Environment in Focus

After a major rockfish poaching incident, Maryland Natural Resource Police are using high-tech gear, including sonar systems and tracking devices, to crack down on illegal fishing in the Chesapeake Bay.  New laws also grant officers the power to impose $25,000 fines, revoke fishing licenses, and inspect the cabins of commercial fishing boats without probable cause.

Offshore wind farm.  iStockphoto.

Dennis Whigham, senior botanist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, is trying to bring back species of orchids that are threatened and nearly extinct.

Tundra swans lift off a frozen field on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is building "green" alleys, parking lots and basketball courts with holes in them to absorb stormwater runoff pollution.

An air pollution control device called a scrubber rises at the Brandon Shores coal-fired power plant south of Baltimore, with plant chemical technician Melissa Sampson at left.  

American eel. Photo credit: NOAA.

The American eel, or Anguilla rostrada, is one of the strangest and most contrarian fishes in the world, with a migration pattern opposite that of most species.  But its populations are declining, in part because of overfishing for seafood markets in Europe and Asia, and because a growing number of their streams are blocked by dams and development.

Dairy farmer Ron Holter works a milking machine in Frederick County, Maryland.

George Kelly.

Maryland and surrounding states plan to use pollution credit trading as a central part of their strategy to meet new EPA pollution limits for the Chesapeake Bay. George Kelly, founder of Environmental Banc & Exchange, believes that a market-based approach will reduce fertilizer runoff pollution on farms, although others are skeptical.