SOUTHEAST

Effect of Climatological Cycles and Storm Events on Water Quality in the National Estuarine Research Reserve Systems of the Southeastern United States

NERRS sites: North Carolina Reserve; North Inlet-Winyah Bay & ACE Basin reserves, South Carolina; Sapelo Island Reserve, Georgia; and Guana Tolomata Matanzas Reserve, Florida

To assess the impact of human activity on coastal water quality, coastal managers require enhanced understanding of the influence of natural cycles and meteorological events. With these accounted for, managers are better positioned to evaluate whether changes in water quality that are tied to human activity.

To address this need in the Southeast, researchers from five reserve sites leveraged water quality data collected as part of the NERRS System Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) and resources from CICEET to develop an analysis tool that accounts for natural, cyclical changes in water quality, as well as impacts that occur from storm events.

In the process, the team developed “periodicity free” data that can be used to gain a better understanding of coastal ecosystems in the Southeast. The transferable methods they developed are accurate, and compatible with large datasets that have a high degree of variability. All findings, as well as necessary statistical tools required to accomplish this effort, are described in the project report.

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PACIFIC COAST

Tidal and Watershed Forcing of Nutrients and Dissolved Oxygen Stress within Four Pacific Coast Estuaries: Analysis of Time-Series Data collected by the National Estuarine Research Reserve System-Wide Monitoring Program (2000-2006)

NERRS sites: Padilla Bay, Washington; South Slough, Oregon; Elkhorn Slough, California; and Tijuana River Estuary, California

Along the Pacific Coast, nutrient concentrations can vary widely according to local land use, tidally-driven ocean upwelling, and meteorological events. Managing nutrient loading—and the phytoplankton blooms and low oxygen conditions that it can lead to—coastal managers require an understanding of the degree to which it is influenced by natural processes in the nearshore ocean and by runoff from coastal watersheds.

To address this need, researchers from four Pacific Reserves leveraged data collected as part of the NERRS System Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) and resources from CICEET to compare nutrient dynamics at their sites within broader geographical, oceanographic and climatological contexts. They compared similarities and differences in nutrient concentrations, ratios, and dynamics; nutrient impacts of human activity; and the influence of weather patterns.

While the Reserves are distributed from just south of Canada to just North of Mexico, the researchers found common climatic and oceanographic influences on nutrient dynamics, including seasonal upwelling, distinct wet and dry seasons, and long-term phenomena such as recurring El Niño Southern Oscillation events and the cyclic warming and cooling of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

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NORTHEAST

Synthesis of SWMP Data for ASSETS Eutrophication of the North Atlantic Region NERRS Sites

NERRS sites: Wells Reserve, Maine; Great Bay Reserve, New Hampshire; Waquoit Bay Reserve, Massachusetts; Narragansett Bay Reserve, Rhode Island; Old Woman Creek Reserve, Ohio

Nutrient pollution is a pervasive problem that impacts people and the environment, particularly in highly developed areas. Developing solutions to this challenge depends on the availability of accurate timely information on nutrient levels in coastal waters.

To address this need in the Northeast, researchers from five NERRS sites leveraged data collected as part of the NERRS System Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) and resources from CICEET to apply Assessment of Estuarine Trophic Status (ASSETS), an accurate, accessible method of measuring eutrophication (increases in nutrient levels) in estuaries and coastal waters. Their goals were to assess eutrophication at the estuaries studied, improve the ASSETS methodology, explore the integration of ASSETS and SWMP, and investigate the relationship between coastal land use and eutrophication.

The study found that in the Northeast, eutrophication worsened from the north to the south. Less development in adjacent lands usually correlated with less eutrophication, most likely due to reductions in urban runoff. The ASSETS methodology is readily accessible to coastal resource managers now through the step-by-step methodology submitted together with this report.

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MID-ATLANTIC

Synthesis of Data from the National Estuarine Research Reserve System-Wide Monitoring Program for the Mid-Atlantic Region

NERRS sites: Hudson River Reserve, New York; Jacques Cousteau Reserve, New Jersey; Delaware Reserve, Delaware; Chesapeake Bay reserves, Maryland and Virginia.

Along the Mid-Atlantic coast, expanding development has led to increases in nutrient loading and sedimentation in estuaries and coastal waters. To be effective, projects to restore coastal habitats require up-to-date syntheses of information on environmental conditions, collected at multiple temporal and spatial scales. They also require the context of how conditions in one ecosystem compares to others in a region.

To address this need in the Mid-Atlantic, researchers from five reserves leveraged data collected as part of the NERRS System Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) and resources from CICEET to better understand environmental relationships among the reserves, and the controlling factors that influence individual reserves and the region.

The researchers developed a methodology to aggregate water quality and nutrient data into longer time scales more suitable for making comparisons with other sites. They conducted analyses to update methods of computing net ecosystem metabolism from SWMP data, and they assessed the role of freshwater inputs in controlling interannual variability in water quality.

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