Albemarle-pamlico national estuary program

Read full article. View of Keel Creek. Photo courtesy of Tom Earnhardt. Story continues. Recommended Stories. FX Empire. Investor's Business Daily. The Coloradoan. American City Business Journals. Associated Press. The Independent. News Direct. The Des Moines Register. Spartanburg Herald-Journal. Mansfield News Journal. CBS News. Assessing and monitoring the resource through the Landscape Characterization Initiative and Citizens Monitoring Networks.

Conducting outreach and communications to a wide variety of stakeholders. Evaluate the causes and consequences of changes in environmental status and trends. Assess environmental, economic, and sociological impacts of alternative policies for dealing with these changes. Forecast change and create an early warning detection. Ecosystem Changes A review by the U. Monitoring and Assessment Following the extensive research of the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuary Study in the late s, researchers produced a substantial body of knowledge.

Community Engagement and Education Community engagement and education efforts are difficult to measure. Also important was the influence of the U. Environmental Protection Agency, which supported the elevation of the APNEP to a higher organizational level within the structure of the state government. Participants in the program say it can facilitate connections that lead to action.

One partner, for instance, may identify a need, but lack the money to address it. APNEP can work with other organizations with various pots of money to fund a project. Early in the program, there were questions about the appropriate role of citizens.

Because of a conflict between the roles of citizen and science, there were frustrations in developing the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan CCMP , leading individuals to drop out of the planning process and oppose the draft plan.

More recently, the Management Advisory Committee has not been very active, allowing research efforts to progress without strong input from representatives of the agencies expected to implement strategies that are based on the research findings.

To address this challenge, the program wants to reinvigorate the committee. But the plan is actually rather species specific, including site-specific actions and implementation efforts. In revising the plan, APNEP staff acknowledge the challenge of tackling a broad scale while keeping the plan feasible. The Policy Board will be asked to indicate priorities for the program. Creating an Adaptive Approach: In revising the CCMP, contributors sought a plan that offers flexibility and a blueprint from which to base annual workplans.

Adaptive approaches are sometimes mired by the delay in seeing the outcomes of management strategies. In addition, biological timeframes and social timeframes rarely coincide. Transitioning from Assessment to EBM: Although the program has been in place for more than 20 years, ecosystem-based management is still unfolding.

Though these are vital precursors to an informed management scheme, they have delayed implementation of EBM. Organizational Placement: The program has been housed within several different units of government, which affected its influence.

They feel the current nesting of the program diminishes some of its flexibility and influence. Through two years of a five-year monitoring program, the project is on track to meet or exceed the documented criteria for success, with significantly improved water quality and circulation results, and improving condition scores over time. The Lagoon also now functions as nursery habitat for juvenile estuarine fish.

Further, there is a shifting trend from a pre-restoration pollution-tolerant benthic invertebrate community to a more diverse, sensitive invertebrate community. This project endeavors to offset the loss of 75 percent of giant kelp communities on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

In the past two years, community volunteers and commercial fishermen spent over 5, hours reducing sea urchin densities on the shallow rocky reefs and have restored 33 acres.

The teams crushed 1. Once completed, the project could encompass more than acres. The ecological response has been direct: giant kelp returned to the reefs and formed a canopy, and biomass and the richness of fish species increased.

The remaining sea urchins, valuable to the red sea urchin fishery, are recovering quickly and are of value to the fishery, at a modeled benefit of percent for every unit restored. Since , SBEP located in Florida has overseen the completion of nearly 70 habitat restoration projects, with help from partner agencies, conservation groups and volunteers.

Between , the SBEP and several key partners managed two major wetland restoration projects. This project consisted of the following three unique elements:. Acquired for its historically important coastal habitats, this acre parcel saw a lot of abuse over the decades and needed a major restoration. Here, SBEP focused on restoring saltwater wetland and creating improved tidal circulation throughout half of the available upland acreage.

The SBEP partnership planted extensive native vegetation along the wetland edges and upland islands. In the first project, the SBEP created over four acres of oyster habitat. Completed over three years, the oyster reefs now support thriving fish and invertebrate communities. Moreover, they closely mimic the form and function of nearby natural oyster reefs.

With the help of Reef Innovations of Sarasota, SBEP designed several new reef modules to attract juvenile gag grouper, which use the bay early in their life cycle. Subsequent monitoring revealed a variety of pelagic and reef fish, as well as highly economically valuable stone crabs, using these habitats.

The results of this acre restoration initiative included:. More than 51 acres were purchased by The Nature Conservancy and set aside as a protected reserve.

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