Session Lead: Zhengui Wang (Virginia Institute of Marine Science)
Co-Lead(s): Gopal Bhatt, Joseph Delesantro, Wenfan Wu
Session Format: Oral presentations
Session Description:
This session explores the evolving Chesapeake Bay ecosystem through watershed, airshed, and estuarine perspectives. We are interested in highlighting advances in monitoring, data analytics, environmental management, and modeling that improve characterization of physical and biogeochemical water quality processes, and its association with ecosystems across atmospheric, terrestrial, and aquatic domains. Emphasis is placed on understanding drivers of nutrients and sediment loading, the downstream effects on critical habitats for living resources, and how these insights could inform decision-support tools such as the Chesapeake Bay Program’s CAST in improving assessments of past and future watershed planning and management.
A key focus will be placed on the development of the Chesapeake Bay Program’s next generation Phase 7 modeling framework, where greater emphasis is being placed on better representation of scale, biogeochemical processes, and incorporation of emerging high-resolution datasets in the model development. These advances would provide improved estimates of water quality response, habitat conditions, and management outcomes under current and future environmental pressures.
We welcome presentations on studies across land, air, and water that enhance understanding of nutrient and sediment sources and transport, assess management and modeling effectiveness, and advance of Phase 7 model components. The session aims to provide a multidisciplinary forum for improving ecosystem understanding and informing adaptive management across the Chesapeake Bay and its watershed, and we also welcome presentations on the use of existing models such as Phase 6 for informing management decisions of CBP and other systems.