, and other criteria.

In Bob Gallagher's view, data gathering is "haphazard."

"The agencies aren't always looking for what we want," he says. "Their data collection is usually project-driven. Once the project is over, they move to something else."

But even the data gathered by the riverkeepers themselves can confuse. One look at the scorecards for different rivers illustrates the problem. Someone living on the Western Shore, for example, may want to see scorecards for the Magothy, the Severn, the South, the West, and the Rhode. But while information exists for all these rivers, comparisons are tough. One scorecard will use a bar graph, the other a line graph. One will show data relative to the habitat needs of fish or oysters, the other will show the same data as a percentage of a stated goal.

Comparing the health of rivers using these scorecards is a brain tease at best. Biologist Peter Bergstrom understands the problem. Working out of the Annapolis office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Bergstrom is pushing a standardized format for all the river scorecards. He has floated suggestions for a common format, where tabulations for oxygen, salinity, bacteria, and other factors will look the same from river to river, from year to year. The University of Maryland Integration and Analysis Network (IAN), located at UMCES, is cooperating with Bergstom and others to develop standard ways of representing data across the board.

Whether or not riverkeepers and others will sign on to a standard tracking scheme remains to be seen.

And there is a more profound problem. Even when data is well organized and standardized, it does not alone provide the answers to some very complex scientific questions.

A rich data stream is very good at "tracking trends," says Michael Kemp. The data tell us, for example, what's up and what's down, he says. Whether it was a "good year" or a "bad year" for oxygen. But, he asks, "What does all that mean?"

In particular, what does it mean for an estuary like the Chesapeake Bay, where nutrient levels, despite some progress, have remained high since Baywide monitoring began in 1985? To make his point, he refers to recent work in Europe by researchers who tracked nutrient loading in about half a dozen European rivers. While they started by tracking nutrient increases, he says, these researchers were fortunate enough to eventually track decreases in nutrient loading. In the Chesapeake, he says, declining nutrient trends are hard to find.

The European example shows that tracking nutrient increases and decreases proved relatively easy. Explaining what happened next is not.

According to two researchers, Daniel Conley from Sweden and Carlos M. Duarte from Spain, nutrient levels declined, but algae levels remained high.

Those rivers did not appear to respond to nutrient reductions. Why not?

Conley and Duarte argued at a recent meeting of the Estuarine Research Federation that the rivers did not respond because something had changed. That something is the climate. Because of global warming, they say, baseline conditions are no longer the same. Trying to return to a prior state would be, in their words, like trying to return to "Neverland."

Their findings reinforce Kemp's point. We can track trends, but it will take our very best science to explain them.

Does Kemp agree that global warming has made returning to a prior state more difficult — if not impossible?

Maybe. But he offers another hypothesis. Kemp suspects that over-fertilized systems — like the Chesapeake — have become stuck in a rut. Some call this a "perverse resilience." In order to move out of this state, he says, we need to reduce nutrients and then provide the Bay with enough time for "self-healing," borrowing a phrase from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

To know when the Bay is responding, he says, we need to track the return of positive feedback loops. The return of bottom dwellers and filter feeders. The comeback of underwater grasses. We need to pay close attention to how the Bay is responding to such key factors as nutrient loading, sediment, and climate.

"The action," he says, "will be in the shallows."

It is in the shallows, Kemp argues, that we will see the quickest response and the earliest signs of change.

With no rain to flush them out during hot, dry conditions, tributaries may well become reactors pumping out harmful algal blooms.

The summer of 2007 offered a glimpse of what could happen in the shallows if the climate warms and nutrients continue unabated.

It also revealed why so many algal blooms can show up even in a drought year.

First, we know from Tom Malone and his colleagues that much of the nutrient loading to the Bay occurs in the cooler months. During most of the winter and spring of 2007 rainfall was, according to the U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS), average or above average. By the time the drought began in early summer, nutrients were already in the Bay.

Second, with very little rain and a lot of sunlight, the tributaries cooked. Since the rivers already had plenty of nutrients in them, they didn't need any more runoff to fuel the summer's blooms — blooms largely of dinoflagellates, some of them toxic.

"It was a banner year for harmful algal blooms," says Allen Place, researcher at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI). Place, who studies toxic algae at UMBI's Center of Marine Biotechnology in Baltimore, points out that dinoflagellates thrive in still waters. Diatoms can swirl happily in spring runoff, but dinoflagellates don't like agitation. At least that's what he's observed with species he's studied, including the toxic dinoflagellate Karlodinium. He was not surprised to find Karlodinium showing up at fish kills during hot still weather in Baltimore Harbor, in Weems Creek near Annapolis, and down on the Potomac River.

It's widely understood that when algal blooms crash, low oxygen conditions usually follow. But while dinoflagellates can cause dense algae blooms they tend to show up in lower numbers than do springtime diatoms. For this reason, they may form mahogany tides, perhaps even toxic ones that cause fish kills, but not cause the huge drops in oxygen associated with thicker clouds of diatoms or other algae.

This is likely the answer to riverkeeper Bob Gallagher's question about the summer of 2007. Algae bloomed in a dry summer because nutrients were already there from the previous winter and spring. The blooms were largely comprised of dinoflagellates that thrive in hot still weather. These mahogany tides did not cause the kind of oxygen drops associated with the spring bloom because dinoflagellates probably bloomed at densities well below that of spring diatoms.

In the end, this is disturbing news. As long as heavy loads of nutrients run off the land in winter and spring, algae will bloom and cause a loss of oxygen in the Bay's deeper waters. Even worse, despite a dry summer, harmful algae blooms, caused by dinoflagellates, will bloom in the shallows and tributaries. With no rain to flush them out during hot dry conditions, the tributaries may well become reactors pumping out harmful algal blooms.

Place and Kemp are quick to add that for now this still-water scenario is only conjecture. Though their years of research have led them to these explanations, connecting the dots between climatic conditions and the appearance of particular kinds of algae will require a lot of data and a lot of experimentation and analysis. It will, they say, require a lot of synthesis, a lot of thinking.

Kemp is now working at synthesis — trying to make sense of huge amounts of data. To do this, he's partnering with a team of experts he calls "super computer geeks." Experts from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Delaware, Dalhousie University, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center. Kemp and UMCES colleague Ming Li will provide the link between all that computing power and the Bay-related questions they're trying to answer.

Their project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), will serve as a "proof of concept." The idea is to manipulate the huge profusion of data now available from advanced observing systems to achieve a new level of scientific understanding.

With the advent of new technologies, observing systems have proliferated, Kemp says, for everything from climate change to tsunamis. Because of the years of sophisticated research directed at understanding the Bay's oxygen cycle by Malone and many others, the Chesapeake will serve as a national experiment. The Bay will help answer to what degree and in what way we can put new massive data streams to use in answering fundamental science questions.

Their plan is to draw from many different data sources and to organize that data in ways never before possible. Their goal is a new "cyber-infrastructure."

We are clustering (or "federating") different datasets, Kemp says. But this is not just a matter of hooking up piles of data. The key, Kemp says, will be to shape the data in various ways, to ask the right questions of it. While data are always used to create models, these researchers will reconstruct models in various ways to spit out specific information they want. They will target information geared to test particular hypotheses or concrete management choices.

Over the next thirty years, the vast array of observation sites that Malone and others are pushing for will track what happens as we reduce the flow of nutrients into the Bay. It will keep a sleepless watch on the shallows, to see when rivers reach their thresholds of recovery, when algal blooms abate, oxygen levels rise, and water clarity improves.

And more than this, if Kemp and his colleagues are successful, scientists will use a new cyber-infrastructure to explain why change is happening, why the ecosystem is responding, why algae is blooming — or not — even in a dry summer.

Or, if we do not have the political will to reduce the flow of nutrients into the Bay, this new approach will show us precisely where the toxic algal blooms are likely to occur, where the fish kills will be, where the oxygenless dead zones will spread.

That is a picture no one wants to see.

This page was last modified September 15, 2018