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SAVvy Participants Contribute to Improving Chesapeake Bay Water Quality SAV: submerged aquatic vegetation . . . the formal term for the underwater grasses that grow on the floor of the Chesapeake Bay. These grasses offer food, shelter, and nursery areas for fish and shellfish while providing vital oxygen to the bay’s water. The more SAV the better for the Chesapeake Bay. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency considers SAV to be an important indicator of the bay’s health because the grasses are not subject to harvesting pressure and grow best in good quality water. But for researchers at the U.S. Army Environmental Center (USAEC), the question was: how much SAV actually exists in the parts of the bay that fall within the Army’s installation? The Army manages approximately 217,000 acres of land within the Chesapeake Bay watershed and is dedicated to supporting EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program for improving the water quality of the bay. But USAEC’s attempts to replant the grasses often failed because it wasn’t clear just how much SAV already was there and where it was located. Planting the Seed The solution to the Army’s dilemma began as an idea planted in a University of Maryland classroom in 1996. Julie Bortz and classmate Paul Cisar, an environmental protection specialist at USAEC, needed an environmental research project. They approached USAEC, located at the Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG) in Maryland, with a proposal to map the Army installation’s SAV beds and monitor the water quality. A partnership then sprouted between the USAEC, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (USARL), and the APG’s Directorate of Safety, Health, and Environment (DSHE). USARL provided resources, DSHE provided Dr. Jim Bailey to oversee the program, and Julie joined USAEC as a full-time intern through the ORISE research participation program.
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Cultivating the Project Julie first established 40 monitoring sites throughout the APG site. For nine months in 1996, the SAV team sampled the sites for total suspended solids, phosphorus, and nitrogen; chlorophyll levels; acidity; and other indicators of water quality. Meanwhile, the partnership grew to include a professor with SAV expertise from nearby Harford Community College as well as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who helped the team with standard operating procedures for water quality sampling and monitoring. The Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay also offered training and equipment.
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Julie left the USAEC in 1998 to begin graduate school in California. During her absence, research participant Mike Weldon stepped in to spearhead the program. Mike, a former Army Infantry Ranger with a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Montana, joined the SAV project in March 1997. He brought an expertise in watershed management to the project and has been involved with water quality and other data analyses, transplanting experiments, fisheries work, and SAV light requirement studies. In the summer of 1999, Julie transferred to a graduate program at Johns Hopkins University and has been able to return to the SAV project part-time. Some of her contributions over the course of the project have involved creating a GIS database for tracking statistics, which has proven valuable for her presentations to other groups about the effort. "The teamwork has been very effective in developing ways to restore SAV in the Chesapeake Bay," said Janmichael Graine, Army Chesapeake Bay coordinator and SAV team mentor. "The data gathered by Julie and Mike have been extraordinary. With the large number of monitoring sites, they have received good assessments of the conditions to restore the SAV." Mike added, "We were fortunate to be able to establish a larger number of monitoring sites at three locations, as opposed to one sampling station for both the Bush and Gunpowder rivers, which is what had been established and monitored by the State of Maryland. As a result, we have a more accurate and complete characterization of water quality in these systems." Full-Grown Success The monitoring and data collection phase of the SAV project has proven to be quite successful. The surveys reveal that APG’s original estimates of 125 to 250 acres of SAV were quite low. The data show that there are actually more than 1,235 acres of 15 different species of grasses. The next steps of the project focus on restoration, which began during the summer with the planting of new SAV beds. Additionally, the SAV team plans to work with other bay installations to share what they’ve learned and help them to establish similar programs. "When I first came on this project, I thought that it was just going to be me going out on the boat," Julie said. "I think that was the consensus—that this was going to be a small-scale program, a pilot study. I’ve been happily shocked at all the support and enthusiasm that the project has gotten." |