Chesapeake Bay Gets a Gentlemen's C

With a little grade inflation. From the Balmer Sun, Chesapeake Bay is the healthiest its been in 40 years — with a C+ grade

Chesapeake Bay is the healthiest it has been in 40 years of tracking — earning a C+ grade, according to a newly released report.

The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) released its 20th annual Chesapeake Bay and Watershed Report Card, offering a comprehensive snapshot of the health of the bay and the waterways that feed it.

The report card crunched data mainly from 2025, measuring indicators such as water clarity and total nitrogen.

The Chesapeake notched an overall C+ grade, scoring 56%, according to the report. It received an A for dissolved oxygen, which is critical for aquatic organisms’ survival. The bay also showed improvement in aquatic grasses, total phosphorus and total nitrogen.
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Of the Chesapeake’s 15 regions, eight showed improving health trends, while seven remained stable. The Lower Bay earned a B+ (76%), the highest score ever recorded for a region. The Lower Western Shore received the lowest grade, a D- (24%).

The bay’s improved health comes as the blue crab population increased over the past year, despite a troubling decline over the past decade. Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources also reported significant growth in the state’s oyster population over the past five years.

The bay’s watersheds, areas where rainfall, snowmelt and surface runoff drain into a shared body of water, earned a C+ grade as well, matching last year’s score. Its highest-scoring indicators were temperature stress at 84% and protected lands at 80%.

Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, president of UMCES, said in a statement that the recovery reflects “a steady, long-term trajectory, proving what sustained science-guided efforts can achieve. Real recovery isn’t measured in single years — it’s built over decades,” he said.

I'm not a big fan of the grading systems used by the several groups who put out such grades. They're very weather dependent. A good score one year can be followed by a horrible one the next. Is the system worse for it? Maybe, in an extreme case like Hurricane Agnes, but for the most part, it's just random, for certain values of the word random.

For my part, I don't see much change in the Bay, except that one of my favorite pastimes, fishing for Striped Bass is more difficult because their abundance is in real trouble, they're harder to find, and the rules on keeping them have, justifiably, been made substantially stricter;

On the other hand, there's good news, the famous Chesapeake Logperch has recovered to the point that the Federal government no long considers them endangered. I hear they're awesome on a fly.