Is the Chesapeake Bay TMDL a Blueprint for Restoring our Nation's Estuaries?
Austin Byers, MSc, CERP
Stantec
Baltimore, MD
In 2007, the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) partnership agreed to the overall goal of having practices in place to restore the Bay by 2025. While at times controversial, the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Dail Load TMDL has been in effect for well over a decade and is undoubtedly the largest such cleanup plan ever developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) encompassing a 64,000-square-mile watershed in a multi-state agreement to limit nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment pollution necessary to meet water quality standards in the Bay. We will look back at lessons learned, the complexities of modeling sediment and nutrients, the effectiveness of alternative Best Management Practices (BMPs) such as stream restoration and their impact on the Bay TMDL, quantifiable results, and the advancements in data-driven science to determine if channel and floodplain restoration can have a meaningful impact on large scale watersheds and estuaries to determine if the Bay TMDL is a Blueprint for restoring our Nations estuaries.
About Austin Byers, MSc, CERP
Austin Byers is a Principal and Senior Ecological Restoration Designer based in Baltimore, Maryland. Austin leads stream and wetland restoration/mitigation and NPDES MS4/TMDL compliance efforts in the Chesapeake Bay Region. Austin earned a B.S. from Shepherd University and M.S. from Towson University.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-byers-b19503b8/