Brady Awarded Funds to Improve Water-Quality Model

Damian Brady, assistant research professor in the School of Marine Sciences, has been awarded $25,294 to improve a sediment model of the Chester River in Maryland in order to enhance the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Modeling Package that is utilized to clean the bay. Water-quality models provide information about how much pollution — in the form of nutrients from wastewater treatment plants and inorganic fertilizers — it takes to create dead, or hypoxic, zones, in Chesapeake Bay. Brady says models are proficient at determining the relationship between pollution and ecosystem damage, but they’re less proficient at predicting the impact of nutrient pollution on shallow water connected with sediment underneath. The University of Maryland is administering the funds from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The project began in June 2014 and continues through May 2016.