The League is working to develop a more robust picture of Chesapeake Bay health — a water quality baseline that can be used to track the progress of restoration efforts over the coming years. This is a huge project that involves:

• Inventorying thousands of agencies and volunteer groups currently collecting water quality information across the mid-Atlantic states
• Ensuring the data these groups collect are of high scientific integrity
• Prioritizing data needs based on gaps in information currently collected by the Chesapeake Bay Program
• Developing a powerful and userfriendly database to capture new data
• Engaging and training new groups of volunteers to address data gaps.

We are working with several partner groups — the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring — as well as citizen scientists, local government agencies, and universities across the mid-Atlantic states. Funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made it possible for the League to hire a new staff person, Lea Rubin, to manage this effort.

Lea joined the Izaak Walton League in early December 2015 as Chesapeake Monitoring Outreach Coordinator. For the past three years, she worked for the Chesapeake Research Consortium (part of the Chesapeake Bay Program Partnership), where she managed water quality monitoring networks and explored ways to foster a stronger and more resilient monitoring network. As a member of the Chesapeake Conservation Corps in 2011-2012, Lea participated in bootson- the-ground restoration of riparian buffers and oysters and constructed a biodiesel processor on the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Claggett Farm. She received her bachelor’s degree in environmental chemistry from the Rochester Institute of Technology and enjoys being in the outdoors as well as camping, cooking, and dancing. Please join us in welcoming Lea to the League!