Assessment, Monitoring, and Protection of Small Tidal Tributaries

Title: Assessment, Monitoring, and Protection of Small Tidal Tributaries

Discussion Group Leader: Mike Wessel

Value of the Creek from those who live on them (citizens)

• Looks can be deceiving (when looking at it had no idea the health consequences of the creek)
• Phillipe Creek main source of trouble in this area
• Whitaker Bayou citizen interested in the effects to streams in the Greenway
• Storm systems conduit for garbage
• Recreational opportunities from tidal creeks? citizen answer: because of beauty

Value for professionals

• Ecological function
• Economic component- commercial fishing, etc

Dealing with Sediment

• Emptying out sediment can be expensive or prohibitive if there are dangerous metals, etc in the sediment
• Lack of Deltas- historically not a lot of sediment, much more of a recent phenomenon
• Alteration of uplands due to increased sediment load

Slides:

• AMP: Assess, Monitor, Protect
• Should tidal creeks be AMP’d using the same criteria as the open bay’s?
• In one way these creeks are already being AMP’d.

Nutrient Number: tidal creeks have to comply with. A lot of work trying to figure out what we are trying to protect and assess.

What is a tidal creek? Bayou same as open bay, there is a transition area usually.

What is enough information to AMP within budget constraints? Potential Metrics:

• Hydrology
• Physical alterations
• Shoreline habitat
• Sediment composition
• Plants and animals
• Water column nutrients
• Water column algae
• Plankton
• Fish
• Birds

Problem: Metrics do not translate to the human benefit (product as tidal creeks valued by the community) Dissension: Different discussion, these metrics were more about creating a healthy shoreline and tidal creek system, rather than translating metrics into the relation to the community.

Policy Based on Sound Science: Go from Process to Synthesis that can be Explained to the public and Translated into Policy

What will information be used for? What is the PURPOSE of assessment?

• Develop a structure that will allow you to prioritize.
• Product needs to be suitable to be received by the public who owns private property.
• Would a potential metric be public access?
• Why is it important? Effect on fishing etc, which goes beyond aesthetic access (which is largely private).
• What is definition of ‘healthy environment’?

Things that make Bay healthy come through Watershed, creeks, etc. Chronic problem in bay would be sourced in walking back up the creeks.

Isotope analysis: finding out where nitrogen is coming from. Urbanization around water shed: questions about point sources.

Water Atlas: source of ‘simple thinking’ and public access

Tidal Creeks: lost in the gap of marine and fresh water biologists

Translating Metric Data into water quality standards. Response: People have tried that, these areas don’t lend themselves to classifications because the water movement makes them dynamic and hard to create standards because as tidal creeks they are inherently fluctuating bodies of water.

Learning the Phases of Tidal Creeks to Differentiate between Data the needs to be collected and data which would be redundant to collect.

All Tidal Creeks Different: Different Flow, Morphology, go from one extreme to the other, the dynamics are the energy that makes them work, tidal creek as creek specific

Suggestion for Out of Water Metrics. ex) tree canopy in relation to temperature change

Contact jay@sarasotabay.org for information about tidal creek workshops