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1. Develop a fundamental understanding of the relationship between landscape pattern and ecosystem function with respect to critical plant communities (SAV and wetlands) and human alteration of the landscape.

Background

Preserving and restoring plant communities and associated habitats are acknowledged as a high priority for Bay restoration. The ambitious goals need to be addressed within the context of critical research needs. Efforts to address gaps will provide information that will greatly increase the likelihood of success in achieving restoration goals. Central to proposed research efforts is the viewpoint that effective restoration must be grounded in spatially-explicit “ecosystem-based management” of plant communities targeted to restoring abundance as well as functional, sustainable habitat. These concepts apply equally to submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV) and wetlands. For both cases priorities include the following.

Recommendations

1) Critical Plant Communities: Developing a fundamental understanding of the relationship between landscape pattern and ecosystem function with respect to critical plant communities (SAV and wetlands) is the highest priority. This effort should be directed to increase knowledge of spatially complex plant communities and interacting environments, and of their relative values as habitat and for biogeochemical processing in the Bay ecosystem.

2) SAV Restoration Guides: Research is needed to guide SAV and wetland restoration efforts and to optimize strategies for placement and design. This should include expanded remote sensing capabilities for shallow habitat conducive to SAV colonization and monitoring growing plants. Research to understand SAV and wetlands as a component of Bay habitat complexes should also be increased. From these measures, modeling to develop SAV site-specific forecasts should be explored. Further, there is a need to develop a wetlands function assessment to account for the relationships of landscape setting, speciation, physical structure, subsurface preferential flow pathways, and biogeochemical function in natural and restored wetlands. Recommended approaches include advanced imaging technologies, e.g., remote sensing, LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging), to estimate wetland acreage. Such approaches imply partnering with agencies such as NASA and NOAA.

Expanded research on SAV species growth requirements must be undertaken to identify appropriate taxa for site-specific restoration efforts. Strategies for co-restoration of multiple SAV species will provide options for changing environmental conditions (substrate, light and nutrient levels, salinity tolerances). Development of minimum size requirements of sites to achieve ecosystem function in wetlands and SAV beds, both biological and biogeochemical, is critical.

3) Restoration Monitoring: A commitment to long-term, research-based monitoring is needed to assess the underlying reasons for success or failure of restoration efforts, without which there will be no means to assess reasons for and conditions amenable to plant recovery.

4) Climate Change and SAV: Research is needed to understand the impact of climate change over short to long-term time frames and its implications for SAV and wetland restoration goals. Included are variations in water temperature and water depth, including sea level changes, and effects on light availability and sediment quality.

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1. Develop a fundamental understanding of the relationship between landscape pattern and ecosystem function with respect to forests and human alteration of the landscape.

Background

Aquatic health of streams and watersheds will be assured through jurisdiction-specific management plans. Forests as a large portion of the bay landscape are excellent nutrient sinks and serve as important natural nutrient-processing centers. Forest buffers in riparian buffer strips are now recommended features along our creeks, rivers, and Bay. Buffers reduce sediment erosion and sedimentation processes as well as limiting solar heating of adjacent creeks and the habitats they represent. Additionally, because not all forests are identical with respect to nutrient processing, nor as habitat for animal populations, due to differing species composition, rooting habitats, and canopy characteristics, some forests and forest lands may be more suitable than others for manipulation/logging/development. This knowledge needs to be collated and developed.

Streams throughout the watershed are important habitat for living resources and serve as effective nutrient-processing systems. In streams, because downstream nutrient delivery implies that export exceeds in-stream loss terms, innovative in-water measurements and predictive methods are needed to more accurately estimate loss terms and in-stream nutrient processing rates.

Recommendations

1) New Technologies: Newer chemical methods such as use of stable isotopes to assess in-water nutrient processing rates must be expanded to provide more realistic estimates of stream nutrient dynamics, including development of rate functions for modeling in-water processing to better quantify model predictions of watershed/stream export.

2) Water Processing: Manipulation of point source nutrient speciation to foster more in-water processing, e.g., denitrification, reducing nutrient export downstream might be explored in future CBP-supported planning.

3) Remote Sensing: Remote sensing technologies are routinely employed to determine forest acreage, location, and species and their use could be effectively expanded to determine encroachment of other land uses into forested area. Such approaches should be evaluated in CBP-sponsored activities.

4) Forests as Nutrient and Sediment Retention Landscapes: As forests represent large reservoirs of fixed nitrogen and effective sediment traps, research on managing forest growth/timbering to help reduce nitrogen and sediment loads should be pursued. Further, as forests become fragmented through development and altered land use, forest parcels are often heterogeneously distributed in a given region. The spatial and temporal variability in nutrient processing and sediment retention/erosion control in the fragmented forested landscapes must be evaluated particularly as it relates to historical land uses. Research is needed to determine forest acreage required for maintenance of biodiversity in plants and animals, as refuges for endemic and migratory fowl, and as effective nutrient and sediment retention sites in catchments.

5) Natural Buffering Models: Modeling buffer roles in nutrient processing and animal habitat must be expanded. This includes innovative land use models that incorporate forests as nutrient buffering zones (function of root zone, buffer width, and depth of the water table, and effect of subsurface flows that bypass buffer zones) as well as essential habitat for valuable animal species. The models, in turn, should be routinely employed in developing master plans and county zoning maps.

6) Local Model Application: Zoning decisions are made at very local scales, far from the main stem of the Bay, and hence often not in local citizens' frames of reference for assisting the Bay's recovery. It is therefore critical to develop watershed models that incorporate land use decisions and predicted water quality, biological, and economic impacts for use by the local planning commissions. Without these tools, effective reductions in impacts from cumulative local zoning decisions cannot be achieved.

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