The Chesapeake Bay is the nation’s largest estuary. After slow deterioration for several centuries, the Chesapeake Bay Program was launched in 1983 to restore it. After spending more than $24 billion, the results of the restoration program are disappointing. The Bay Program has arrested the decline of the Bay, but it has failed to achieve its restoration goals—something that will become more challenging with climate change. The rate of environmental change today is more rapid than at any time in the history of humanity. The concept of restoration—to return to an earlier time and condition—is an outmoded concept for coastal ecosystems like the Chesapeake Bay that are at the leading edge of change. A better strategy would be to focus on shaping the future Bay. While we cannot create the future Bay, we have many of the tools to shape it, tools that have never been used as a complement to existing efforts. Learn about the past and present of the Bay, how climate change will affect its future, and how we can intervene to shape the future of the Chesapeake.

The USA touts Chesapeake Bay as its premier environmental restoration programme, yet the Bay remains in poor condition.

Life in the Chesapeake Bay is the most important book ever published on America's largest estuary. Since publication of the first edition in 1984, tens of thousands of naturalists, boaters, fishermen, and conservationists have relied on the book's descriptions of the Bay's plants, animals, and diverse habitats. Superbly illustrated and clearly written, this acclaimed guide describes hundreds of plants and animals and their habitats, from diamondback terrapins to blue crabs to hornshell snails. Now in its third edition, the book has been updated with a new gallery of thirty-nine color photographs and dozens of new species descriptions and illustrations. The new edition retains the charm of an engaging classic while adding a decade of new research. This classic guide to the plants and animals of the Chesapeake Bay will appeal to a variety of readers—year-round residents and summer vacationers, professional biologists and amateur scientists, conservationists and sportsmen.

An appendix documents the many small islands that have dropped entirely from view since the seventeenth century.