Along the coast of southern Maine, the need to conserve natural buffers in order to protect rivers and wetlands has become a focal point for tensions between development and conservation interests. In this rapidly developing landscape, decision-makers often feel they must choose development over conservation or restoration to support local economies. While there is scientific evidence that underscores the value of protecting natural buffers around sensitive water bodies, local decision-makers need additional place-based, economic information about the ecosystem services that these lands provide and the range of tradeoffs that are implied in related land use decisions.

Stormwater pollution is the number one threat to coastal water quality in North Carolina, where it contributes to beach closures, impacts tourism, and interrupts shellfish harvests. Rapid urbanization, population growth, and a shifting climate have all converged to make it increasingly difficult for the state’s communities to reduce the volume of stormwater washing over th landscape and protect water quality. Excess runoff also leads to street flooding that ranges from being a nuisance to a danger to public safety.

Healthy estuaries are vital to the economy of the Texas central coast, supporting the region’s multibillion-dollar fishing industry and growing tourist trade. Adequate supplies of freshwater are key to the productivity of these estuaries. However, as the regional population grew and the recent drought deepened, estuaries were receiving less freshwater.

A team of collaborators from the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve, Southwest Wetlands Interpretive Association, and University of California-Davis are exploring the environmental consequences of managing the opening and closing of lagoon mouths. The project approach includes the following elements: Collaboration with Users: The project team will regularly engage members of the Southern California Wetlands Recovery Project, which coordinates and funds restoration projects throughout the region. Data Synthesis: Long-term water quality and vegetation data will be analyzed from three estuary systems: San Diego Bay, Los Peasquitos Lagoon, and Tijuana Estuary. The team will look at how mouth closures influence factors such as dissolved oxygen and salinity, which in turn affect plants and animals. Literature Review: The project team will pull together relevant scientific articles and reports to guide its interpretation of monitoring data and development of management recommendations. This science transfer project was funded by NOAA through the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative to promote the use of science. It did not produce any new data.

NOAA has designed and is currently implementing a hyporheic monitoring plan for the Thornton Creek watershed in North Seattle. This work is being conducted for Seattle Public Utilities, who in 2015 completed two large-scale floodplain reconnection projects in the Thornton Creek Watershed. This study will evaluate restoration effectiveness by comparing control and treatment study reaches to each other and to forested references streams before and after restoration. NOAAs data collection focuses on hyporheic invertebrates, water temperature, and nutrient concentrations. Hyporheic and surface water concentrations of DOC, TN, TP, and dissolved nutrients.

Understanding why estuarine habitat restoration is viewed as successful or not is critical for evaluating completed projects and garnering support for future projects. Particularly important, and often overlooked, are the perceptions of partners and the surrounding community which play an integral role in shaping the future of coastal habitats. Restoration metrics rarely include human dimensions even though community support for restoration can promote or thwart potential projects and the long-term success of completed projects. Working with the South Slough NERR, this catalyst project worked to more fully account for and understand the impacts of estuarine habitat restoration by developing social metrics for restoration success and linking them to ecological monitoring metrics. Using South Slough NERR, The Wetlands Conservancy, and other restoration projects in Oregon as case studies, the project involved a two-pronged approach to data collection: 1) synthesis of existing and newly collected ecological data from nine salt marsh restoration projects to derive commonly used ecological metrics and 2) focus groups in three Oregon locations (South Slough, Alsea, and Yaquina) to understand public perceptions about marshes. The team then connected the social and ecological datasets conceptually to create a matrix linking the datasets and indicating mismatches between ecological data and social values. Based on these steps, the team was able to provide recommendations to help improve restoration design and implementation, including more inclusive and effective communications surrounding estuarine restoration.

Conservation and repair of the coastal wetland ecosystems’ in the Great Barrier Reef catchments have come into focus following media converging on the point that the reef health and land use in catchments has been compromised. While on-ground wetland repair investment activities are underway, data to demonstrate water quality and biodiversity return for the investment is not available. Here we continue working with project partners, further contributing to change management practices, consolidate new project partnerships, and road test the Queensland Wetlands Values Based Causal Framework using existing and new data.

Meteorological dataset: Meteorological data provide information on atmospheric conditions that can affect water quality and biological and physical processes. Core elements currently measured at each National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) include air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed, wind direction, rainfall, and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR). Optional parameters include total solar radiation. Each site maintains at least one meteorological station. Stations are placed at locations typical of local conditions or in areas where a specific need for weather data has been identified. Data are reported at 15 minute intervals. Prior to 2007, hourly and daily average data were also reported. Water Quality dataset: Water quality observations made over long time periods can provide important feedback to scientists and to local, state, and national resource managers about actions taken to manage, protect, and restore estuaries. They also provide valuable information for evaluating the impacts of environmental change on coastal habitats and species. There are at least four water quality stations at each National Estuarine Research Reserve. Each station is designed to characterize long-term variability and short term changes in environmental conditions. Data are collected with data loggers at fifteen minute intervals and instruments are deployed continuously and year round where possible. Water quality parameters collected include: water temperature, specific conductivity, salinity, percent saturation of dissolved oxygen, dissolved oxygen concentration, pH, depth, and turbidity. Chlorophyll fluorescence is an optional parameter and pressure corrected water depth is a calculated value. Nutrient/pigment dataset: There are at least four water quality stations at each National Estuarine Research Reserve. Each station is designed to characterize long-term variability and short term changes in environmental conditions. Discrete samples for nutrient and chlorophyll a concentrations are collected at each long-term monitoring station at least once monthly. More intensive (24-hours over a complete tidal cycle) sampling is conducted each month at one water quality monitoring station to better understand impacts of tide and irradiance on nutrient cycling. Nutrient parameters collected include: nitrate, nitrite, ammonium, orthophosphate, and chlorophyll a. Numerous optional parameters include dissolved organic carbon, total dissolved nitrogen, and total dissolved phosphorus. All data are provided in yearly .CSV files.

Blue carbon storage – carbon sequestration in coastal wetlands – can help coastal managers and policymakers achieve broader wetlands management, restoration, and conservation goals, in part by securing payment for carbon credits. Despite considerable interest in bringing wetland restoration projects to market, the transaction costs related to quantifying greenhouse gas fluxes and carbon storage in restored marsh has been a significant limiting factor to realizing these projects. The Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve has been at the forefront of blue carbon research and end user engagement. Building on the efforts of a previous project, Bringing Wetlands to Market in Massachusetts, this project developed a verified and generalized model that can be used across New England and the mid-Atlantic East Coast to assess and predict greenhouse gas fluxes and potential wetland carbon across a wide environmental gradient using a small set of readily available data. Using this model, the project conducted a first-of-its-kind market feasibility assessment for the Herring River Restoration Project, one of the largest potential wetland restoration projects in New England. The project team developed targeted tools and education programs for coastal managers, decision makers, and teachers. These efforts have built an understanding of blue carbon and the capacity to integrate blue carbon considerations into restoration and management decisions.