The principles of fisheries management (such as ensuring long term biological and economic sustainability) are generally the same around the globe, but the path to achieving these goals differs among national and international management bodies.

Liese Carleton, PhD Candidate, Fisheries Science Virginia Institute of Marine Science

Liese Carleton is a PhD candidate at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science studying fisheries science, and has recently returned from spending a year working in Europe. While “across the pond”, Ms. Carleton supported producing catch advice for fish and crustacean stocks in the Northeast Atlantic, ranging from assisting with stock assessments to communicating the advice to managers and members of industry. Ms. Carleton will share her unique perspective on how fisheries management and policies differ between the US and Europe, and will discuss some case studies on interesting fisheries issues that occurred during 2019. This may include discussing the process of producing catch advice; European recreational fisheries; the full implementation of the discard ban in Europe; shifting fish distributions; the future of incorporating ecosystem information in stock assessments and advice; and more!

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

7:30 PM

Seaside Hall

Virginia Institute of Marine Science

Wachapreague, Virginia

The Virginia Institute of Marine Science Eastern Shore Laboratory presents its public seminar series on the first Wednesday of the month.   The seminar is free and open to everyone.  Coffee and light refreshments will be provided.  For further information call VIMS at 757-787-5816.

Press statement from Chesapeake Bay Foundation

(WASHINGTON, DC)—In an unprecedented assault on the Clean Water Act, the Trump Administration today unveiled a new rule slashing federal protections for wetlands and waterways that are essential to restoring the Chesapeake Bay.

The administration’s new definition of “Waters of the United States” unravels safeguards in place since the landmark law was enacted in 1972. It excludes streams that only flow after heavy rains or snow, groundwater, and most roadside and farm ditches. It also leaves out waters and wetlands that cross state borders.

The Chesapeake Bay is fed by an intricate network of creeks, streams, and rivers spanning tens of thousands of miles and 1.5 million acres of wetlands, which play an essential role supporting the waters and diverse wildlife of the Bay’s 64,000 square-mile watershed. Wetlands trap polluted runoff, absorb storm surges, slow the flow of pollutants into the Bay, and provide critical habitat for the region’s birds, fish, invertebrates, and mammals.

In the Bay watershed, the rule will do the most damage in Delaware, the District of Columbia, and West Virginia, which primarily rely on the federal definition to protect wetlands and streams within their borders. Almost 200,000 acres of wetlands in Delaware alone are now at risk of destruction. Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia have additional state water protection programs, but will still feel the impact because their programs all have holes the rule will only make worse.

Lisa Feldt, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s (CBF) Vice President of Environmental Protection and Restoration, made this statement about the new rule:

“This rule poses a dangerous threat to our efforts to restore the Chesapeake Bay and mitigate the effects of climate change. By acting as natural pollution filters, wetlands are vital to improving water quality. Their marshy waters shelter many of the Bay’s birds and animals and provide our first line of defense against climate change by absorbing floodwaters and protecting local communities.

“Recognizing the value of wetlands, in 2014 EPA and the other cleanup partners committed to creating, reestablishing, or restoring 235,000 acres of wetlands by 2025. Gutting federal protections for wetlands undermines that commitment and risks derailing our decades long restoration effort at a critical time.

“The Bay has made encouraging progress in the ten years since we adopted the Clean Water Blueprint, the science-based plan for restoring it to good health. But the recovery is fragile, and the 2025 implementation deadline is approaching fast. We need the Trump administration to lead the way, not sabotage our efforts to save this national treasure.”

WASHINGTON – The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee today passed Congresswoman Elaine Luria’s (VA-02) bipartisan bill to protect and preserve the Chesapeake Bay, recommending the legislation for a vote in the full House of Representatives.

“Our beautiful Chesapeake Bay is a critical economic and recreational resource that we must protect and preserve for future generations,” Congresswoman Luria said. “It’s been a privilege to lead this effort, gather support from both parties, and push this bill through committee. I urge House leadership to stand up for one of North America’s greatest natural resources by scheduling the bipartisan Chesapeake Bay Program Reauthorization Act for a floor vote.” 

The Chesapeake Bay Program Reauthorization Act (H.R. 1620) is a bipartisan bill that would fully fund the Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program by authorizing an injection of$455 million into the Program over the next five years. The Chesapeake Bay Program Reauthorization Actalso provides funding for local projects.

Congress has not formally reauthorized the Chesapeake Bay Program since 2005. Despite the current administration’s efforts to reduce or eliminate Program funding all together, Congress has acted in a bipartisan manner to continue funding the Program in annual appropriations bills.

The Chesapeake Bay Program coordinates data collection and distributes grants to states for Bay restoration efforts. By fully funding the Program over the long term, Congress would ensure that states get the resources they need to comply with their obligations to protect and preserve the Chesapeake Bay.

Original House cosponsors of the Chesapeake Bay Program Reauthorization Act include Chesapeake Bay Watershed Task Force Co-Chairs Rep. Bobby Scott (VA-03), Rep. Rob Wittman (VA-01), and Rep. John Sarbanes (MD-03). Senators Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) are leading the effort in the Senate.

CNN and the field of Democratic Candidates proved once again that we are indeed living in clown world. For seven hours, the brainy individuals engaged in a forum discussing climate change and the coming end of the world. The big takeaway: stop eating meat and we all must drive electric cars.

Left out of course were a few key details like how do people in emerging countries find sustenance, and what will all of this do to the economy? Like, what happens to the trucking industry, the airline industry, the boating industry, and really just about every other industry. Exactly, how many dreamy windmills and solar panels will it take to light up Topeka… not to mention Chicago?

These clowns talked about everything except empirical data. Well, here’s some:

All proxy temperature data sets reveal that there have been cyclical changes in climate in the past 10,000 years. Climate has always changed. And it has changed in both directions, hot and cold. Until at least the 17th century, all these changes occurred when almost all humans were hunters, gatherers, and farmers.

Industrialization did not happen until the 17th century. Therefore, no prior changes in climate were driven by human emissions of carbon dioxide. In the last 2,000 years alone, global temperatures rose at least twice (around the 1st and 10th centuries) to levels very similar to today’s, and neither of those warm periods were caused by humans.

Polar bears and the ice caps are actually doing fine. The 10,000-year Holocene paleoclimatology records reveal that both the Arctic and Antarctic are in some of their healthiest states. The only better period for the poles was the 17th century, during the Little Ice Age, when the ice mass levels were higher than today’s. For the larger part of the past 10,000 years, the ice mass levels were lower than today’s. Despite huge losses in recent decades, ice mass levels are at or near their historic highs.

Polar bears are one of the key species in the Arctic. Contrary to the hype surrounding their extinction fear, the population numbers have actually increased in the past two decades.

Last year, the Canadian government considered increasing polar bear killing quotas as their increasing numbers posed a threat to the Inuit communities living in the Nunavut area.

And it is not just the polar bears in the Arctic. Other critical species elsewhere, like tigers, are also making a comeback.

Carbon dioxide does not have a huge effect on climate.

While most of the current climatologists who collaborate with the United Nations believe anthropogenic CO2 emissions have exacerbated natural warming in recent decades, there is no empirical proof to support their claim.

The entire climate cabal was in for a rude awakening when global temperature between 2000 and 2016 failed to rise as anticipated. The scientists assumed that rising CO2 emissions from human activity would result in a rapid rise in temperature, but…they didn’t.

This proved that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are not the primary factor controlling global temperature. Consideration of a much longer period (10,000 or more years) suggests that CO2 had no significant role to play in temperature increases. CO2 never was the global thermostat.

W. W. Soon in Geophysical Research Letters(2007) has reviewed much of the literature on air temperature-CO2 relationships. He concludes, “there is no quantitative evidence that varying levels of minor greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4 have accounted for even as much as half of the reconstructed glacial-interglacial temperature changes or, more importantly, for the large variations in global ice volume on both land and sea over the past 650,000 years …changes in solar insolation at climatically sensitive latitudes and zones exceed the global radiative forcings of CO2 and CH4 by severalfold, and that regional responses to solar insolation forcing will decide the primary climatic feedbacks and changes.”

A real worry is the impending solar minimum that NASA has predicted for the next two solar cycles between 2021 and 2041, ushering in a period of global cooling like it did during the solar minimum of 17th century.

There has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, droughts, or other extreme weather events. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported low confidence that global warming—manmade or not—was driving increases in extreme weather events.

So, stop listening to these people. As we speak, California is planning to add climate change fear to the school curriculum. We are raising a generation of kids who are living in fear, like the poor girl from Holland that says every day she wakes up afraid for her future, so much so that she had to sail to New York. All of this is based on theory, and not empirical evidence, or as some call it, science.

Do you really want to be a punk driving around in a Prius? Screw that, crank up the Harley, and get that Dodge Challenger if you want it.

Keep Calm and Chive on.

This month’s VIMS seminar features Dr. Martin Skov, Senior Lecturer in Marine Biology, School of Ocean Sciences, Bangor University, Wales, UK.

From Dr. Skov, “Ecologists formulate fundamental ideas (paradigms) to reason the shape of the natural world they see. Yet, all ecologists, myself included, have favorite locations where they work, and so big ideas about the world can be shaped from small viewpoints. Here, I show how some paradigms about mangroves and salt marshes are challenged when crossing continents (US to Europe), oceans (Gulf-Caribbean to Indo-Pacific) or smaller geographic regions (across the United Kingdom). I look to differences in biology, geology, weather and people to explain this world of differences.”

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

7:30 PM

Seaside Hall

Virginia Institute of Marine Science

Wachapreague, Virginia

The seminar is free and open to everyone.  Coffee and light refreshments will be provided.  For further information call VIMS at 757-787-5816.

The seminar is available as a real-time webcast you can view online. 

Please go to: http://vims.adobeconnect.com/afterhours  and log in as a guest at the time of the event.

A “dead zone” in the Chesapeake Bay has grown to one of the worst in decades.

Data from the state’s Department of Natural Resources indicates the dead zone – an area of water with little to no oxygen – was covering 2 cubic miles at the end of July. That makes it the second-largest late-July dead zone since 1985, according to the DNR report. The average size for that time period is 1.34 cubic miles.

The worst section of the dead zone includes the lower Potomac and Patuxent rivers, as well as much of the bay, from Baltimore to the mouth of the York River, the Associated Press reported.

Air temperatures around the bay reached 100 degrees for several consecutive days in July, which heated main bay waters to temperatures as warm as 90 degrees, the DNR report said. Warmer water holds less oxygen and compounds hypoxia.