Episode 4: Seagrasses: Moving Towards Restoration | One Lagoon, One Voice: The Podcast

Hi. I’m 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.
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Alright. Hello everybody. Welcome to One Lagoon, One Voice. I’m Kathy Hill, Deputy Director of the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program. If you are up to speed on seagrass in the lagoon, you know that it’s a hot topic right now. We’ve had about a decade of seagrass losses and starving manatees and all kinds of issues that have resulted from losing seagrass in the lagoon. So we want to make sure that everybody has sort of a handle on what’s been going on—why did we lose our seagrasses, are they coming back, can we get them back, can we plant them back?
So we’ve invited our two experts on this today. The folks that I call when I have questions about seagrasses in the lagoon. So I’m going to introduce you to Lori Morris and Lauren Hall from St John’s River Water Management District. Welcome ladies.

Thanks Kathy.

Thanks. My name is Lori Morris. I’m an environmental scientist with the estuaries program here at the St John’s River Water Management and I have actually been working pretty specifically in the Indian River Lagoon for the past 30 years. A lot of times I tell everybody that I’ve crawled across the bottom of most of the Indian River Lagoon for these past 30 years. So I’m pretty intimate with a lot of what’s going on out there.
I’ve been able to see a lot of the really good parts of the lagoon and how beautiful and gorgeous it was. Unfortunately, I’ve [also] been able to witness a lot of the decline but also have been very encouraged about how the renewal of it is going on right now.

And I’m Lauren Hall. I’m also an environmental scientist working for the St John’s River Water Management District. I’ve been there for the past 26 years and I work out of our Palm Bay satellite office. Like Lori, I’m with estuary’s program in the Bureau of Water Resources and I focus heavily as well on seagrasses, macroalgae, and also phytoplankton in the IRL so I’m usually the one that’s crawling alongside Lori in the lagoon.

Well neat. So yeah I know that you guys know all about seagrasses in the lagoon and let’s just orient folks and give them a little bit about why you do what you do and why are seagrasses so important? I mean, why does the district pay all this money to kind of keep an eye on seagrass?

Yeah sure. Well, so first off, seagrasses are flowering plants. They actually are flowering plants that have adapted to grow in an underwater marine environment. They’re very productive. They provide habitat protection from predators for fish and all sorts of small invertebrates. They’re also really important in cycling nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, those types of things. They can provide food directly for herbivores, so things like our beloved manatees, our sea turtles, lots of different types of fish, [and] they’re also a great source of detritus so when the plant dies or if there are leaves that slough off in the fall, just, you know, natural sloughing of leaves, those can be broken down by different microbes.
They’re also a really great sediment stabilizer. So seagrasses have these specialized roots called rhizomes and they’re able to hold the sediment in place and then that can prevent erosion and resuspension of sediments. So they’re a really important part of the IRL. They provide so many of what we would call ecosystem services, and we’re a bit special here in the IRL because we actually have a pretty high diversity of seagrasses. We have seven different species in our lagoon.

And is that a lot? For the folks listening in.

It is. It’s more than other estuaries in North America. We’re pretty unique here because we’re right on that temperate to subtropical divide and so that gives us the ability to have a lot more diversity here in the lagoon.

Yeah and if you’ll let me build on that a little bit, I always like to think of the seagrasses as our foundation species. The ones that are the basis for our food webs and like Lauren said about all the different animals and everyone who lives, you know, are part of the seagrass system. Really every animal that lives out there has a part of their life cycle that has aspects to the seagrass beds, and so it’s interesting how these beds have been such a part of this basic foundation of the whole lagoon, and they’re there as a buffering system. They’re able to keep things stable—and when things are good things get to stay good for a really long time because the seagrass beds [are] out there.

So tell us about the district’s monitoring program, just to let people know. How do you know when seagrass is good? How do you know when it’s not so good?

At the Water Management District we’ve been monitoring seagrasses at two different scales. We have our large-scale seagrass mapping project and then we also have our finer scale transect monitoring project.
For the seagrass mapping side of things, every two to three years since the 1980s we’ve been producing these lagoon-wide seagrass maps, and we do that from photo-interpreting our aerial photography. And those maps will provide that big picture, that overall picture, of how much seagrass do we have in the lagoon, and then that can then help us figure out well what areas are really healthy that maybe we need to work hard to protect. Then on the other hand what areas maybe are not doing so well. Where do we have some problem areas that maybe we need to investigate a little bit further or maybe make a little bit more effort for restoration.
So with things like these seagrass maps, we’re actually currently using the seagrass maps that we’ve done over the last 26 years to help focus those restoration efforts. Areas that really need a little bit of help. So we want to know where have the grass beds been most persistent or long-lasting and then use those maps as a tool to help guide us on where we may have some more potential for success, especially within certain depth zones and you know all those areas that we know seagrass have been really successful in the past.

Sure, sure. Laura, do you want to add anything?

Well, of course, on the finer scale is the project that’s been kind of my baby over these past 30 years: our fixed transects that we monitor. So we put those in back in 1994 because we didn’t know what was happening inside the beds. We had this mapping program that gave us the big picture and it gave us the footprint of the beds, but with these seven species and knowing what’s going on and how dynamic these beds can be we wanted to look at them at a finer scale and watch the changes that were happening within the bed.
So originally in 1994 we set up 73 sites, and currently we now have 102. We actually added five more just this year. And we’ve got these wonderful partners that have been helping us monitor those. So we have a group at Marine Discovery. We have the biological scientists at NASA. We have FDEP, FWC helps some sites, the South Florida Water Management of course and then our new partners are Sea Grant IFAS and Florida Oceanographic.
We like to do everything non-destructively so when we monitor, we’re looking at percent cover, and percent occurrences and we have a lot of visual estimates and that allows us to follow these changes over time. Which we’ve been able to notice because you have this footprint of the seagrass beds, you know, when we had our biggest footprint we had a lot of seagrass within that footprint. We had up to 40-50 percent cover of seagrass within that massive scale of the total acreages of seagrass out there. Now that that whole footprint has shrunk, the whole extent of seagrass within that bed is even shrunk even more so now instead of 40-50 percent inside that smaller footprint we actually have down to one and five percent cover.
So the whole idea of this functioning bed as all the ecosystem services that we mentioned earlier, they’re not necessarily being provided as well in some of these really sparse beds. So those are some of the things that we’ve been able to follow over the years which to me is just fascinating, I don’t know, to watch all the changes.

And also going from the maps to the seagrass transects on a map with that broad [of a] scale with aerial photography, you can’t pick up things like species or how much macro algae, you know, real percent covers, how much macro algae is there, are the blades covered in epiphytes, um, you know, the type of algae that will grow on a seagrass blade.
So if you can’t see those fine scale things from the maps it’s really important to get in the water, and that’s you know Lori and I saying earlier that we’ve crawled along the lagoon, that’s doing those transects and really seeing that those fine scale changes.
Do we have species shifts half happening? What’s really going on at a fine scale? Those kinds of things are really important.

And just for the folks who may not know when you say the word “transect” what does that mean?

So sometimes you’ll see rows of PVC poles coming out from shore. A lot of those are some of our spots but basically what we do is we work our way from the shore out to the deep edge of where the transect is and that deep edge typically maps that edge of what is seen from the aerial photos. So we have a really good fit between what we’re measuring on the ground in the water along that line, as far as [the] extent of the bed is, also closely matching with what we’re finding from our maps, but then along that measured line from shore is where we put a one meter quadrant down. That’s broken into a hundred squares and that’s what we put down at measured distances along there, and we get our percent cover and all of our visual estimates, canopy height, shoot counts, and of every species we find out there.

Great, great thanks. So I want to kind of step back in time and talk about when the lagoon sort of turned for the worst and I can remember Lauren, you being in my cubicle at the district all that time ago when we sort of were first discovering how bad seagrass actually had gotten, and we were checking your math to make sure that you hadn’t done something crazy and you said to me, “Check my math, check my math. This can’t be right.” But it was right. It was spot on. Tell us about sort of what all went on during the years in 2010 and 2011 when the lagoon went bad.

Yeah, I remember that very well—that was a really sad time for the lagoon. You know, we were seeing some really dramatic changes, but really the declines in seagrasses in the lagoon began even earlier than 2010 in part due to some of the population increases that we saw in the ‘60s and ‘70s even. With those population increases comes other changes that can bring in additional nutrients, and the complicated part with seagrass systems is they tend to not gradually decline, just see this you know gradual slow decline.
They tend to cope with stress, so when you have something like increased nutrients that are creating these stresses for seagrass beds they’ll cope and cope and cope until they can’t cope any longer and then that decline can happen rather rapidly. Which is what we’ve been seeing in more recent years and what we were seeing then when I showed up in your cubicle that day.

Right, right.

But I think some of the things we have to remember are some of the other events that happened around that 2010 period. Sometimes we refer to it as the unfortunate “perfect storm” [I try] to not use that cliche too much, but it really was. You know, we had these decades of nutrients, of things being put in that maybe we weren’t quite as aware of, that they were really happening as a bad thing. You know, the system seemed to be buffering itself and being able to hold up. But what happened in 2010 is we had these climatic changes, or you know just events, weather events.
So we started off with that cold. We had our first really cold period in a long time and with that cold we wound up getting a very large fish kill, and so it kind of set off a chain of events where you had these internal nutrients now of things starting to die back. Following that then we had some very warm periods, very hot summers, and so you know cold and hot and we started getting these large fluctuations, and with that you get some of these chemistry changes that are happening within the water column. Some of the hot temperatures can cause nutrients to be released from the sediment that you weren’t necessarily accounting for.
We weren’t seeing big loadings coming in but it was some of these internal things that were happening, and you know we had these large muck deposits and sometimes with the heat with the warming temperatures of the water, some of those extra nutrients were being brought back into the water column. And so that’s what probably started a lot of these large phytoplankton blooms, was this shift in our system that went from more of a seagrass dominated to a competition for all this extra nutrients that were in there.
The phytoplankton just were in the right spot at the right time with the right conditions and they just took off and you know like you were saying we kept thinking we saw these changes and we’re thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is going to stop. This is going to stop. This is going to stop.” and it didn’t. And they kept fueling each other as things started dying back because you had all this phytoplankton blocking all the light to the seagrasses. We started seeing more dying of the seagrasses, the macro algae, all of our good buffering things that were in that system just kept adding more and more nutrients to the system and that’s when we just started on this decline, this horrible roller coaster down.

Yeah when you think about, you know, Lori mentioned the macro algae. We saw that this low cover of macro algae, this low biomass of macro algae, out there for a couple of years. And macro algae can be a really great sponge for those nutrients, and when it’s not present those nutrients that it might soak up are now available in the water columns.

And so that’s a really good explanation for why we’ve been having consecutive blooms and really bad years of blooms and things of that nature. So this seems like a good time to ask you about the World Seagrass Conference. I know you guys just got back from a trip and learned a bunch out at this once every five year conference. Tell us about that.

It was absolutely incredible. This was the first time that it was held in the United States. There were over 250 seagrass scientists from around the world sharing all of their experiences. We had three different plenaries, 14 different presentation sessions, poster sessions, 14 different workshops, it covered every topic that you can imagine. But the best part is it was all on seagrasses. It’s like going to a conference where every single talk that you’re listening to is applicable to the work that we’re doing here.

Yeah, it was. It was tough. Lauren and I tried to split up as much as we could to make sure that we could absorb all the information being presented to us. One of the striking things to me, I had originally come down from Chesapeake Bay, I had done my graduate work up there, and so of course I wanted to sit in on their sessions because they have been able to see some recovery of their beds there. The one striking thing for all the work in Chesapeake Bay is the they set a main goal and they stuck to it and they had everybody working towards these main goals and they just kept working away and they put themselves on the so-called nutrient diet and they did, they stuck to it, and now they’re seeing these great successes but it didn’t happen overnight! It took 30 years for it to happen. So that’s why, you know, we have to make sure that we have patience when we’re trying to think about our system. When you see these big losses and these big changes, that something else is [happening], you know we have to just stick to our program.

So, Kathy, for me I think another important take home was how different some of these systems are. So in some estuaries, they’re dealing with direct climate impacts where heat stress is causing a decline in a specific seagrass species and so that’s something that they’re seeing happening in Chesapeake Bay with their Eelgrass Meadows.
In the lagoon we’re not really seeing these direct climate impacts. Our climate impacts on seagrasses here are a little more indirect. We’re not experiencing these marine heat waves like they were seeing in Chesapeake Bay or in Shark Bay in Australia. So in the lagoon we’re seeing more of an increase in our frequency, our duration of these phytoplankton blooms that are exacerbated by climate change, and when you have these big blooms that are reducing light penetration that is causing our decline in seagrass cover and extent. So it’s not as simple as what they’re seeing in Chesapeake with the eelgrass, where the eelgrass cannot tolerate those heat waves. We’re not really seeing that. We’re seeing more of an indirect impact with climate change.
And then also like Lori was talking about earlier, changing temperatures can impact water chemistry. So when water temperature increases hydrogen sulfide can also increase. Those higher temperatures also can change the oxygen dynamics and, you know, when we get low oxygen—the colder water is better at holding oxygen—so when we see these warming temperatures and our oxygen goes down that’s when we start seeing things like our fish kills that you know, unfortunately I think we’ve all witnessed in the lagoon.

Right.

So, you know, we really do need to consider climate change, but while we might not be able to solve it on a local level there are things that we can do on the local level. Like nutrient reductions that can hopefully make, you know, the seagrass resilience a little bit better to deal with things like climate change.
But it was just really neat to see all these other systems and some of the things that they’re dealing with that are a little bit different than what we’re dealing with. But all of these systems are having issues and, you know, and so we’re not alone in our struggles and our efforts to try to restore our system. There are places all around the world that are also dealing with similar things.

Very interesting. Very interesting. I know if you read anything about seagrass you hear all the time about seagrasses and decline here and there and everywhere. It’s good to know that it’s all for different reasons. It’s not all the same thing.

Yeah.

So that gives you some hope that your little corner of the world can be better based on what you’re doing for it. So sort of in that note, we at the NEP have been funding and are starting a restoration project to kind of get some restoration centers moving so that there is kind of a supply line for things like seagrass and mangroves and clams and oysters to put them back into the lagoon where they belong. Where they can do some good and provide some services.
What are your thoughts on what’s being done to grow seagrass in nurseries and maybe out planting them into the lagoon? How do you guys feel about that?

We really have had a big push lately to plant seagrass out there.

There’s a lot of pressure for that.

A lot of pressure for that. And coming from a lot of, a lot of the community. They really want to see us put plants in the ground. So a lot of people say, “Well, can we do it? Are the conditions right for it?”
Well, can we plan? Of course we can but it’s really important to note that no one has ever done the kind of acreage that we’re talking about. Most of what’s been done in the way of planting is really small scale—so restoring prop scars and things like that—not really water quality-related projects when it comes to plantings. So in the last 20 years we’ve lost—we were talking about those seagrass declines—we’ve lost 60,000 acres of seagrass. That’s just not a small-scale restoration. You can’t plant 60,000 acres of seagrass back into the lagoon. We’re not going to plant our way back to a healthy lagoon.

Right.

But…

But we have to try.

Yeah, we gotta do something.

Yeah, it’s tough but, you know talking about these nurseries… typically when we would have smaller mitigation projects or something, we could borrow the plants from some of the good areas in the lagoon and take those plants and transplant them to other areas. Well, we don’t have that option anymore. We don’t have a supply or these dense, dense beds anymore. Or [ones] that can handle being dug up and moved to other areas. So that’s where these nurseries are going to become very, very important.
They’ve been able to get fragments along that wash up along the bottom, and then plant them in nice controlled areas of their nurseries, and grow them out and get to a point where they have enough plant material that we can now put [it] back into the system. I think those are going to become very, very important in the next couple of years.
We are seeing some natural recruitment, but there’s a lot of areas that could use a lot of help. And that is one of the other things that I tried to go to during this conference, was to make sure that I went to all these transplant and restoration workshops, and all the sessions that they had on that. Because it was really cool to see all the different things that everyone’s doing. Planting at different densities, at different scales, different patterns, you don’t even think much about a pattern. Do you do an even distribution of a couple of shoots here and there or do you clump your plants all into one area to help them kind of work together as a team? People add clams around the plants to help add extra oxygen to the root system so they don’t start decaying any sooner [and things like that].
So there’s all kinds of different projects that we should be able to pull from and things that we’ve learned that will help us move forward in the lagoon.

And not everywhere has the same success with the same methods. You know, so that’s one of the things that is really important with these projects that we’re going to be doing in the lagoon moving forward. We’re going to see failures, no question, but we may also see some successes. What’s really important is to figure out why. Why did we see a failure? Why did we see success? When we have successes, what did we do right there? Is it a site selection thing? Is it the methodology of plantings?
You know, we really want to be able to make sure that we’re going to have the most potential for success when we’re going out there and putting a lot of these plants that we’ve been spending all this time growing out in these nurseries. We want those to be successful, but we want to be able to answer why we are seeing failures, why we are seeing successes and what we can do to really increase our chance of success out there.

Right and what lots of people don’t realize or don’t buy into sometimes is that failure is okay as long as you learn what you need to know from it and then you do better next time.

I mean, I’m really hopeful about the future of seagrass in the lagoon. It seems grim out there sometimes but, you know, Lori and I this summer we were really excited to see some of the recovery in some of the areas that we really didn’t anticipate seeing recovery in. So why were we seeing that? I mean, a lot of your local listeners, they probably have seen that through the spring and the summer [when] the water was really, really clear. Why? Is it because we had less rain? Is it because of all these nutrient reduction projects that we have going on? It’s probably a lot of both. A lot of the different projects that we have going on that we’re really starting to see some response now. Gosh, there were some areas where we saw quite a bit of growth and it was really nice to see.

Yeah, we’ve been getting some pictures from folks when they’re just out and about fishing or you know snorkeling or doing something out in the lagoon. We’ve gotten pictures that are astonishing with the amount of growth in some areas so it’s a really hopeful sign.

When I’m at boat ramps launching the boat to head out there, and I have a fisherman that comes up to me and tells me about this great recovery that he saw in a grass bed just around the corner—I mean, how can you not have hope that we can get back there again someday?

Sure, sure. Yeah, I’ve said this a lot lately that you can’t be a pessimist and work in environmental issues. That you have to be an optimist and that’s what gets you out of bed every morning.

Yep. Agreed.

Above the top of my desk.

So, in thinking about things, if you want like everyday citizens to take home a message about how they impact seagrasses, what would be the message and what are some of the things you can share with listeners for how they can do better in taking care of the lagoon to help seagrasses along?

One of the things I always like to tell people is always to be informed. I applaud you for listening to this podcast, for taking the time to learn something and learn all the different parts of what’s going on out there and making sure that you are informed. The more informed you are, the more aware you are, and by being aware you realize maybe, maybe I really shouldn’t do this or maybe I should do that.
You know, it does [make an] impact. Every little thing does have an impact. You know, everyone thinks, “Oh well my recycling is not going to matter.” It does! If we all had that attitude then we’d be nowhere. So everybody thinking about the fertilizers on the lawn—I know nobody wants to have things taken away— and your lawn, it will be okay. We do have enough rain. We do have enough things that’ll keep our lawns green. So it’s just the little things that help.
So when it does start raining all that runoff we know is going to wind up in the water and we want to try to make a point of keeping the least amount of nutrients that we can control on our own out of the system.

And then also spread the word about the lagoon. Why is it so important and what all these other agencies are doing to help. The more we talk about it the more likely people are to implement those small changes in their own backyards. You know, and I mean I don’t know about your neighborhood but I know in mine there are several [houses] that have the Lagoon Friendly signs out in front of their yards. I mean, it kind of starts to become a badge of honor to not have your typical green lawn in your front yard anymore, and so I love to see stuff like that. You know, these small changes that people are making all through our neighborhoods can add up to be really impactful.

Absolutely and that’s part of the Lagoon Friendly push that we’re doing, is just kind of making people or helping people to realize that it is just those small little behavior changes that you can make.
Obeying fertilizer regulations for the summer. Don’t fertilize your lawn in the summertime and if you use fertilizer—we’re not telling anybody not to use fertilizer—but if you use it at other times during the year just use something that’s a little more friendly, you know, not fast release. Use slow release nitrogen so it spreads out the impact over a longer time. And everybody is connected, stormwater connects everybody to the lagoon and so the more you can reduce the things that you do in your home and in your yard that might get into stormwater, the better off the lagoon will be.
Lagoon-friendly–that’s our push and that’s what we will stand by. But yeah, everything you just said, absolutely, we agree. Alright so ladies taken all together, what do you think? What’s the outlook for seagrass in the lagoon? Are we gonna get it back in the next 10 years?

I am actually very optimistic. I am amazed [by] what we’ve seen in the last, just this last year, the last two years. We’ve seen a lot more grass popping up and expanding into areas and I think because everybody is becoming more aware of it that I think we will see some positive changes. I think we really, we’ve got to.

And we do have to have patience and we really need to just stay the course. We’ve been working for years on reducing nutrients. We can’t stop that now. We have to keep doing the things that are going to help us get where we want to be, and you know really just stay that course and then give the seagrass time to get back to where it was.

Right. I think it’s a little more fragile than it had been in the past, you know like we were saying. When it was a 40 and 50 percent cover on the bottom it could handle, it could buffer things. So we can’t put the same amount in than we have been, and so we have to reduce what we’re putting in for this new growth to have a chance to expand itself. We do have to be very vigilant on what’s going in, and think about it really closely because the poor little pieces of grass that are holding on for dear life! I always take their picture when I’m out there but they’re holding on and we want to keep them to stay there and so you know we really want to give them every chance they have to, to be able to expand.

Lori introduces herself to every shoot when we’re out there.

They’re working so hard!

For sure, for sure. Well, listen, I can’t thank you all enough for coming today. I feel really lucky because I think this is the most time that we’ve had together to just sit down and focus on a conversation, in like, forever. Because every time we see each other we’re all running in different directions, going off to different things and it’s just a quick, “Hi, how are ya?” and that’s it, so thanks for coming today. Thank you for telling us all about seagrass and sharing your thoughts with us. Is there anything you want to share about how people can learn more about what the district’s up to and what you guys do on a daily basis or a monthly basis?

Thank you so much Kathy and Duane and everyone at NEP, not just for having us today but also for all the work that you do to help the lagoon system. You can find out more information about what we’re doing at the district on our website sjrwmd.com or you can follow the district on our Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.
And then for any folks that want to read a little bit more about the great science that’s happening in the lagoon, we actually have a special issue on the lagoon in Frontiers and Marine Sciences so you can check for that issue on our website or feel free to email Lori or I. We would love to share it with you.

Thank you. This has been a lot of fun.