The Chesapeake Bay score decreased in 2018, but maintained a C grade, according to the 2018 Chesapeake Bay Report Card. This was due to extremely high precipitation over the year. Despite extreme rainfall last year, the overall trend indicates that Chesapeake Bay health is improving over time.

Find out how UMCES provides the science for policymakers to address the pressing environmental issues in our communities in our latest annual report.

Scientists have completed the first comprehensive assessment of UV-filters in surface seawater, sediment, and coral tissue from multiple coral reefs around the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

A new model has been created that can forecast the location of Eastern Pacific leatherback turtles along the coast of Central and South America in an effort to decrease bycatch mortality of this critically endangered and ecologically important species.

In one generation, the climate experienced in many North American cities is projected to change to that of locations hundreds of miles away—or to a new climate unlike any found in North America today. A new study and interactive web application aim to help the public understand how climate change will impact the lives of people who live in urban areas of the United States and Canada.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has awarded a $5.75 million grant to establish a Center for Oceans and Human Health and Climate Change Interactions to study the effects of ocean health-related illness and the interactions from climate change. The Center will be headquartered at the University of South Carolina and involve more than 20 researchers from five colleges and universities, including the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Ecologist Vic Kennedy offers baselines for abundance in Chesapeake Bay and a survey of the diamond-backed terrapin in two new books published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Maryland, with 3,100 miles of tidal shoreline from the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries to the Atlantic Ocean and coastal bays, is highly vulnerable to sea-level rise. The effects of accelerated sea-level rise are already apparent, including shoreline erosion, deterioration of tidal wetlands, and saline contamination of low-lying farm fields. Later this century, rates of sea-level rise increasingly depend on the future pathway of global emissions of greenhouse gases during the next sixty years.

Jacqueline Grebmeier has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society, for providing “new and sustained insights on the ecological responses of Arctic continental shelves to climate change and extraordinary leadership in scientific program development.”