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Chesapeake Conservancy is a non-profit organisation, whose aim is to use technology and advocacy to support conservation of the Chesapeake Bay estuary on the east coast of the United States. The group is based in Annapolis, Maryland.

History
In December 2016, the organisation announced that Robert Stanton, former director of the National Parks Service, and Anne Scott, a philanthropic investment manager, had joined the board of directors, replacing outgoing board members Patrick Noonan, Stephen Adkins and Lloyd Beatty, Jr.

Board of directors

 * President and CEO: Joel Dunn
 * Chair: Douglas Wheeler
 * Vice chair: Anne Scott
 * Treasurer: Robert Gensler
 * Secretary: Robert Stanton
 * Marc Bunting
 * Jane Danowitz
 * Leslie Delagran
 * Holly Evans
 * Robert Friend
 * Heather Gartman
 * Stephen Harper
 * Verna Harrison
 * Barbara Jackson
 * Randall Larrimore
 * Turney McKnight
 * Jeffery More
 * John Neely
 * Mamie Parker
 * Richard Scobey

Honorary Board Members Gilbert M. Grosvenor

Gil Grosvenor is chairman emeritus of the National Geographic Society. He retired as chairman of National Geographic Society’s Education Foundation in February, 2012 and as chairman of the National Geographic Society’s board of trustees in December, 2010, a position he had held since 1987.

Grosvenor served as president of National Geographic from 1980 to 1996, the fifth generation of his family to have served in that capacity. He began his career with National Geographic in 1954 as a picture editor and was editor in chief of National Geographic from 1970 to 1980, when he assumed his position as the Society’s 14th president.

Grosvenor serves as a director or trustee of several foundations and corporations, including Chevy Chase Trust and Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. He is a member emeritus of the Board of Visitors of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment; former vice chairman of the President’s Commission on Americans outdoors; and former member of the President’s Commission on Environmental Quality.

In June 2004, Grosvenor was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He graduated from Yale University in 1954.

U.S. Senator Paul Sarbanes

U.S. Senator Paul S. Sarbanes (Ret.) has been a champion for the environment, for conservation and for the Chesapeake Bay since he was first elected to public office in 1966. As a member of the Maryland General Assembly he co-authored the public law creating the real estate transfer tax mechanism for financing Maryland’s Program Open Space – one of the most progressive programs to fund state and local parks and land conservation in the country. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1970 and to the United States Senate in 1976, where he served five terms and helped enact every major piece of legislation to enhance the nation’s environmental quality — including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and Superfund, to name only a few.

Senator Sarbanes was born in Salisbury, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he fostered his love of the Chesapeake. “If a state could have a soul, Maryland’s would be the Chesapeake,” he often said. As Chair of the Maryland Congressional Delegation and as the senior member of Congress from the Chesapeake watershed, Sarbanes led Congressional efforts to restore the health of the Chesapeake from 1987 to his retirement in 2007. Among his legislative accomplishments are: EPA’s Chesapeake Restoration Act, the restoration of Poplar Island, NOAA’s Chesapeake statutory authority and Bay   Education Program, the federal native oyster restoration program, the National Park Service’s Chesapeake Gateways and Watertrails Program, and the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, enacted in 2006. He has received numerous awards and recognition from the National and Maryland Leagues of Conservation Voters, the Waterkeeper Alliance, and the University of Maryland’s Truitt Award, among others, for his environmental achievements.

Senator Sarbanes graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. His son, John Sarbanes, was elected to Maryland’s 3rd congressional district in 2006, the district that Paul Sarbanes represented for three terms prior to his election as senator.

U.S. Senator John Warner

John Warner is a former United States Senator who represented the state of Virginia for five terms, serving from 1979 to 2009. Since retiring, Senator Warner has rejoined the law firm of Hogan Lovells, where he was employed prior to joining the U.S. Department of Defense.

Senator Warner served as Secretary of the Navy from 1972 to 1974 and is a veteran of World War II. Senator Warner spent his early life in Washington, D.C. and after serving one year in the Navy following his graduation from high school, attended Washington and Lee University where he graduated from in 1949.

Senator Warner went on to study law at the University of Virginia, though he postponed his legal education to again support the nation in the Korean War. Upon his return, Senator Warner resumed his legal studies taking classes at the George Washington University, receiving his degree in 1953.

He went on to clerk for Chief Judge E. Barrett Prettyman of the U.S. Court of Appeals and in 1956 he became an assistant U.S. attorney.

Emeritus Directors Patrick F. Noonan

Pat Noonan is founder and Chairman Emeritus of The Conservation Fund (the Fund), a non-profit organization dedicated to conserving America’s natural and historic heritage. The Fund has worked with public and private partners to protect more than 7 million acres of America’s special places, over 250,000 acres in the Chesapeake Bay watershed alone, since its founding in 1985.

Noonan was president of The Nature Conservancy from 1973 to 1980 and was a founder of the American Farmland Trust (1980) where he remains active, serving on its President’s Council. He is vice chairman of the National Geographic Education Foundation and served on three Presidential Commissions.

Noonan has received numerous awards, including receiving a five-year “genius” fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1985 for his pioneering work in fostering partnerships between business and the environmental community.

The National Audubon Society recently recognized him as 1 of 100 conservation leaders whose lives and work shaped the growth of the American conservation movement in the 20th century. Pat is a former member of the Board of Advisors of Duke University Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy.

Charles A. Stek

Charlie Stek has worked for over 35 years to restore and foster greater understanding and stewardship of the Chesapeake watershed. He currently serves as chairman of the Citizens Advisory Committee to the Chesapeake Bay Program and chairs a partnership dedicated to creating the first new National Marine Sanctuary on the Chesapeake in the Mallows Bay area of the Potomac River. He is an honorary member and the first Chairman of the Board of the Chesapeake Conservancy, a member of the federal Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail Advisory Council, and president and CEO of his own consulting firm – Environmental Stewardship Strategies. Stek also served for seven years as policy director for the National No Child Left Inside Coalition and for four years on the Board of the Maryland Historical Trust. He is an avid kayaker, bicyclist, and hiker who has explored much of the Chesapeake.

As projects director for U.S. Senator Paul Sarbanes, Stek led the congressional delegation’s Chesapeake restoration efforts for 22 years. He developed and enacted many of the Bay Program’s federal initiatives including: EPA’s, NOAA’s, the National Park Service’s and the Army Corps of Engineers’ Chesapeake restoration programs; the Small Watersheds, Bay Watershed Education and Training (BWET), and Gateways and Watertrails Programs; the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail and the largest habitat restoration project ever undertaken in the Chesapeake – Poplar Island, among others.

High-Resolution Land Cover Project
Chesapeake Conservancy used topographical mapping to create the Chesapeake Bay High-Resolution Land Cover Project, a high-resolution map of natural and man-made objects around the bay's 64,000 square mile watershed. Initially a small-scale pilot program, using mapping to update the United States Geological Survey's existing land-change model of the bay, the conservancy subsequently formed a partnership with the University of Vermont and WorldView Solutions to extrapolate the method to the whole bay. The map has square meter resolution, substantially improving the previous 30-square-meter resolution. The data was then converted into a web-based application for public use, released in late 2016, allowing those involved in conservation of the bay to locate optimal positions for tree buffers and other measures aimed at reducing soil and nutrient pollution in the bay's watershed. The conservancy refers to this method as "precision conservation". The Chesapeake Bay Program then combined the mapping data with land use data from the area to inform other conservation measures and attempts to improve land use, as well as monitoring water pollution. Chesapeake Conservancy also developed other apps to combine with different kinds of data, such as municipal storm water reports. In 2014, the conservancy received a grant from Microsoft, as well as access to their Azure cloud computing service, which drastically increased the speed of the web-based application. A deep neural network model developed by Chesapeake Conservancy and Microsoft allowed the data used in creating the map to be updated at more frequent intervals, which will allow researchers to track changes such as deforestation, urbanization, and the impact of climate change.

Return of Native American land
In 2017, the conservancy worked with former Virginia Senator John Warner to return an area of land adjacent to the Rappahannock River to the Rappahannock Native Americans who had been forcibly moved from the area in the 17th century.

Champions of the Chesapeake
Each year, the organisation gives out Champions of the Chesapeake awards to recognize individuals for their contribution to conservation of the bay, its environment, and its resources. In 2017 the award was given to Maryland Governor Larry Hogan.