Buzzards Bay National Estuary Program

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Status & Trends

Sub-Pages:   Coalition State of the Bay Reports  |   Citizens Monitoring Program  |   Population Trends  |  

Related Pages:   Tracking Town Actions  |  

General Bay-wide Trends

Category	Recent Trend	Historic Status*	Comments	Link for Graph	Link for Info
Shellfish Closures		56	New openings offset by slightly more closures		Shellfish Closure Status
Embayment Eutrophication		56	Wet summers and more discharges from new growth pushing down scores		CBB website
Eelgrass Beds		25	New declines in north end of Buzzards Bay driving the trend		Eelgrass page
Herring Runs		4	Continuing collapse of herring runs on eastern seaboard driving the trend		Herring Runs page
Scallops		10	Varies considerably from year to year		CBB State of Bay report (2MB pdf)
Endangered Roseate Terns		NA	Funding becoming available for habitat improvements		Roseate Tern Page
Protected Open Space		NA	Oil Spill fines will purchase 100s of new acres		Open Space Page
CCMP Progress		NA	CCMP is being updated, much of "low lying fruit" has been picked		GPRA Report
Remaining Wetlands		60	Coalition's Assessment of Remaining Wetlands in the BB Watershed (*)	NA	CBB State of Bay (2MB pdf)
Remaining Forest		75	Coalition's Assessment of Remaining Forest in the BB Watershed (*)	NA	CBB State of Bay (2MB pdf)
Remaining Stream Buffers		67	Coalition's Assessment of Remaining Stream Buffers in the BB Watershed (*)	NA	CBB State of Bay (2MB pdf)
BBP Trend Basket	0.00	NA	Current average of BBP Recent Trend scores (2 to -2)		NA

(*) "Historic Trends" remaining percentage compared to estimated pre-European settlement conditions as described in The Coalition for Buzzards Bay's 2003 2007 CBB State of the Bay Report(2 MB pdf).

Climate Trends

Graph of average water temperature in Woods Hole, MA during the first two weeks of August when water temperatures are typically the warmest.

EPA National Estuary Program 2007 Coastal Conditions Report

EPA and Congress Celebrate NEP 20th anniversary, but Nation's estuaries remain impaired.

On June 5, 2007, representatives of Congress, EPA, and national estuary programs around the country met in Washington DC to celebrate 20 years of success in the National Estuary Program (NEP). The NEP was established by the 1987 rewrite of the Clean Water Act, and has served as a model for watershed and estuary protection efforts around the country. A major focus of many of the NEPs and their partners during the past few years are their efforts to protect and restore wetlands, with more than 1 million acres protected or restored during the past 6 years. Since 2003, the NEPs have also leveraged well over 1 billion dollars to fund and implement various environmental protection and restoration efforts. Around the country, the NEPs have been strong advocates in facilitating the adoption of EPA's stormwater control program and Total Maximum Daily Load controls for nutrients and other pollutants.

Despite these positive achievements, the news is not all good. At the same meeting, EPA released its National Estuary Program National Coastal Condition Report (Go to EPA's NEP CCR page to download the report). The report was based on data collected between 1999 and 2003. The NEP estuaries were rated individually, regionally, and nationally using four primary indicators of estuarine condition: water quality, sediment quality, benthic (bottom) condition, and fish-tissue contaminant concentrations. In this report, EPA acknowledges that in NEP bays, many of the measures of habitat and water quality showed poor conditions. These conditions appear to reflect impacts from the tremendous growth in coastal development and population that these bay watersheds experienced, coupled with inadequate controls of pollution. Still, EPA stated in their press release that the NEPs were doing somewhat better than their corresponding coastal regions in response to growth pressures. They noted: "While population pressures in the NEPs were greater than those in the non-NEP estuaries from 1990-2000, the NEP estuaries showed the same estuarine conditions as, or better than, other coastal waters overall. By 2000, more than two-thirds of the coastal population lived in NEP counties, which comprise less than six percent of the coastal land area."

The report section on Buzzards Bay ranked it at the high end of "fair", although in the case of certain contaminants, like toxic contaminants in fish, the bay ranked as "poor." The report was meant be an evaluation of the entire bay by averaging the results of stations both in the central bay and in representative embayments. A weakness of this approach is that overall, conditions in central Buzzards Bay tend to be very good, but many of the bays and harbors around the bay are impacted from pollutant inputs and changes in habitat cause by development and other changes in land use. The report notes: "Buzzards Bay has avoided many estuary-wide problems that plague other watersheds around the country, but land-use practices and the growing local population have impacted natural resources in the 32 small embayments in the Buzzards Bay area."

It is for this reason that the Coalition for Buzzards Bay, with financial support of our program and the Commonwealth, monitors and tracks water quality in more than 30 Buzzards Bay embayments.



Read the Buzzards Bay section of the report (a 1.8 MB pdf file).

Coalition's 2007 State of the Bay Report

On June 15, 2007, The Coalition for Buzzards Bay released a new State of the Bay Report, finding that the Bay's indexes of water quality and living resources have declined since their last report in 2003. The new score for the bay was 45, down from the 2003 score of 48. The Coalition developed the report based on data and information from agencies, scientists, and land use planners. The report uses the best available current and historical information for indicators in three main categories: pollution, watershed health, and living resources. The Buzzards Bay National Estuary Program contributed to the effort by evaluating certain data sets, particularly data on shellfish bed closures, eelgrass cover, and various land use and wetland change calculations.

The report follows a national state of the bay report released a week earlier, for all estuaries in the National Estuary Program (described in the article below). The national Coastal Condition Report paints a rosier picture for Buzzards Bay, finding it at the upper end of "fair" overall, and in better condition than most estuaries in the National Estuary Program. Upon closer examination, the two reports are attempting to answer different questions with different sampling schemes. For the national monitoring program, sampling stations were randomly selected throughout Buzzards Bay to represent the entire geographic extent of the estuary, with relatively few stations located inside the bays and harbors along the edges of Buzzards Bay. From this perspective, it is certainly true that average Buzzards Bay water quality as a whole is in far better condition than other estuaries like Narragansett Bay, San Francisco Bay, Delaware Bay, and the other estuaries it out-scored. The national monitoring program was established to help EPA report to Congress and others as to whether our nation's estuaries were getting better or worse, and how the National Estuaries compared to each other with respect to the problems they faced.

In contrast to EPA's monitoring program, the Coalition for Buzzards Bay's State of the Bay assessment focuses on water quality and living resources in the nearshore areas. From a local perspective, this makes lots of sense because it is these nearshore areas that are most impacted by human activity, and it is these nearshore areas that are also most utilized and enjoyed by residents, whether they are swimming, fishing, or beach walking. For example, the shellfish index is based upon the portion of Buzzards Bay nearshore areas closed to shellfishing. Certainly shellfish exist in central Buzzards Bay, and some shellfisherman work these deep waters with special equipment, but for the most part, most Buzzards Bay commercial and recreational shellfisherman work in bays and shallow waters nearshore affected by pollution.

From a scientific perspective, these nearshore areas also tend to have some of the most important and diverse habitats that sustain or act as nurseries for numerous species. These coastal areas and the embayments around Buzzards Bay each have a story to tell of impacts to water quality and living resources, affected principally by activities in surrounding watersheds of each embayment. Each of these embayment will need a custom management strategy to solve their problems, and the success or failure of these local efforts will be documented by water quality and living resource monitoring programs like these.

Links

Coalition's 2003 State of Bay Report (2.1 MB pdf file)

EPA's letter on the 2002 review and evaluation of Buzzards Bay NEP performance on implementing the Buzzards Bay CCMP

EPA's letter on the 2002 review and evaluation of Buzzards Bay NEP performance on implementing the Buzzards Bay CCMP

"A report of Implementation Activities Relating to the Implementation of the Buzzards Bay Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan in accordance with the Government Performance and Results Act, April 2001. "
A 43kb PDF file.

1999 Biennial Report
A critical review, Action Plan by Action Plan, of work toward the implementation of the
Buzzards Bay Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan. A 249 KB pdf file.

2005 Triennial Report
A critical review, Action Plan by Action Plan, of work toward the implementation of the
Buzzards Bay Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan. A 169 KB pdf file.

Citizen Water Quality Monitoring Program, 1996 report.
In collaboration with the Coalition for Buzzards Bay, the Buzzards Bay NEP funded and designed a citizen-based water quality monitoring program to evaluate the impacts of nitrogen loading to coastal waters. Link to more recent info.

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