Ryan Powell holds up a vial of water with fingers caked with mud. It is algae extracted from pond choked with a bloom. He is standing on a farm outside of Baltimore, a test site for a new technology he has developed that can harvest algae from open ponds so it can be turned into crude oil. The oil can then be used as jet fuel, fuel oil, and diesel fuel.

Scientists are expecting that this year’s Chesapeake Bay hypoxic low-oxygen zone, also called the “dead zone,” will be approximately 1.37 cubic miles – about the volume of 2.3 million Olympic-size swimming pools. While still large, this is 10 percent lower than the long-term average as measured since 1950. 

Dr. Alyson Santoro, assistant professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Horn Point Laboratory, is one of four scientists in the nation to be given the 2015 Simons Early Career Investigator in Marine Microbial Ecology and Evolution award by the Simons Foundation.

"Imagine the clandestine lives of marine fishes,” begins “Migration Ecology of Marine Fishes,” a new book by Dr. David Secor, one of the most respected voices in marine fish migration studies. Their movements, social interactions, and favorite spots are all obscured beneath the surface. However, an explosion of technological advances in data gathering and analysis has allowed fisheries scientists to observe the secret lives of fish in a whole new way.

A recent study of harmful algal blooms in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science show a marked increase in these ecosystem-disrupting events in the past 20 years that are being fed by excess nitrogen runoff from the watershed.  While algal blooms have long been of concern, this study is the first to document their increased frequency in the Bay and is a warning that more work is needed to reduce nutrient pollution entering the Bay's waters.

UMCES' Chesapeake Biological Laboratory (CBL) alumnus Adam Peer and CBL Director Dr. Tom Miller were recipients of the Best Paper of the Year 2014 awarded by the American Fisheries Society for its journal North American Journal of Fisheries Management.