Biennial “State of the Bay” report grades it at 32 out of 100, putting a key 2025 goal at risk By Fredrick Kunklen - Washington Post January 6, 2023 at 5:00 a.m. EST The effort to restore the Chesapeake Bay has made little overall progress the past two years, with improvements in some categories offset by stagnation or deterioration in others, a new report has found. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s biennial State of the Bay report found that oyster harvests hit record numbers in the previous two years in Maryland and Virginia, and the bay’s low-oxygen “dead zone” was among the smallest recorded since monitoring began 38years ago — and yet the population of blue crabs plummeted to such worrisome levels that the organization suggested reassessing how crabs are managed. Meanwhile, long-standing efforts to protect the bay’s wetlands by creating buffers and planting trees have languished, with several states falling behind goals as tens of thousands of acres of open land in the watershed have been plowed under for urban and suburban development. . “I know that some of this news is frustrating to some, and I will count myself in this list,” Hilary Harp Falk, the bay foundation’s president and chief executive, said during a news briefing. “While we’ve made significant progress, far too much pollution still reaches our waterways.” The environmental nonprofit’s report is yet another sign that state and federal efforts to restore the bay by achieving several measurable targets by 2025 will probably fall short. The report assesses 13 indicators of the bay’s health in three categories — pollution, habitat and fisheries — and grades each of them on a scale of 100. In 2022, the overall score remained at 32, as in 2020, with three indicators higher, three lower and seven unchanged. A perfect score would [...]

https://www.virginiamercury.com/2022/10/25/one-man-has-collected-more-than-8000-pounds-of-acorns-for-virginia/