Baltimore is a major city in Maryland with a long history as a major seaport. Fort McHenry, the birthplace of the United States national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner”, is located at the mouth of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Today, this port area offers shops, luxurious crab shacks and attractions, such as the warship USS Constellation, from the Civil War era, and the National Aquarium, where they are exhibited thousands of marine creatures. More information about the bay, including its history and its effect on regional culture, can be found at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St.
Baltimore, the main port in the upper (north) part of the bay. The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal connects the headwaters of the bay to the Delaware River estuary. The Hampton Roads port group, around Norfolk, Virginia, at the mouth of the James River, exports coal and tobacco. A major naval base is located in Norfolk.
Baltimore is located in north-central Maryland, on the Patapsco River, near where it flows into Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is located on the downward line between the Piedmont Plateau and the Atlantic coastal plain, which divides Baltimore into the lower part of the city and the upper city. Baltimore's elevation ranges from sea level at the port to 480 feet (150 m) in the northwest corner, near Pimlico. Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States.
It extends from north to south from the mouth of the Susquehanna River to the Atlantic Ocean. It is one of the most productive estuaries in the world, with more than 3,600 species of animals and plants. The bay provides vitally important habitats for wildlife, many recreational opportunities for people, and is an important fishery on which both people and wildlife. The Chesapeake Bay watershed includes parts of six states and is home to some 17 million people, including cities in Washington, D.C.
The numerous rivers in the watershed provide people not only with drinking water, but also places to fish, boating and bird watching. Its wetlands are also places for boating, birdwatching and waterfowl hunting. The bay itself is popular for boating and recreational fishing. The Chesapeake commercial fishery is worth billions of dollars and includes blue crabs, rockfish, menhaden and oriental oysters.
The bay also includes two of the largest commercial ports on the East Coast: Baltimore and Hampton Roads. Chesapeake Bay is a very large and complex ecosystem with many types of wildlife habitats, including forests, wetlands, rivers, and the bay's own estuary. The bay is home to more than 3,600 species of plants and animals, including more than 300 species of fish and 2,700 types of plants. The waters of the bay are a mix of salt water and fresh water.
Salt water comes to the bay from the Atlantic Ocean and fresh water enters through rivers and streams, as well as through groundwater flows called groundwater. Much of the bay's wildlife, including blue crab and waterfowl, rely on underwater grasses that grow in shallow water. Hundreds of invertebrates, such as the blue crab and oyster, and other less edible but important species, such as the horseshoe crab, also live in the bay. Oysters, once heavily populated in the bay, have declined considerably.
Oysters filter and clean water, and their loss has affected the quality of the bay's water and the health of other species. Different birds inhabit the bay at different times of the year, from birds of prey, such as bald eagles and ospreys, to aquatic birds, such as swans and ducks, and migratory birds, such as leeches and ruby-throated hummingbirds. The region's beaches are home to some of the largest shorebird populations in the Western Hemisphere, such as the red knot and the common plover. For waterfowl, the Chesapeake is an important stopping and wintering place along the Atlantic migratory route.
Each year, one million waterfowl winter in the Chesapeake Bay region. The millions of people who live in the Chesapeake Bay watershed have left their mark on their lands and waters. About 55 percent of the watershed is forest, while the rest has been converted by people for agricultural (30 percent) and suburban and urban uses (9 percent). These land-use changes have impacts on the bay.
One of the bay's biggest problems is the excess of nutrients in the water. Excess nutrients come from many sources, such as treated wastewater, runoff from agricultural areas, runoff from suburban areas, such as lawn and garden fertilizers and septic systems, and even air pollution. Although it doesn't seem like a bad thing, excess nutrients can cause a lot of problems in the bay. Phosphorus and nitrogen are limiting factors for plants.
With the addition of the nutrients that drain away, the algae have nothing to keep them under control, so they grow and turn into giant flowers. Algae blooms block the sunlight that underwater laurels need to survive. Many species of bay leaves rely on grasses for food and protection. Algal blooms also absorb the oxygen from the water that species such as crabs and oysters need to survive.
Forests and wetlands can serve as sinks for excess nutrients, absorbing them before they reach the bay. However, in urban and suburban areas around Chesapeake Bay, many of the forests and wetlands have been removed. One hundred acres of forest habitat in the bay's watershed are lost every day because mainly to development. The watershed is covered with too much pavement and other hard surfaces that water cannot flow through, such as roads, roofs, sidewalks, and parking lots (also called impermeable surfaces).
These hard surfaces make up 21 percent of all urban land in the bay's watershed. Not only do they contribute to excess nutrients (by making it easier for rain to pick them up), but they also have their own problems. The water that falls on these surfaces cannot be slowly absorbed into the ground to replace groundwater in the area, but it flows rapidly into streams and rivers, causing erosion, or directly into storm sewers, which causes flooding. Not only does climate change threaten to exacerbate many of the environmental threats that Chesapeake Bay already faces, it is also causing a rise in sea levels that are consuming diverse estuaries and wildlife habitats.
Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in our country and is home to more than 3,600 species of plants, fish and animals. If climate change continues unabated, the expected rise in sea level will significantly modify the region's coastal landscape and jeopardize waterfowl hunting and recreational saltwater fishing in Virginia and Maryland. The site is expected to lose more than 90 percent of its fresh swamps, tidal swamps and brackish swamps, which become salt marshes and eventually open water. The loss of brackish swamps could be particularly detrimental to species that have adapted to these habitats, such as rockfish and white perch, as well as to anadromous species, such as herring and tarragon, which use the habitat of brackish marshes in the transition between their freshwater and saltwater life cycles. Similarly, the loss of fresh swamps due to tides could affect minnows, carps, sunfish, crabs and bass, which rely on these habitats for shelter, food and spawning.
Marshes at sea level, which are extremely rare, are also at risk. These habitats, located in highlands of wide marshes next to the ocean, in the upper eastern part of the peninsula, are composed entirely of open freshwater wetlands whose main source of water is groundwater. Only certain types of plants and animals can thrive in swamps, such as the ten-angled motherwort, the carnivorous sundew, the motherwort, the elven skimmer dragonfly, and the oriental mud turtle. At the same time, this amount of sea level rise is expected to cause a 33 percent expansion of the freshwater wetland, which includes forest and scrub habitats, with a notable expansion into undeveloped drylands along Mobjack Bay.
Overall, the undeveloped dry land area of this site is reduced by 17 percent, or 45,611 acres. Nearly 20 percent of the undeveloped drylands on this site are at risk of being flooded, primarily as rivers widen and transitional marshes expand. While these underdeveloped lands provide opportunities for habitats to migrate inland, pressure to develop some of these lands is likely to increase because the human population in this part of Virginia is expected to grow considerably in the coming decades. Proactive measures to identify and protect lands where habitats can migrate will be of vital importance.
In addition, the region is expected to face a 79 percent loss of ocean beaches by 2100, if extensive beach feedback is not achieved. The thousands of acres of brackish wetlands in this region will be converted to salt marshes and open waters, potentially ruining lucrative commercial and recreational fisheries that depend on the health of the marshes. Critical seagrass beds in this area are also at significant risk due to rising sea levels and increased sediment deposition in the Blackwater area to the north. Chesapeake Bay Program, Chesapeake Mid-Atlantic Regional Center, National Wildlife Federation National Park Service, Chesapeake Bay Office, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Chesapeake Bay Office A new plot map connects the dots between extreme weather and climate change and illustrates the damage these disasters cause to communities and wildlife.
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The Chesapeake Bay Basin, home to more than 18 million people and 3,600 species of plants and animals, is a truly extraordinary place. The Bay watershed, which spans six states and the District of Columbia, never ceases to amaze with its rich history, its vital importance economic and its amazing beauty. Below is just a sampling of some of the impressive facts and numbers about our wonderful watershed. In September 1781, during the War of Independence, the British sank more than a dozen ships in the York River, near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.
The arrival of the English colonists Sir Walter Raleigh and Humphrey Gilbert in the late 16th century to found a colony, which was later established on Roanoke Island (off the current coast of North Carolina) for the Virginia Company, marked the first time that the English approached the gates of Chesapeake Bay, between the capes of Cape Charles and Cape Henry. The Chesapeake Bay watershed has been heavily affected by natural forces such as erosion, tides, and a history of hurricanes and other storms. With its long coastline, low topography, and growing coastal population, the Chesapeake Bay region is among the places in the country most vulnerable to rising sea levels. Chesapeake Bay is an estuary in the North Atlantic, which extends between the Delmarva Peninsula to the east and the North American mainland to the west. The tide forecasts published by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (see the figure on the right) are a good example of how different sites in Chesapeake Bay experience different tides.
Growing concern about pollution also led the Maryland and Virginia legislatures to create the Chesapeake Bay Commission, a body consultative, in 1980. Also moored is the Chesapeake Lighthouse, which for decades marked the entrance to Chesapeake Bay; and the Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse, the oldest surviving screw-pile lighthouse in Chesapeake Bay, which once marked the mouth of the Patapsco River and the entrance to Baltimore. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which connects Virginia's east coast to its mainland (in the Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Chesapeake metropolitan areas), is approximately 20 miles (32 km) long; it has trestle bridges and two two-mile-long (3.2 km) sections of tunnels that allow unimpeded transportation; the bridge is supported by four 5.25-acre (21,200 m) artificial islands. Individual, population and ecosystem effects of hypoxia in a dominant benthic bivalve in Chesapeake Bay.
It is highly invasive and has the potential to flourish in the low-salinity tidal waters of Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake Bay Flotilla, which was built with shallow barges and ships to counter British naval attacks during the War of 1812. I intended to spend my days sailing, eating as many blue crabs from Chesapeake Bay as possible and studying a little about the inhabitants of the East Coast.