The University of Maryland's Department of Environmental Science and Technology (ENST), in partnership with the Department of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences (GEPS), introduced a new minor this fall: Chesapeake Bay: Watersheds and Water Resources.
In Maryland, where the Bay shapes everything from the seafood industry to real estate values to environmental policy debates in Annapolis, the minor offers students from all disciplines a formal way to build literacy in an ecosystem that helps define the state. For students already headed into environmental careers, the minor offers a chance to specialize in the watershed they may choose to work in after graduation, while providing a strong foundation for estuarine work anywhere in the world.
“Our campus rests within the Bay watershed and more than 75% of our students come from homes within the watershed,” said program co-director Lance Yonkos, an associate professor in ENST. “We as an academic community have some ownership of the resource, and some responsibility for its protection. Even students not pursuing careers related to the Bay in particular, or estuaries and other water resources more generally, should have a basic understanding of our individual and collective influences on these systems.”
“The Chesapeake Bay is a perfect microcosm for the larger issues surrounding the ‘critical-zone,’ that realm where the rocks of Earth's crust, its waters, soils, biosphere and atmosphere interact chemically and physically,” said program co-director John Merck, a principal lecturer in GEPS. “The critical zone is of primary importance to human society. It informs decision-making for environmentalists, civil engineers, urban planners and a host of others, but the academic disciplines that study these components are distributed among departments in at least three colleges. The goal of the new minor is to bring these elements together in a coherent package that will pair appropriately with a wide range of majors.”
The minor was developed through collaboration across departments and structured to reflect the subject's interdisciplinary nature.
“The factors impacting the Bay ecosystem and its health are complex, and solutions require knowledge in subjects spanning multiple fields,” said program advisor Jennifer Gunnulfsen, a senior lecturer in ENST. “This range is reflected in the variety of elective course options for the minor, and the potential outcomes for students.”
A hydrology-minded engineer, a policy student tracking Bay restoration funding and a biological sciences major studying wetland ecosystems could all complete this program and walk away having built different things: models of watershed hydrology, arguments for shoreline restoration or field data on water quality—all filtered through the same regional lens.
The program will rely heavily on a portion of the Chesapeake Bay watershed that runs through campus: Guilford Run and Campus Creek, both of which drain into the Paint Branch and the Anacostia River watershed, which flows into the Potomac River on the way to the Chesapeake Bay. These bodies of water will serve as a living classroom throughout various courses, and students will also spend time visiting and studying other parts of the watershed, as well as the main stem of the Bay.
The minor is built around two core courses that lay the interdisciplinary groundwork for understanding how the water cycle moves through, and interacts with, the land and the organisms living on it.
In ENST 333: "Ecosystem Health and Protection," students will cross the Bay Bridge and immerse themselves in one of Maryland's most impactful Bay programs: large-scale oyster restoration. The class will visit the Horn Point Oyster Hatchery to learn how to raise young oysters in a hatchery environment and deploy them to the Bay, where they will help boost natural oyster populations.
In the second required course, GEOL 452, "Watershed and Wetland Hydrology," students will use field and data-driven studies to examine hydrological processes that support Chesapeake Bay wetlands and streams and how they respond to climatic and land-use changes.
With a requirement of five courses and a minimum of 15 credits, students will choose three electives from a list that spans the sciences: oceanography of the Chesapeake and Mid-Atlantic, freshwater biology, wetland ecology, soil-water pollution, groundwater, geomorphology, environmental geochemistry and water management in urban environments, among others.
Throughout the program, faculty will leverage their working partnerships across the state to bring real-world experiences in Bay science and related issues to students, and partners such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation are excited about the collaboration.
"The Chesapeake Bay Foundation is extremely excited for the launch of the new Chesapeake Bay minor at the University of Maryland,” said Tom Ackerman, the vice president for education at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “Teaching and training undergraduates to become the next generation of environmental problem solvers and Bay leaders is essential to saving the Bay and a perfect role for the university. We look forward to partnering with the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources to make this a great new learning experience for students."
