View Report Card.

This time, the attention is turned to the Patuxent River, which suffers from cloudy water, not enough underwater grasses and too much pollution. In a report card released yesterday by the University of Maryland, the Patuxent Riverkeeper Program and other groups, the river's health was graded as a D-.

The tidal portion of the river was divided into three sections and given more specific grades: C- for the upper estuary, D for the middle estuary and F for the lower estuary.

Despite the awful grades for the river, there are opportunities for improvement, said one of the authors of the report card.

"The report card documents large-scale changes in water and habitat quality as we look at different parts of the Patuxent River," Dr. Bill Dennison of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science said in a statement. "These variations show that hope is not lost for the Patuxent, and that implementing targeted restoration efforts is key to returning the river to a vibrant, thriving ecosystem."

Highlights of the report include:

More than 53 percent of the watershed is used for farming or urban development, which are major sources of nutrient and sediment pollution.

The marshy middle section of the river successfully removed 55 percent of the nitrogen flowing downstream. Marshes and wetlands are like kidneys that clean and filter water flowing through.

Although the river exceeded its goal for 128 hectares of underwater grasses in 2005 with 182 hectares, the amount of underwater grasses fell to 58 hectares in 2007. One hectare is equal to about 2.5 acres.

The report card is an offshoot of the University of Maryland baywide report card issued earlier this month. That report card gave the Chesapeake Bay as a whole a grade of C-. The Lower Western Shore - which includes the Magothy, South, Severn, West and Rhode rivers - earned a D-.

The Patuxent Riverkeeper program aims to boost its volunteer corps to do more water-quality monitoring, in hopes of getting a better handle on the river's problems and how to fix them.

More than 50 volunteers already have been trained to test spots on the river for dissolved oxygen, bacteria, nitrates, phosphates and other health indicators.

But the riverkeeper still needs more volunteers, as the Patuxent is the longest river within the state of Maryland - snaking 110 miles through seven counties, from its headwaters in Mount Airy to the where it meets the Chesapeake Bay at Solomons Island.

"We plan to collect and communicate this data as a call to stimulate action and empower citizens with data they can use to make and demand change," said Fred Tutman, the Patuxent Riverkeeper.

Read the report at www.eco-check.org. For information about the Patuxent Riverkeeper's water quality monitoring, visit www.paxriverkeeper.org.