Who, What, When, Why and How of Louisiana's 2012 Coastal Master Plan

Alaina Owens (Brown and Caldwell)

Who: The plan is being developed by the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. In all, over 100 people are involved in the planning effort. The state has established a variety of ways for government staff, industry representatives, non governmental organizations, members of academia, citizens, and other stakeholders to participate in the process.

Levee/floodwall construction

What: The 2012 Master Plan will offer a comprehensive approach to coastal restoration and risk reduction in coastal Louisiana. The Plan focuses on the following five overarching objectives:

1. Reduce economic losses from storm based flooding to residential, public, industrial, and commercial infrastructure.
2. Promote a sustainable coastal ecosystem by harnessing the processes of the natural system.
3. Provide habitats suitable to support an array of commercial and recreational activities coast-wide.
4. Sustain, to the extent practicable, the unique cultural heritage of coastal Louisiana by protecting historic properties and traditional living cultures and their ties and relationships to the natural environment.
5. Promote a viable working coast to support regionally and nationally important business and industry.

Barrier island restoration

When: The plan will be submitted to the Louisiana State Legislature for approval in the spring of 2012. By legislative mandate, the plan must be updated every five years so the state can respond to changes on the ground as well as innovations in science, engineering, and policy. Louisiana’s 2012 Coastal Master Plan is the second of what will be an ongoing series of master plans, each one improving on work done before.

Marsh creation

Why: The wetlands of coastal Louisiana help protect communities and critical oil and gas infrastructure from storm surge, support waterborne commerce for the nation, and provide a substantial portion of the nation’s commercial fisheries landings. The coast’s expanse of natural habitats makes it one of the nation’s most unique and valuable landscapes. Unfortunately, Louisiana’s wetlands are being lost at an alarming rate, with an estimated loss of nearly 2,000 square miles since the 1930s.

How: The 2012 Coastal Master Plan is grounded in a coastal “vision.” The vision specifies levels of flood risk reduction for communities and targets for ecosystem services across the coast. A suite of seven predictive models is being used to predict how far various restoration and/or protection projects can move the state toward achieving its vision. Model output, combined with a set of decision criteria (factors that reflect what is important to the state), feed a decision support tool that compares the effects of projects and groups of projects. This information will help state decision makers identify projects that provide the most benefit.

Example project types include levee / floodwall construction, barrier island restoration, and marsh creation. River diversions, hydrologic restoration, shoreline protection and bank stabilization projects are also being analyzed as part of the 2012 Master Plan update.

The use of predictive models in formulating Louisiana's coastal Master Plans relates to Topic 5: Dynamic ecosystems to be discussed during the Synthesis Sessions at CERF 2011.  You can hear more on the specific topic of this post in session SCI-010 - Challenges and Innovative Methods Integrating Science and Coastal Decision Making.

For more information on the Louisiana Master Plan go to www.coastalmasterplan.la.gov, or email – masterplan@la.gov.

Coastal Scientists and Managers in a Three-legged Race to Set Nutrient Criteria

William Nuttle, Organizer for CERF 2011 Synthesis Sessions
wnuttle@eco-hydrology.com

In the ideal partnership between coastal science and management, the job of scientists is to discover underlying causes and describe possible solutions to a problem, and the managers’ job is to implement the solution. This requires scientists and managers coordinate their actions, much like teammates in a three-legged race. So, if one partner makes a change in direction, then it’s bound affect the other’s game.

The US EPA is the lead management agency in the effort to combat the growing “dead zone” the northern Gulf of Mexico. Nutrients from farm fields in Midwestern states, carried into the Gulf by the Mississippi River, feed an annual algal bloom in near shore shelf waters. The death and decay of bloom organisms depletes oxygen in the stratified bottom waters over a very large area of the coast.

The solution to this all too familiar problem of coastal eutrophication is to reduce the amount of nutrients carried to the Gulf by the Mississippi. Managers rely on scientists to provide data and analyses needed to establish defensible nutrient concentration thresholds and loading rates that protect against the negative effects of eutrophication. The key to success is to be able to link the problems caused by excess nutrients in coastal waters directly to the various processes that introduce nutrients into the river up in the watershed.

Scientists and managers have already run this three-legged race in the Chesapeake Bay and its watershed. At the end of last year, December 29, 2010, EPA established a “pollution diet” for the District of Columbia, and large sections of Delaware, Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania. These limits were established across the entire watershed of the bay, all at once, based on state-of-the-art modeling tools, extensive monitoring data, and peer-reviewed science.

However, EPA is taking a different direction in addressing the problem of coastal eutrophication in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Last month, July 2011, EPA reiterated its intent to follow a proposed Framework for State Nutrient Reductions in setting numeric nutrient criteria for the Mississippi River watershed. The proposed framework lays out a states-based approach, instead of the watershed-based approach used for the Chesapeake Bay. The first step is to establish, separately for each of the 31 states in Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin, priorities for nutrient reductions among hydrologic basins within the state.

What does the decision by EPA mean for the scientists who will be called on to provide the essential information needed to establish these criteria? How can water managers in Missouri factor in the impacts of eutrophication in coastal Louisiana when setting water quality criteria for rivers and streams in their state? What data will be required and what approach can be taken to perform such an analysis. Will water managers in Kansas use the same approach or a different one that they might prefer? Who can say?

These questions relate to Topic 3: Management applications and Topic 6: Management problems to be discussed during the Synthesis Sessions at CERF 2011.


Figure credit: http://www.georgekrevskygallery.com/dynamic/artwork_detail.asp?ArtworkID=651

PCAST Recommends National Ecosystem Assessments, Better Science

William Nuttle, Organizer for CERF 2011 Synthesis Sessions
wnuttle@eco-hydrology.com

In July, advisors to the President called for the US to begin tracking the state of its ecosystems and evaluating the economic benefits they provide. This report by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recommends a quadrennial, across the board assessment of the state of US ecosystems and the services they provide.

Right now, the US federal government spends about $10 Billion per year on ecosystem restoration and preservation. This figure does not include investments made by state and local governments and by private groups. One of the concerns raised by the report is that data from government-supported environmental monitoring programs are not available to assess the efficacy of these investments, or indeed whether more work is needed

“The Nation has an urgent need for more complete monitoring systems in order to inform policy, as a basis for development of predictive capabilities, and to address issues of compliance, assessment, and management.” The committee recommends that the federal government conduct a comprehensive assessment of the nation’s ecosystems every four years, the Quadrennial EcoSystems Trends (QuEST) Assessment.

Managing the data in such an effort would be challenging, and this requires attention to data accessibility and the innovative use of information technologies. Other challenges relate to the science underlying ecosystem monitoring and analysis. Questions that must be addressed include:

1. “Are current modeling methods adequate to predict the consequences of human-ecosystem dynamics for biodiversity preservation, for ecosystem services, and for biosecurity? 
2. “What is the scope for using socio-economic data in modeling anthropogenic environmental change? 
3. “How can existing monitoring systems be augmented to include such data?” 

The recommendations lack the force of regulation or policy. But they do indicate recognition at high levels of need for regular reporting on the nation’s ecological health and, implicitly, for the science underlying ecological monitoring and assessment. Details remain, but implementation must keep in sight that national ecological assets are not simply numbers in a ledger; they are where people live and the resources we depend on.

The information in this post relates to Topics 1 and 5 of the CERF 2011 synthesis sessions.

Figure credit: http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/ecosys/background.html