Lew Gramer

2015

Needs: Managers from the three CRCP priority jurisdictions of American Samoa, Florida, and CNMI all identify management of sediment on coral reefs and adjacent coastal waters as a priority objective to NOAA CRCP (ASLAS, CNMILAS/CAPS, Florida-priorities). These managers have stated a need for both historical and timely information on coastal turbidity concentrations within their jurisdictions.Goals: Provide information to assess changes in reef ecosystem health due to sediments, jurisdiction-wide, and at sub-watershed scale. Communicate results and build local capacity to meet jurisdiction needs for LBSP issues. Recent research advances make it possible to fill a knowledge gap and provide timely information to address turbidity management concerns identified for LBSP.Objectives: Specifically, project is providing managers in each of three jurisdictions with water-turbidity maps over time (2002 to present) at sub-watershed scales within their coastal waters, and with detailed, near-real-time alerts, including Google Earth maps to provide geographic context, when new sediment plumes appear. All products will be available to inform NCRMP (CRCP climate-monitoring) sites election at American Samoa. Approach: Coordinating with Management (FDEP, CNMIDEQ, ASDMWR/CMP) and academic partners (USF, SDSU/ASCC), proposed retrospective analysis provides baseline data to determine mean conditions in the past, and to represent current conditions as anomalies relative to them. The project is leveraging significant existing resources and expertise within AOML and at University of South Florida's Optical Oceanography Laboratory (USF/OOL). In Years 1 and 2, we made a suite of customized satellite maps available at 250m spatial resolution, and implemented tools for near-real-time assessment and alerting of managers about relative sediment levels in their jurisdictions. We will work closely with jurisdictional managers via remote conference, to help them understand these tools and take full advantage of them. The project takes advantage of the Virtual Antenna System (VAS) implemented at the USF/OOL from past support of NASA and other agencies. The VAS obtains and processes historical and real-time satellite data from NASA, and makes higher-level customized products available online.In Year 3, sensor deployment/recovery will be done at sites in Florida, CNMI, and American Samoa, collaborating with regional partners, to enhance the product suite with absolute turbidity information. Remote conferencing with managers in all three jurisdictions continues, with the aim of ensuring that management expectations for information on coastal turbidity are met.

The project is providing historical and near-real-time products to managers, showing them relative and absolute surficial turbidity at individual 250m-square areas across multiple watersheds within their jurisdictions. These maps show the combined effects of land-runoff and sediment-resuspension. Based on reliable relative-turbidity maps of their regions, managers will be able to judge relative effectiveness of mitigation efforts within different sub-watersheds over time; alerts and absolute turbidity maps will soon provide managers with timely, detailed information when coastal management activities may be increasing sediment concentration within individual estuaries, coastlines, and other sub-watershed areas to levels that may be harmful to corals and other benthic organisms in those areas. Products are intended to provide managers with direct, quantitative as well as visual feedback on the in-water turbidity impacts associated with projects for coastal construction and dredging, terrestrial revegetation, or beach recovery planned or already underway in each of these target areas.

• Florida
• American Samoa
• Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands

• Faga’alu
• Vatia
• LaoLao Bay (Saipan)

Land-based Sources of Pollution (LBSP)

Ongoing

Funding Ended

https://www.coris.noaa.gov/search/rest/find/document?searchText=projectNumber%3A881%20OR%20projectTitle%3A"Sediment%20on%20reefs%20and%20adjacent%20coastal%20areas%3A%20information%20tools%20for%20managers%20in%20American%20Samoa%2C%20South%20Florida%2C%20CNMI"&start=1&max=10&f=searchPage