Prior to the 1980s, many of Tampa Bay’s habitats were damaged, reduced, or lost during development activities. Once the value of these habitats was recognized, protections were put in place and monitoring of these habitats began to occur on a regular basis to help understand the effectiveness of different conservation and restoration activities.
For most habitats, information comes from assessments of seagrasses and land cover conducted by the Southwest Florida Water Management District. To gain or improve our knowledge about some habitats (such as hard bottom), the TBEP and its partners conduct supplemental studies when we recognize that additional information is needed.
When viewed as a whole, the most significant and meaningful trends in the TBEP habitats of interest over the periods of record examined include: 1) the 75% gain in seagrasses since 1988; 2) the slight gains in both emergent tidal wetlands (10% gain) and freshwater wetlands (2% gain) since 1990; and 3) the 39 percent loss in native upland habitats since 1990. The increasing trend in seagrass coverage is a testament to improved bay water quality.
The habitat gains demonstrate the effectiveness of state and federal wetland regulatory programs publicly-funded habitat restoration projects. Minor increases in salt barrens may also reflect a landward expansion associated with sea level rise.
However, a loss of upland habitats is the result of continued human population growth and urban development in the Tampa Bay watershed, and unless local protections for native upland habitats improve, this trend will likely continue.
These are painful tables, we need to figure out a better way of presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_j36a1rUz1GjXK_ZQV6T5goeqnRvPrRR/view?usp=sharing, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P86xKOE_IZw577nVAVGYqr6ffKnOTlZv/view?usp=sharing
Habitat restoration is an attempt to restore important services, such as providing fish nurseries, improving water quality, and storm protection, to an ecosystem. This can involve a variety of habitat types, from salt marshes to pine flatwoods.
In fact, Tampa Bay restoration professionals often work to create or restore a mosaic of habitats to reflect the variety seen in natural systems.
Habitat restoration in the Tampa Bay region has evolved over time from a simple planting of red mangroves west of the Howard Frankland bridge in 1971 to major landscape-scale ecosystem restoration projects such as Rock Ponds, that involved 1,043 acres of landform changes on regionally significant tracts of coastal land e.g., Rock Ponds (2,543 acres). Nearly 5,000 acres of habitat restoration has occurred in the Tampa Bay watershed since 1971, and TBEP and its partners have committed to restoring 3,150 additional acres before 2030.
Another table (slightly less painful): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zVx18P6lrPuVR6ANMAetBRXwxCGeCN9b/view?usp=sharing
The nekton index, which is similar to the water quality scorecard, uses catch data from the State’s Fisheries Independent Monitoring Program to track trends for representative species. With samples dating back to 1989, there is a long-term record that can be related to water quality and habitat characteristics. The index groups and assesses catch data according to habitat use, species composition and diversity, and feeding dynamics to understand trends in the fish community.
An annual “snapshot” of ecological health helps fisheries managers target efforts to improve habitat or other factors, if persistently low scores below “normal” conditions are detected. While the data period does not include “pristine” conditions, the community appears to be resistant to large-scale changes and resilient to episodic disturbances over the period the index was developed. “Yellow” cautionary scores in the mid-2000s and 2010/11 coincided with red tide or cold snaps, however, the index doesn’t specifically point to these events as direct causes of declining scores. Regardless, nekton communities appear to have rebounded, with all four major bay segments receiving “green” scores the past four years.
Action: Continue monitoring nekton health annually and incorporate the index into habitat restoration planning.