The Chesapeake Bay is a national treasure and a resource of international significance. The Chesapeake Bay encompasses 2,500-square-miles of water; its watershed includes over 40 tributary rivers, and 64,000-square-miles of land in 6 states. The Chesapeake Bay watershed is an incredibly complex ecosystem of water and land, creatures and people, cultures and economies. Effective stewardship of this complex ecosystem requires complex partnerships. It also requires a complex understanding of how this ecosystem works and how it has become degraded.

The Bay today is still beautiful and teeming with life. But the Chesapeake Bay, largest of all estuaries in the United States, has been losing its wonderful biodiversity and abundance for decades. Since the first comprehensive scientific study of the Bay in the mid-1970s, the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) partners have learned a great deal about what we need to do to keep this ecosystem healthy.

Since its inception, the CBP's highest priority has been the restoration of the Bay's living resources--its finfish, shellfish, bay grasses, and other aquatic life and wildlife. A decade ago the CBP had primarily a water agenda focused on the mainstem of the Bay. Then initiatives expanded to include the tributaries of the entire watershed. Now the challenge includes redressing the impacts from a vast airshed. If water and air have dominated the environmental restoration agenda to date, then increasingly, land use will be linked to water quality across the Bay's sprawling watershed. The CBP has evolved in response to the ever-increasing understanding of the complexity of the ecosystem.

The National Park Service (NPS) mission is to preserve and interpret the nation's most precious natural and cultural resources and to provide for the public's enjoyment of these resources. As people have gained a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between species and their landscapes, the concept of parks as integral parts of greater ecosystems has emerged. Heightened public awareness and changing expectations has necessitated new approaches to managing parks, and new roles for the NPS in conservation leadership. As the world presses in around us, our attention will increasingly be drawn from the more familiar realm within our park boundaries to the lands and resources beyond. Increasingly, the NPS is called upon to help others conserve and protect resources beyond park boundaries where most of the work to effectively manage resources as part of a whole ecosystem must be done. Such is the case in our partnership with the CBP.

The CBP is a multigovernmental, interstate partnership that includes the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia; Washington, D.C.; the Chesapeake Bay Commission, a tri-state legislative body; and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as the lead agency for the Federal government. The top executive from each CBP participant--the governors of each state, the District of Columbia mayor, the Chesapeake Bay Commission chairman, and the EPA administrator--make up the Chesapeake Executive Council, which has been guiding the Bay restoration since 1983. Representatives from each of the jurisdictions, along with officials from other federal agencies, local governments, and citizen representatives, meet regularly to carry out the policies set by the Chesapeake Executive Council.

Through a 1993 Memorandum of Understanding with the EPA, the NPS became a formal partner in the CBP. In joining the CBP, the NPS agreed to contribute to the restoration, interpretation, and conservation of the Chesapeake Bay's many valuable resources--both within the national parks of its watershed and in coordination with others striving for the Bay's continued recovery.

Through the 1994 Agreement of Federal Agencies on Ecosystem Management in the Chesapeake Bay, the Federal partners have built a solid record of measurable accomplishments. To continue in our leadership role, the Federal Agencies Committee (FAC) drafted an update to the 1994 agreement--a vehicle for taking a fresh look at the current and future work that Federal agencies are doing in the Bay watershed.

The 1998 Federal Agencies Chesapeake Ecosystem Unified Plan (FACEUP) provides a timely response to the new watershed management initiatives identified within the President=s Clean Water Action Plan and keeps the CBP on the cutting edge of ecosystem management nationally. The 1998 FACEUP challenges the NPS and other federal agencies to achieve specific measurable goals in areas such as watershed management, sustainable development, protection of human health, habitat restoration, stewardship of living resources, and nutrient and toxics prevention and reduction.

The Secretary of the Interior and the Director of the National Park Service again joined in cosigning this 1998 FACEUP agreement, which will provide a blueprint for measuring our accomplishments in several important areas in the coming years. Many of the initiatives identified are well underway within NPS parks and program centers in response to established policy and mandates; others will challenge us to increase our commitment to partnerships, resource management, and ecosystem management within the Chesapeake Bay watershed.