Episode 26: NOAA and the IRLNEP: Partnering on Transformational Habitat Restoration in the IRL

Jessy Wayles:

A $9.4 million investment, 10 partners, thousands of oysters, clams, seagrass shoots, and mangrove plantings, all working towards one bold goal, restoring life to the Indian River Lagoon. Today we’re talking with Dr. Duane De Freese, executive director of the IRLNEP, and Kevin Walker, the project manager behind one of the largest, most collaborative restoration efforts ever undertaken in this estuary. What does it take to bring a lagoon back to life? And how do you get that many people rowing in the same direction? We’re discussing the IRLNEP NOAA grant today on One Lagoon – One Voice.

Duane Defreese:

Hi, I am Duane De Freese, executive director of the IRL Council and the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program. Welcome to our One Lagoon, One Voice Podcast.

Each week, myself or one of my staff members will host leaders in the community, scientists along the lagoon, people who know a lot about the system to talk about some of the problems.
And most importantly, some of the solutions to solve the Indian River Lagoon’s health and make sure it’s great for future generations.

So let’s get the show started and let’s talk a little lagoon.

Jessy:

All right, guys, welcome to One Lagoon – One Voice, the podcast.

My name is Jessy Wayles. I am one of three community engagement coordinators, and I am super stoked today to be talking to two of my fabulous co-workers about the $9.4 million NOAA transformational habitat grant we got recently.

So welcome, Kevin Walker, our project manager of the grant, and of course, you know him, you love him, Dr. Duane De Freese, our executive director.

Thanks for coming on, guys.

Duane:

Thanks for having us.

Kevin Walker:

Thanks for having us.

Jessy:

Kevin, I would love to chat with you. Everybody knows Duane, we all love Duane, but you are a new face on our team. So how did you get involved with this grant project?

Kevin:

Well, I’m a native Floridian, so I’ve lived here all my life and I live in Island National Refuge, in the Indian River Lagoon System… And I kind of learned about the work that you guys do through that. And honestly, I had no idea.

And it’s funny ’cause I lived here for years and years and I paddle board and I fish and I kayak and I had no idea about all the, all the things that happen and the great work that you and all the other partners and everyone’s been doing and everything we can do to help.

And then I just happened to have an opening in my schedule, so I applied and here I am. This is something I really wanted to do ’cause it really excites me, ’cause like I say, I’m a water person, so this only benefits me, my family, everyone I know. It’s good for the environment, all the animals, um, diehard animal wildlife guy. So, so yeah, I’m really, really excited about this.

Jessy:

And so your background is in project management, but it’s not necessarily lagoon project management, right? You used to work in like aerospace or…

Kevin:

Correct. I worked in the aerospace sector for 20 years and then also in that kind of area for another four years prior to this.

Jessy:

Gotcha. So, I mean, it’s great that you’re still working on the Space Coast, even though it may not be in aerospace. So welcome to the team. We’re super happy to have you.

But we are here to talk about this grant. So we’re gonna start at the high level and we’re gonna work our way down into the nitty-gritty.

So my first question is going to be for Duane. We’re just gonna go ahead and chat about the project. How did this come about? Like, I know that we had applied for this grant a couple years ago and we didn’t get it, so we kind of went back to the drawing board, got a lot of partners on board, but how did we come up with this idea of this transformational habitat grants and why is it considered to be transformational?

Duane:

That’s a great question and it was a big challenge for us.

So this funding comes through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Office of Fisheries. It was made available through congressional funding for infrastructure, including natural infrastructure. And so it was a very large funded program.

We looked at it and the title of the program was Transformational Habitat Restoration and Coastal Resilience Projects. And historically, those transformational projects are really big.

And so when you think about Everglades and Puget Sound and the Gulf of Mexico, many times it’s the size and the number of partners.

Jessy:

Right.

Duane:

And the Indian River Lagoon just isn’t like that. You know, we’re narrow. We’re shallow. You know, we have multiple counties, seven counties in the watershed.

And so we had to think about what would be transformational for the Indian River Lagoon and then make the case in the proposal that would have national significance.

We thought long and hard about what that might look like. So we developed a strategy. Rather than having one super large project, we would take multiple partners and multiple projects and put them together. So, in combination, they were transformational at a national level, even though not a single one of those projects alone probably could’ve competed at the national level.

Jessy:

Absolutely. And I think that’s what’s so unique about our project, is we’ve really created this community of practice. And even though the IRL is so large, the folks that work here, it’s a pretty small team. Everybody knows each other pretty well.

So how hard was it getting these different partners to buy into this idea of going out for this massive amount of funding?

Duane:

On one hand, it was easy ’cause the National Estuary Program said, “We’ll do the heavy lifting on the proposal.” Uh, but bringing 10 partners in on a combined project means that everybody’s gotta be looking in the same direction, thinking at the same scale, working together cooperatively.

And so it was a lot of work on our part to make sure that we had a communication structure that would allow us in a certain amount of time to build a really solid proposal, that was technically sound. The partnerships were created and the communication was happening. And we had multiple levels of what we felt were pieces of that transformational puzzle, one of which was building this community of practice of 10 organizations.

But it’s not just the organization, it’s the people that are working within the organizations, thousands of volunteers. We have private sector contractors, public sector partners, and then, you know, trying to stay within the boundaries of a very stringent proposal.

It was a lot of work. We were herding cats, but it was-

Jessy:

Absolutely. (laughs)

Duane:

…really exciting. We literally, in building the proposal, even if it hadn’t been funded, we created that foundation for a community of practice. We were communicating better, collaborating better.

You know, we understood each other and our needs and our priorities better. So even if we hadn’t been funded, there was a lot of progress made in building that communication strategy.

Jessy:

I agree. I mean, you know, we do see each other at a lot of our quarterly meetings, but I think the only time all of us really get together is during the IRL Symposium in February. So it’s been great to be able to talk to these partners on a more regular basis.

So there’s 10 partners, 15 sites. Kevin, is it still like herding cats when trying to work on this project? Have you worked on a project before where you have to, you know, ping pong with a bunch of different people, or your fingers tired from all the emails you’re sending or how’s it going?

Kevin:

It’s absolutely herding cats.

Jessy:

(laughs).

Kevin:

Luckily for me, in my prior life I was used to herding cats all around the world. So, (laughs) so doing it within the 156-mile lagoon system isn’t too bad for me.

Jessy:

Good. (laughs)

So can you tell us, Kevin, can you tell us a little bit more about the project partners that you’ve worked with so far and some of the locations throughout the lagoon?

So we know that this is across the entire length of the lagoon. All five counties have some sort of project involved. Can you tell us a little bit more about what we’re doing?

Kevin:

Sure, sure. Of course across the board we’re planting seagrass, we’re doing oyster restoration, we’re creating living shorelines, we are restoring wetlands.

We’re doing all of that as a, like you said, a transformational, large scale innovative project. And it’s really fostering a lot of great communication, collaboration. For example, recently I was up at Titusville at Scobie Park working with Brevard Zoo.

Jessy:

Yep.

Kevin:

And they installed seven 27-foot-long Coquina breakwaters, about two foot high, gaps in between. This particular location, this beach, severe erosion, you can tell from climate change, storms, boat wakes, just horrible erosion. Right?

And it’s a real popular place for the horseshoe crabs to go. So this is a really nice project. And it was the first one I got to go out and see. So it’s really special to me. After doing all that, we planted all the salt marsh plants and everything and they already completed with their project. It actually happened in April.

But when I went back out for the monitoring, one of the thing I noticed about the collaboration aspect is we had some professors from UCF there who were also working with Brevard Zoo and helping them with some monitoring techniques, giving some advice from their experience.

And in going out to the sites, not just Brevard Zoo at Scobie Park, but all of them, I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. And the number one thing that everyone says is that this is fostering communication.

Jessy:

Nice.

Kevin:

Prior to this you had person A and person B who had this dollars and these dollars doing these little projects, but now it’s this large-scale project. We’re trying to be consistent with our reporting, our metrics, our communication, and that’s bringing everyone together.

And also, you know, hopefully everyone can learn from each other’s successes, but more so even failures.

Jessy:

Right. Right.

Kevin:

Because in the past, if you’ve got person A who’s got, you know, so many dollars and they have a failure, but, you know, they know it, but no one else knows it, we don’t want someone else to be wasting those valuable resources just to get the same result when we can be evolving the science and learning and growing more.

Jessy:

Yeah. That’s such a good point.

So Duane, the lagoon has lost 89% of its seagrass between 2011 and now. How do you think that this project is gonna help to repair that loss?

I know Kevin kind of touched on using seagrass as one of the metrics. So how is this project gonna help with that?

Duane:

For our listeners, let me put that loss in perspective. That 89% represents about 47,000 acres of seagrass. And seagrass is our metric for a healthy Indian River Lagoon.

When we have robust seagrass meadows, we have good water quality, but we also have essential fish habitat. And to put that in perspective, that would be about 35,600 football fields of seagrass.

So I think it’s important for our listeners to know that we’re not going to plant our way out of that loss.

Jessy:

Great point.

Duane:

That the work that we are doing has to be in conjunction and parallel to all of the work that’s being done to improve water quality to allow seagrasses to recover on their own where they’re able to do that. And then the work we are doing, if we do it well, will accelerate that restoration.

We’ve developed five independent seagrass nurseries for research and restoration. And so we see this as the beginning of having a seagrass restoration infrastructure, building the human capacity to actually out-plant seagrasses, but to learn along the way.

And seagrass restoration is exceedingly difficult. It’s high risk, high expense, but it’s such an important habitat in the lagoon, we’re investing a considerable amount of our time to make it, you know, make it beneficial to the larger natural recovery we may have if we keep doing the water quality work.

Jessy:

Right. So obviously seagrass is going to be a huge part of this, and we are putting in a lot of funding from multiple sources to help with it. What are some of the challenges, you think, to getting seagrass to regrow successfully?

Duane:

There’s a number of challenges. Number one, you would think that after all these decades of working on the lagoon, we’d understand how seagrasses grow, where do they grow what are the triggers for flower and seed, you know, how do seeds get dispersed.

And the fact is there’s a lot we still don’t know. And each of the seven seagrasses in the system are different. And they have different ecological niches that they fill. And so what we’re learning about… I’ll give you a really good practical example. Our early attempts to out-plant seagrasses, most of those failed not because of water quality, although that was factor but two other factors were herbivory.

So if manatees happened to stumble across the newly planted field, they had a good meal. But the other part was the importance of sediment, stability and sediment type.

I don’t think we would’ve been so focused on sediments had we not been actually doing this work real time. You can’t learn this in the laboratory. You have to learn it in the living laboratory of the lagoon. Uh, which is where monitoring is so important.

Jessy:

Yes, absolutely.

Duane:

So, with seagrasses, we’re learning a lot about their ecology, their physiology, what prompts growth. And the more information we can get, the better we’re going to be in the restoration phase.

Jessy:

So along with seagrass, we are also working to restore oysters. And Kevin, I know that you have worked with some of our oyster folks recently. Can you tell us some of the techniques that they’re using to restore oyster beds up in the northern region of the lagoon?

Kevin:

Sure. I know there are different techniques, depending on which partner you’re working with, but the particular one you are alluding to, we went out with what they call a BESE mats, which stands for biodegradable ecosystem shell-filled elements. And there are oyster shells on ’em.

So these mats are made of potato starch, which I believe is a byproduct of potato chip manufacturing so we put these oyster shells standing up on ’em so they can recruit spat, oyster spat.

And then we take the four corners of the BESE mat and we take stainless steel tie straps and tie ’em down to the little sprinkler rings that you protect your sprinkler heads with.

So everything is completely natural, biodegradable, nothing there is, you know, plastic. So we put those out. But before we can even do that, we have to rake down the dead oyster reef.

Jessy:

Right.

Kevin:

So, for example, we went out there and it was, I don’t know, three, four feet high, and you have to rake down the dead oysters so that when you put the new equipment in to recruit the oyster spat, that it’s within that tidal zone so that they’re not just out in the sun and gonna pass away. Right?

Jessy:

Absolutely.

Kevin:

So we’re getting the elevation correct, put the oyster mats in, but then we have to put wave attenuation devices around it to protect from the wave energy from primarily boats, but as well as storm energy and so forth. So we had oyster volcanoes, oyster rings, all kinds of interesting things I’ve never seen. (laughs).

And just so we all load ’em on a boat and we take ’em out to the location, and then we all have like a chain of people and we hand them to one another and we place ’em ’cause they’re kind of heavy.

But it was great because we had a lot of volunteers from one of our local colleges. We had students, we had young scientists working on their graduate and their undergraduate degrees.

And just a really good, fun effort. Hard work, don’t get me wrong. It’s hot out there, but it’s really meaningful and you see a lot of wildlife while you’re out there. So it’s just exciting timing. It’s better than being in a cubicle in the office, so…

Jessy:

Absolutely.

And one of the great things about that project in particular is that they’ve been doing the work, for so long, University of Central Florida, that they know on average 93 baby oysters will recruit onto a single 16 by 16 mat.

And we put out, I don’t know, Kevin, like, what, 150 per reef type thing. So I’ll let the listeners do the math on that, on how many gallons of water (laughs) those oysters are gonna be able to filter once they’re adult size.

But yeah, that’s one of the coolest projects for sure. We’re also doing seagrass oyster reefs, living shorelines wetlands, clam populations, and fish reefs throughout the IRL.

Duane, I wanna know, what role do wetlands play in lagoon health and resiliency?

Duane:

Wetlands are super important. We’ve got one really large wetland project, within Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in partnership with St. John’s River Water Management District. So wetlands are really the kidneys, the filters for our estuaries. And we’ve lost large amounts of wetlands. And for the most part, for the Indian River Lagoon, those wetlands include mangrove marshes and salt marshes to the north.

And so, really, there are multiple benefits of wetlands. First and foremost, is water filtration. As water leaves the land to the lagoon, it’ll hold back nutrients, filter out sediments.

The wetlands are also really important on our built communities for flood protection, storm protection. It’s a great habitat for fishes, a great habitat for wading birds and shore birds. And so wetlands are a critical component of a healthy ecosystem. And because we’ve lost so much of our wetlands or altered wetlands, the goal is to try to build back functionality.

Jessy:

Right.

Duane:

We’ll never get back what we’ve lost in acreage, and maybe not even in quality, but with the wetlands we do have left, the key is to restore functionality.

Jessy:

So do you feel that climate change and increased storm activity has been influencing the habitat degradation?

Duane:

No question in my mind. And, you know, there’s enough scientific evidence to prove it, but for me it’s over four decades of watching the changes occur.

And so we’re seeing shorelines being eroded at levels that we hadn’t seen before. We’re seeing more intense, more frequent storms.

The big worry I have though, is actually temperature and seasonal changes. And so part of the problem we’ve had in the Indian River Lagoon is with harmful algal blooms clouding out water quality and clarity, and then impacting seagrasses. Most of these species are pretty hardy, but they do have temperature tolerances and salinity tolerances.

And for a short episode, almost all these species do a really good job of weathering the storm, so to speak. But when you have long-term change, like we’re seeing with our seasons, you know wetter and warmer earlier in the season, wetter and warmer later in the season, and right now in the summer with temperatures that are as high as I’ve ever seen, those levels of stressors are just an added burden when we’re trying to restore systems.

Jessy:

I definitely agree with that.

So, guys, this project has really big targets. We’re restoring over 2,000 acres of wetlands, 73 acres of seagrass, seven acres of oyster reefs. I could go on, or you can learn more about it on our website but I wanted to know, how did we come up with these restoration goals? How are they determined?

Duane:

I’ll jump in on that one. And so, you know, the notice of funding opportunity came out. You know, we reached out to our habitat restoration community and asked the question, do you have priority sites already identified? Do you have priority sites where you have some data to support the siting? Are you already working in an area and want to expand the work that was underway?

One of the things that we need to do as a scientific community is start to look at the scientific information that you need to best choose a site for certain types of restoration.

That wasn’t in place, you know, in any quantifiable way going into this. So we were using experience, folks that had been at restoration for a long period of time and opportunity.

Jessy:

Yeah.

Duane:

Sites that we felt weren’t obviously bad sites. So for example, planting seagrasses in front of a stormwater conveyance just didn’t make any practical sense. Putting seagrasses in an area where we never saw seagrasses, you know, didn’t make a lot of sense.

Shoreline restoration is a little easier because so much of our shorelines are either eroded or impacted in some way. A lot of the living shoreline was looking at, you know, some of the worst cases of erosion where you’re starting to see sedimentation, but a lot of this was, using science plus experience and using partners who had already been moving in a direction in a certain area. And it just turned out that we wound up with 15 sites that were very representative of the whole lagoon which I think is really important. We didn’t put all-

Jessy:

Yeah.

Duane:

…our eggs in one site in one habitat. We have spread that risk around. And many of the sites are not a single species. So you have seagrasses, shoreline restoration, clams in combination. And so we’ve decreased the likelihood of failure.

Jessy:

Right.

Duane:

Even though we know failure is gonna happen, mother nature is really hard. And, we’re doing a combination of science and really agriculture, we’re farming, you know, sites and hoping that Mother Nature cooperates and that we get good outcomes.

Jessy:

Absolutely. So, with that, I do wanna talk more about our partners and our community of practice.

So Kevin, how are the partners working together to accomplish the goals of this grant? And you’re on the ground with them every day, and of course, everyone’s working on their individual projects, but I know we meet up quarterly with them to chat and discuss and everything. So how are they working together to accomplish these goals?

Kevin:

Well, exactly what we’ve kind of been alluding to all along is that this has really promoted everyone to share information, share knowledge, or seek it out. Instead of just trying to kind of stay in their own area now they know they can contact the IRLNEP and we can put ’em in touch with someone else who’s trying to get a reef or someone else who already put in a living shoreline and encountered some sort of an obstacle.

Besides that, you know, we have the quarterly meetings. You have the annual symposium that we all attend. I have a certain frequency. I talk to everyone when I’m on the ground. I ask ’em if there’s anything they need. Sometimes they tell me. If they do, I tell ’em who they can contact. Or if, I don’t know, I come back to the team here who knows everyone in the industry or local industry at least, and puts them in touch with them.

For example, I was at one location, we had people from two of our different partners there-

Jessy:

Right. Yeah.

Kevin:

…helping each other to understand what they were doing, why they were doing it, and how could they improve their techniques.

Jessy:

So one of the things we haven’t mentioned yet is the internship program through this grant. So Kevin, can you kind of tell us a little bit more about that and how local students and volunteers are getting involved?

Kevin:

There is funding within our project to fund, is it 15 interns? Basically we’re trying to find a good fit where we can have a meaningful experience for the interns, hopefully, that we’re gonna encourage stewardship of the environment, bring them into our fold.

And even if they decide they want to go off and be a finance person at least they will hopefully have a respect for the environment and the wildlife, communicate it to their family and friends.

But so far, while I’ve been at a couple sites myself personally, I’ve been with lots of students and volunteers.

As well as one of our interns who was doing the oysters with us out at UCF or at Mosquito Lagoon.

Jessy:

Yeah.

Kevin:

…they’re all very excited.

Jessy:

I think one of the great things about working with so many different partners is that they all have their own way to tap into volunteers. So it doesn’t fall back on us as the NEP to find them help. They already have this wonderful force of volunteers that wanna come and help out.

You talked about Scobie Park earlier, and they had different clubs out. They had community volunteers, zoo volunteers. It’s been such a great way to get the community involved with this. I’m really excited, actually, to see the numbers of volunteer hours, after the first year and see how many targets we’ve hit with that ’cause I assume it’s in the thousands now. There’s a lot of people that have been getting out and helping with this project.

Kevin:

Well, I do know that our estimate when we started this was over 2,400 volunteers with around 5,000 volunteer hours.

Jessy:

Wow.

Kevin:

But I suspect we’ll surpass that, but we’ll see.

Jessy:

Absolutely.

Kevin:

But there has been a lot of volunteers. Everyone’s really excited. And that’s great because then they go back and they tell their friends, especially if they’re the young people from the school, you know, they go tell all their young friends, “Hey, you can come out on a boat. You can go out and do all this great work. You see the wildlife. You can be in the water.” And I think that word of mouth is really positive and really helpful.

Duane:

And Jessy, you know, from your career and years of education and volunteer work, there’s no better way to educate the public about a complicated system like the Indian River Lagoon than actually getting ’em in the water and doing the work. You know?

Jessy:

Absolutely.

Duane:

Getting dirty, getting muddy. That experiential learning is gonna hang with those individuals much longer than a PowerPoint or a seminar from me, that they actually experience the system, begin to appreciate the complexity of the system, and then they become advocates for protecting the system.

And so we’re not just building a workforce. We’re building a community of young people all the way to retirement volunteers who understand how important the Indian River Lagoon is to our lives, our economy, and our quality of life.

Jessy:

Absolutely.

Duane:

You know, it’s a powerful experience.

Jessy:

It is, for sure. And I think it’s great, too, that this grant, it has a time limit. It’s three years long, right? So we’re in our first year of this grant, so we have three years to be able to impact this community.

So as we’re in season one of this, a lot of our partners are starting to get out into the field utilizing volunteer help to get the materials out into the water. We still have two years left of this project. So what’s next, guys? How are we going to measure success for this project over the next few years?

Duane:

Measuring success is a really challenging question I get asked all the time. And it depends on how you look at scale and success metrics. So the simple metric for success for most people would be, I planted X number of seagrass plants and I had a certain percentage survive, or I, you know, seeded in a million clams and we had a certain survival rate.

But it’s much more complicated than that because the co-benefits of what we do isn’t just the survivability. it’s what happens in that timeframe where we’re doing this work. And I’ll give you a really good example.

If I plant an acre of seagrass, and let’s just say it’s a thousand plants and only 10% survive, you know, is that success or not? Well, if you had no seagrass at all, you have just added 10% to that coverage. But more importantly, of that 90% that didn’t survive, let’s say over three years, if a large percentage of those plants went to flower and seed, and then that seed got dispersed throughout the lagoon in that area, you know, even though you didn’t have plant survival, you had plant reproduction.

And so you’ve gotta look at your success at multiple levels, but success is something that we always need to be paying attention to, and it needs to be intentional. we need to go into these projects knowing how difficult the work is, knowing that we’re gonna have some level of failure, but looking at different levels of benefits and metrics.

Jessy:

Right. So you talked about a couple of different indicators. What would you say are the important indicators or data that will tell us that the lagoon is improving?

Duane:

Well, I think the one major indicator is recovery of seagrasses.

And thankfully we’re beginning to see that. So that’s a water quality issue, really, that water quality gets good enough for seagrasses, you know, where we still have areas of seagrass where they can grow, they can flower and they can seed.

And then where we do outplanting of seagrasses or clams we need to just follow up to see what that growth rate might be to see what the outcome is. But there’s no question that having seagrasses as the basic metric for ecosystem health, uh, that has been a standard now for decades.

Jessy:

Right.

Duane:

And I think it’s a really good standard, but you have to look at the whole picture. You know, so what’s happening in those seagrasses? Are we seeing shrimp communities and crab communities beginning to recover with that habitat recovery? And some of these are gonna lag. Some of these will take much longer to see recovery. Are we seeing fisheries responding to the beneficial habitat? So we need to look at the whole food chain, as it relates to water quality and habitat availability, which is why it’s really good. We’re not just looking at one habitat.

Jessy:

Right. So as we are looking at success and defining it, what are some ways that you think we, and not necessarily we as in the NEP, but we as in the royal we, the IRL community, we, how can we ensure this momentum continues after this grant sunsets?

Duane:

Well, the bottom line for all of this work is that if you don’t have investment of funds, the work doesn’t continue. And understanding that it’s not just one thing, it’s all things, that we’ve got multiple stressors at multiple scales and we need to continue to have resolve to invest in the restoration, invest in the water quality infrastructure so we have, you know, improving water quality.

And those investments one of the limitations is that they’re uncertain from year to year. And it’s hard to do this work, when you don’t know from year to year whether the funding’s gonna be available, where the funding is gonna be adequate to the task. And we know it’s not that.

While we’ve had historic levels of funding at local, state, and federal levels, we still don’t have enough money on the table to do all the work we need to do. And the quicker we can get these projects done, the less damage happens over the course of time. And the cheaper the work is.

But we can’t forget that our communities are growing. We’re seeing massive growth. And so we’re trying to fix old infrastructure solve some of the problems that have been here for decades, and at the same time develop better and more sustainably so we don’t repeat the problems that we’ve already created over the last number of decades.

Jessy:

Yeah. And making sure that we are all working together for the greater good when it comes to these projects. That’s what’s so great about this one and all of the partners, working together. We’re not competing with each other. We are genuinely working together, which has been pretty cool.

So Kevin, you’ve had the opportunity to work on oyster reef restoration, living shoreline restoration, and most, most recently seagrass restoration, right?

Kevin:

Yes.

Jessy:

So what’s one cool thing that you’ve learned about being on site with these partners, like, something new about the lagoon?

Kevin:

Just thinking about when I was out planting seagrass. I didn’t know that things like herbivory exclusion cages existed. I didn’t know you had to do that, ’cause the manatees would come in and literally ravage all of your new planting. And I love manatees. So I thought that was very interesting.

Jessy:

That’s it. (laughs)

Kevin:

I never thought you’d put grass inside of cages to grow ’em and then clean the cages monthly ’cause they get so much drift algae and so forth. So all of that was very interesting for me to learn while I was doing that.

Jessy:

Yeah, that’s a good point because you don’t want the manatees pulling out the entire plant. Do you want them established and then munching on the shoots? So it’s okay if the manatees eat the grass, we just want them to mow it as opposed to dig it up. So those herbivory devices definitely help with that.

And so, Duane, do you have any final thoughts for us when it comes to this grant? What’s the one takeaway from this?

Duane:

So when we’re done with this three-year project and we’ve got these multiple sites, we’ve created a foundation to work with this community of practice to continue the restoration efforts to improve as we learn more along the way but this isn’t the end point of restoration and stewardship. This is at the very beginning. And we have to continue to really invest in water quality for this to have legs, not only over the short term, but over the decade that’s to come.

And so we’re at the very beginning of this process and not the end. And this has provided really good foundation for that beginning.

Jessy:

Absolutely.

Duane:

Both in the human context, as well as the scientific research and the restoration. And we need to continue the momentum. We need to keep the partnership.

I like to call it a collaborative governance structure. We have the right people in the right places with the right expertise, and we need to keep working together for that common goal, which is a healthy lagoon.

Jessy:

I love that. I am super motivated now. It makes me wanna get out onto the lagoon and plant some seagrass.

So Kevin, if folks wanted to learn more about this project, how can they find out more information?

Kevin:

Well, they can go to our One Lagoon website.

Jessy:

Onelagoon.org/noaa-grant.

There’s a great page on our website that gives a complete overview of this grant, including an awesome story map that gives a visual representation of it. So definitely they can check that out.

All right, guys, well, thank you so much for joining us today on One Lagoon – One Voice, the podcast. we hope that you enjoyed the listening to this podcast.

And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us. If not, you will probably catch us out in a boat, planting clams, oysters, seagrass, something or another having to do with the lagoon.

Duane:

Thank you everybody.

Kevin:

Thank you.

Jessy:

If you enjoyed these discussions about the Indian River Lagoon, please like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you find your podcasts.

To learn more about the IRLNEP, how you can get involved tips on Living Lagoon friendly, or to purchase one Lagoon merchandise, visit us at onelagoon.org.

Also, our newly redesigned Indian River Lagoon license plate is now available at your local tag office.

To stay informed about Lagoon news and upcoming events like our monthly What’s Up in the Watershed webinar, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at One Lagoon.