About

The Middle Chesapeake Sentinel Landscape spans over two million acres across the lower Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware. It is home to Naval Air Station (NAS) Patuxent River-Atlantic Test Ranges, one of the U.S. Navy’s premier aircraft testing locations. Each year, the U.S. Navy conducts over 150,000 testing and research flights within its 1.5-million-acre special use airspace in the region. The surrounding ecosystem is equally valued for its natural beauty, economic productivity, and ecological vitality, and it includes a portion of America’s largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay.

Despite the landscape’s historically agricultural and fishing-based economy, its location makes it an increasingly attractive area for residential and vacation home development. This growing demand presents a challenge for the partners within the sentinel landscape, whose individual missions can conflict with unfettered development. As a result, in 2015, a group of stakeholders formed the Middle Chesapeake Sentinel Landscape to enhance land protection and restoration efforts across the region to support military readiness, working and natural lands, and resilient communities and ecosystems. Since its inception, the MCSL has grown from an initial group composed of Federal agency partners to include representatives from 40 different organizations and agencies.