[Music] Okay. All right, y'all can go ahead and start the recordings. We good? Well, welcome everyone. Uh this is the Escambia County Marine Advisory Committee meet meeting and a combined uh effort for us to do a another symposium. This is our fourth symposium
of the year and this is a waterways uh focused symposium. So uh the marine advisory committee chair is not here yet. Uh the vice chair is also uh out on on other business. So I'll help the uh the the process along by giving the introduction now and then after the symposium the marine advisory committee will convene and hold their business and everyone is welcome to uh to stay for
that part of it but we'll do the symposium first. So I'm Robert Turpin. I'm the marine advisory or excuse me the marine resources division manager and marine resources is in Can you pull my presentation up? Marine Resources Division is in the Department of Natural Resources Management for Escambia County and um that is uh Got it. Okay, thank you. That's that's where Marine Resources Division is. Escambia County's Marine Advisory Committee is appointed by the board of county
commissioners. Each appoint each commissioner has two appointees and the county administrator has a an appointee for a total of 11 members of the marine advisory committee and they are tasked with providing strategic direction and input to the board of county commissioners. Escambia County's marine advisory committee and marine resources division. We have a lot in common both programmatically and in our focus but we operate separately. I'm their staff to the committee and
tonight I'll assist with the uh with the business if the chair and co-chair u are are not here. So, some um some quick housekeeping uh items. We have uh restrooms and a water fountain out the back door around to the right. Um if you do have any kind of sidebar conversations or telephone calls that you need to make, if you would just please go out in the lobby. the doors will close and you won't disturb uh the the symposium and we won't disturb you hopefully. Um also we we are
uh we are asking everyone to put your phone on silent or turn it off for for the meeting. Um we do have some safety considerations for any public gathering. Uh we have our emergency exits uh through this door and out to the right out the mo the way that most of y'all came in. Please do not leave before we're we're given the clearance by our public safety if something were to happen and we needed to uh to know who all was here and make sure that everyone had cleared the building.
And if there was any kind of of information that we would all need, uh we'd need to to um be able to communicate with you with our our public safety folks. Um, and and for introductions, I don't see anybody here from from the Escambia County Commission or my department, but um, again, I'm Robert Turpin and I'm the Marine Resources Division Manager. Our marine advisory committee members are sitting on the front row and after the symposium, they'll go up on the DEA. So,
uh, we'll get a chance to meet them. uh natural resources management. Felicia is here with uh she's our admin person, so she keeps us all moving in the right direction, we hope. Um but if we're not, it's not her fault. And of course, Matt Shakowski is our environmental programs manager for marine resources um divisions. I know that we have at least one agency staff that's not on the uh on the agenda tonight, but Daryl Budro is here from the Northwest Florida Water
Management District. Any other agency staff that are not speaking tonight? Okay. Um I do want to acknowledge our steering committee. this the idea for this symposium kind of came organically through discussions with um Matt and and Kendall, my other staff and and some of the uh some of the folks that are in the audience today. But I do want to acknowledge the fact that this is a team effort. Uh Rick Oconor is here. He's the master at getting things organized. And believe it or not,
he's actually pretty good at get getting me organized and and keeping this this project. But this this uh this symposium really took shape and and was really started from scratch in less than two months. And that's that's a pretty uh pretty phenomenal u uh thing to uh to to see these days. And and I and I do give credit to our uh to our staff, uh our community and media relations folks. Uh David's in the back. um he's keeping all of us uh uh compliant with the Florida public
records law and this symposium will be published on our YouTube channel. So um with that we're we do have a full agenda. It's going to be over three hours. So in order to keep us moving on on track, we're going to we've given you the the sheets of paper and pencils and there's more in the back. If you would, if you have any questions during the during the u the presentations, please write those down and we'll compile those at the end for an expert panel and a Q&A at the end of the of the meeting. And that'll just help keep it keep it on track. And we do have uh we do have
some really good speakers and and we don't want anybody to have to leave um ahead of time. Um, and we will provide a contacts list and access to their powerpoints and other reference material for anyone that wants to ask. And you'll see my um my email address is up there and at any time tonight you can you can get my email address. So that being said, my talk in the introduction is really
following the marine resources division mission and that mission statement was developed by by me and my bosses 25 years ago when I started with the county and that was to provide access to safe, healthy, and productive waterways. And the little presentation that I'm going to give tonight is going to follow along with that. And very minimal text, most of it's going to be images. This is an image. I think I stole this from the estuary program. This shows the watersheds for the Pensacola Bay system and the Purto Bay system. And you can see that the watersheds go way up
into Alabama. And water and resources don't always obey the the the the artificial lines on on maps between cities, counties, and even states. And when you look at it on Google Earth, you get a better picture, I think, of some of the challenges and some of the benefits of of uh aerial photography for seeing the not only the waterways, the the the watersheds, but also the human uses. And you can see on on the map there in Escambia County that most of our
urban development is south of Canton. And when you look up the uh Scambia River basin, you see a huge wetland that's undeveloped. And that basin and and buffer give us a very good um opportunity to maintain high quality of water down the Escambia River. And you see also on the Purto River, same thing on the Escambia County side, La Floresa Purita Timber Company has most of that land. So it's it's virtually undeveloped. So it gives us a chance to minimize the uh the negative
human impacts that we can sometimes see. So when when I'm when I was thinking about the waterways access, I I thought about it in historical context of how long have I lived in this area. We moved from Panama City to Gulf Breeze in 1971. So I just kind of took my my history and understanding of the area. But if you see Escambia County's population bars in blue, Santa Rosa's in orange, you can see that that although Escambia County has always had a greater uh population level,
Santa Rosa County is catching up. And that's just population numbers. And um and when I when I think about waterways access and as the marine resources division manager, I acknowledge the fact that the county owns a little bit but not everything. There's there's various states, federal, um there's regional like the water management district. There's commercial marinas and commercial operators that provide access on their land. And then people own private not only single
family residents but multifamily residences that are on the waters on the waterways. So when I think of the the boat ramps and the marinas and the fishing peers and the unimproved access sites that we have and the artificial reefs, four of those five are for the most part outside the control of Escambia County. And we depend on those partnerships and those good working relationships so that the public enjoys access to those sites. And the reason why we we we want that is because
not only does it uh improve our and add value to our economy, especially tourism dollars, but also it's our quality of life. If if you've lived here for any period of time, you know that that the quality of life for most of our residents is tied directly to the water. Some of us live on the water. Some of us go and and recreate on the water. Some of us work on the water. Some of us do all three. Um but uh those are the those are the kind of the overarching principles that that
um that that I consider as my my role in providing access to the public. And the types of access are the just the boat ramps that that we've we all know and love. But the changes in the sizes of vessels that use these boat ramps has an impact on their capacity. Now, we've seen here at Galveves, we've had to reduce the capacity of our parking because the vessels and the vehicles have gotten bigger. And another interesting factor when you look at demographic data, and I credit Matt for
for pulling these data up, is uh the the number of vessels that are registered in in Escambia versus Santa Rosa County. And it's really hard to see from that, but Matt came up with a great way of showing it by uh by just pulling out Escambia counties. You can see in 20ou in 2019, we had almost 16,000 vessels. And just in that one year of 2020, we added almost a thousand vessels. And we probably could attribute that to the oil spill. And people were buying vessels to
be able to get out. And we were we called it we were social distancings social distancing measured in nautical miles. So um the interesting thing here is that Escambia County's uh number of vessels peaked in 2021 and has declined since then and it would be interesting to know the factors in that. But another interesting factor is in 2022, Santa Rosa County's uh the number of total vessels in Santa Rosa County actually exceeded those in Escambia County.
So they have a higher vessel ownership per capita in Santa Rosa County than in Escambia County. Some of the other uh data that we're able to plot and these are also available to you online. The blue dots on the maps are boat ramps. The red dots are paddlecraft launches. You can see our picture of our newest boat ramp at Purto Bay uh in the lower left and what are our new opportunities. Uh we are looking for new opportunities to provide people access to the waterways. Um
also fishing peers. I can I'm very happy to say that our Pensacola Bay fishing bridge is in the process of being demolished and reconstructed. Uh the contractor will begin December 1st of this year and so hopefully next year we'll we'll all be able to go out there and and catch fish off the Pensacola Bay Fishing Bridge. And through some of our outreach and education events, we have become uh affiliated with some of the folks in our community that don't have a uh a the access
opportunities for a lot of us. So folks that have limited access, we're providing uh uh places for them to go and recreate. And for kayak launches, we are actually putting a new kayak launch that has a uh an a an ADA compliant uh paddle craft chute and we'll be we'll be putting it on the uh the lefthand dock of the Purto Bay boat ramp. So, we're retrofitting a boat ramp for people
with limited abilities. And also the uh the the Bob Sykes fishing bridge. This is a picture of in the lower right you see the Grand Marlin and the bridge abutman on on Santa Rosa Island. That fishing bridge is going to be um retrofitted and uh redesigned to be more uh accessible. So, the the the types of uses of our waterways are changing. You can see now people out there on these these uh hover boards that are they're foil boards that are
operated by little motors and you see them zipping around out there and um we you know, who would have thought of that just a a few short years ago? But there's a myriad of ways that people enjoy the waterways and how can we as Escambia County and our partners in our state and federal and commercial uh land owners provide those opportunities. Another big part of Escambia County's uh waterways access is our artificial reef program.
Uh we just put out uh with uh Eternal Reefs, we just put out another 13 uh reef balls into a patch reef and I think we're over 650 reefs now. And all those are available on Escambia County's website. And some of our our noteworthy artificial reefs, of course, starting at the top left, the Ariskany, the three-mile bridge materials were taken out and built as as artificial reefs. You can see that on the lower right. And then Matt's standing there with one of the pre-fabricated modules
that we fitted with a housing uh to be able to accommodate a uh a camera. And we'll show you some of that here in just a second. But some of the the most exciting stuff and the newest stuff that we've started here in Escambia County is working with students in the high schools. This is these are two uh marine biology teachers at Booker T. Washington and West Florida High School. And we used artificial reefs to help teach them, help their students learn about math,
physics, chemistry, marine biology, oceanography, various subject matter could be uh can be taught using artificial reefs as a central theme and the central point. We brought in some blocks and let them uh design their own reefs. And then we took them out to a uh to a local manufacturer and let them see concrete pre-fabricated reefs being constructed. And here Whoops. Hit the button for me, please. No, it worked a minute ago.
Try one more time. Okay, there you go. Okay, this is one of those cameras that Matt was showing us here just a minute ago. It was turned on by the deployment crew and it's filming itself being deployed. So, the boat has a crane on it, and the crane has a GPS at the top of the boom, and they're able to very precisely deploy these modules in patterns of of uh octagons and and
squares and circles. And it's really it's really been a a phenomenal uh experience to watch the development of the industry and artificial reef construction go from back in the days remember Eileen we'd go out there and and just push it over the side and wherever it landed it landed and now these things are precision deployed and you'll see it land on the seafloor here in just a second and the the sediment will stir up. So there's a deployment of a reef within just a
few seconds. And this is a picture of that same reef five months later. This was we shot this this photograph last week. That's this reef has been in the water for less than six months and this is what this is what it looks like. So a very phenomenal success for for our artificial reefs. So, in as your marine resources division manager, again, we're looking at at various types of
access, everything from completely undeveloped and a natural natural beach and shoreline with a place for people to recreate all the way to the state-of-the-art uh boat ramps. Part of our our marketing is to take a um the boating and angling guide, which you probably have uh if you picked it up on the table. If not, you can pick one of these up when you leave. This is the state of Florida's partnership with the counties and crant to uh to provide boating and angling infrastructure
uh information. So, this is boating and angling, but we saw earlier that there's various other ways to enjoy the waterways. So, Escambia County is is working on a on a uh a project very similar to this that would include things like sailing and kite boarding and fly fishing and other types of of of angling opportunities and and boating opportunities that are not in that boating and angling guide. Part of our waterways uh access involves dredging. There are some locations where
we have to go in and and maintain navigational clearance for for some of our larger vessels. This is a dredging project that we do annually at uh Lefit Cove on Pensacola Beach. So that's that's access in a nutshell. For safety, there's various agencies, and I've tried to list all the ones that I could think of that have a role in safety on our waterways. Scambia County Marine Resources Division, we're way down there at the bottom. We have a boating safety symposium. We also have
a seafood safety and diving safety symposia. And that is a I think this slide shows the multiaceted and multi- agency um partnerships that we have here in Escambia and Santa Rosa County as well as lower Alabama for um for maintaining safety on the waterways from our agencies. And we'll see we'll see and hear from some of our agency staff. This is a plot of some of the FWC boating uh incident uh data that we got from Tallahassee. And you can see there's a lot lot going on there.
But we looked at one of the hot spots here and these are these are just boating accidents uh within the last 5 to 10 years. And there's quite a bit of of accidents at Quiet Water Beach in Santa Rosa Sound. But if you think about the utilization, you've got a lot of jet ski rentals. You've got the Blue Angels annual air show. So, this this area here has a lot of attention and we have to credit FWC for that because they put a lot of effort into into patrolling this area and that
shows um that shows up in their citations data as well as their warnings data. So, you'll hear from FWC a little bit later on. Derelic vessels are another threat to the safety of our waterways. Not only are they hazards to navigation, but uh they can also cause pollution that could threaten uh public safety and they're they're expensive to remove. The state of Florida has a grant program and we work with our law enforcement partners to uh to remove these derelic vessels. But I do
want to say that the Florida legislature just this year created the vessel accountability act that hopefully will be able to uh to get a handle on these and and prevent some of the derelict vessels. Other waterway safety and marine resource division. We maintain the uh some of the boating regulatory areas as well as manage some of the channel markers and then also we remove hazardous uh marine debris. And we're not just focused on the safety of the waterways for us. We do have nonhuman users and stakeholders out there that we uh that we're considering as well,
such as this baby uh sea turtle. So, the healthy part of our waterways, Eskimi County has a a uh a seafood safety symposium. Our interns monitor our water weekly for red tide. And we also are local uh rapid response, our water quality division and marine resources division. I see Tim D here from the uh from the department. We are who the the county calls when there's a threat to our waterways and they want to know what it is. We can take samples. We can go out and make on the water
observations. Uh for information, Rick Oconor has a fantastic weekly email that he puts out uh through Crant. We've got folks from D, Department of Health that are all looking at the health of our local waterways as well as Escambia Countyy's water quality division. So, uh you'll hear from some of these folks. This is a a plot that uh Brent Whip and our water quality division made for us. The blue dots are storm water ponds and the gray dots are the storm water outfalls that we are
that we know about. And the water quality folks are working on on improving our understanding of exactly where some of these uh water uh uh water inputs into our surface waters can occur. And then of course the healthy beaches uh the program is is there for public's information regarding harmful algum blooms red tide the the sargasm mat that's always seemed to be in the news threatening the uh the entire western Atlantic as well as vibrio vulnicus that what
we call flesh-eating bacteria. So, we provide outreach and education to the public so that when they use the waters, they can keep themselves healthy. There's also a state warning point and this is public information. You can uh get on an email distribution list. So, any hazardous release in Escambia County or any other place that you want to subscribe to, you'll get an email that can tell you that. So, lot of information here uh tonight. So the last is the productive waterways
and the the green water in this gives us a clue that there's primary prod productivity going on there. The algae have turned the uh the water green. There's zoplankton that are eating on those those uh phytolanton and then this school of cigar menace is feeding on that and that's feeding the food web. And depending on your species of of interest, red snapper or gray snapper, that's what drives the the food web. And that's that's really a a uh a very uh short food chain from from
algae to red snapper. It could go simply from algae to a zoplankton to a cigar ma right into a red snapper. So a pretty short food chain, but very valuable to us as well as for trigger fish. And then productivity also is tied to reproduction. We took this picture last week at one of our artificial reefs. This is spawning uh behavior by gul flounder. You can see the female's got her head pointed down and the male is is the smaller uh fish is
the male. And they'll pair up like this. And there's pairs of these out there right now uh as they're beginning their spawning season. And this is occurring at Escambia County's artificial reefs. And the habitat for spawning is also uh uh useful for the the juveniles as a result of that spawn. This is about a a 3-in lane snapper that's on one of our snorkeling reefs on Pensacola Beach. And it's not just for the consumptive users. some of the non-conumptive users that like to go out
and snorkel and take pictures such as this little spotfin butterfly fish and this little tessillated blenny that you can see sticking his head out of an old barnacle. This is on one of those fivemonth-old reefs. So those barnacles grew and provided habitat for that barnacle or for that blenny in less than five less than six months. And you can see the little holes that are down there. That's a a colonial act um tunicate, a phenomenal little little microcosm right there on one of our
artificial reefs. And then some of the iconic species, you back in in the 50s and the 60s, it was common to see Goliath grouper here off Pensacola. Now they're making a comeback. Uh I credit the uh the strong management from our fisheries managers as well as us providing habitat for them. And then sometimes it's the small things that can really uh show you the beauty of of the marine environment. This is a little octo coral that's also growing on that five-month old reef. So sometimes if you just slow down and and look closely, you can see a phenomenal amount of of
beauty in our marine resources. Um productivity of of shellfish. These are the um the open and closed and provisionally open um oyster beds here in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties. We had a our seafood safety symposium. Someone from the Department of Agricultures Division of Aquaculture came in and uh and gave us a great talk. But this map right here shows where we can and cannot harvest oysters. Um we all marine resources division also participates in fisheries
management. Matt's going day after tomorrow to Appalachiccola to participate in a state um state workshop on management measures for the spotted sea trout. And FWC also on their website they have data for fisheries landings by county in the state of Florida that go back for decades. So I just chose the year 2000 and the year 2025. The year 2000, the year that Marine Resources Division started, the landings in Escambia County were worth $4.5 million. 2025 thus
far is less than 800,000. So I hope that's not a result of marine resources division, but it's the data are there and you can see the species. They've got it broken down by species, by by county, and it's a phenomenal amount of of information. And anybody that wants any of that, just contact me. That's all I have for you. I hope I've given you a good introduction of what you're going to hear a lot of detail on tonight. And I thank you very much. And our first speaker is Matt
[Applause] Captain Clark, that's forward. That's reverse. Gotcha. Thank y'all. Awesome. Thank you. Well, hello everyone. I'm Captain Keith Clark. Work for Florida Fish and Wildlife. My office is based out of Walton County. We have our field office there. As you remember, we had a field office in Pensacola before the Pensacola Bay Bridge. Use our facility that was demolished as a roundabout type thing. So, but we found another home in Walton and we're glad to be
there. Uh, again, I'm the area captain over four counties starting in Walton heading to the west. was Walton, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, and Escambia. I have 40 sworn officers, and that includes myself. So, we have nine officers in Escambia County with two lieutenants. We have seven officers in Santa Rosa County with one lieutenant. In Okaloosa, we have 12 officers with two lieutenants. In Walton County, we have five officers with one lieutenant. That may sound like a a large number of officers,
but in reality, that's a lot of territory by land and by water uh to patrol. So, we do the best that we can. And one of our responsibilities is der vessels. Robert gave a very inspiring, uplifting, and here we are about to drag it down, Robert. So, appreciate that, buddy. And I'm going to um turn this over to Austin. He's going to do the first portion, and I'll jump in later, folks. All right. My name is Austin LGO. and I started in Tallahassee about a year ago and moved to Pensacola. Uh Northwest Region Derelch Vessel Coordinator. It's our job to get derelic vessels
out of the water as quickly as possible and get as many of them out as possible. Here are the numbers from the last 5 years. U overall 64 Escambia County Derk vessels have been removed. Um, one of the problem areas is Bay Chico and 29 have been removed from Bayuch Chico in the same time frame. Uh, so about half of the derelic vessels in the county come from that one Bayou.
It's not working there. We're going to talk about what a derelic vessel is, how to identify it, uh, the due process, uh, removal and then at risk vessels. uh propulsion testing, public nuisance vessels, and the vessel turn-in program. And then Captain Clark's going to talk about the anchoring permit. What is a derelict vessel? It has to be left in a wrecked, junked, or substantially dismantled condition upon the waters of the state at any port in the
state with a consent without the consent of the agency having jurisdiction thereof. uh docked or grounded uh beached or wrecked on the property of someone without permission. What is a derelic vessel? Um it is a vessel that is used for moving uh watercraft used capable of being used for transportation. So this does not include sea planes or floating structures or just ugly or unsightly vessels don't count either.
the functionality of the vessel. This is important when the officers are investigating these. It's not a matter of what the vessel was at one point or what it could be in the future. It is where the vessel stands right now. So, if it was derelictked in the past, but it isn't anymore, it's not derelict. Can't be treated derelictked at that time. Same as if it's at risk and it's headed downhill, but it's not quite there yet. We can't treat it as derelictked until it's actually derelictked. uh definition changed to 82311. A person, firm or corporation may not leave any
derelic vessel upon the waters of the state. Uh leave means to allow a vessel to remain occupied or unoccupied on the waters of the state for more than 24 hours. So the term left, stored or abandoned has been removed from the statute and it only needs to be left for a period of 24 hours or more. I'd like to talk a little bit about this portion that was recently removed uh through the last legislation and just reading from that the legislators have removed the term
responsible party from debit vessel law under the 82711. The officer must now determine who the vessel owner is and that the owner is responsible for the debit vessel. Basically, what that means is that if if you are the owner of a boat and let's say that hires one of y'all to take and be a caretaker of it and I pay you for it and that caretaker does nothing, just takes your money and just leave your boat to rot and becomes in a derelict state. It used to be you could hold him responsible. But now the law says you ultimately have to hold the
owner responsible. But if someone is taking true ownership of the paper of the boat itself, has paperwork either a bill of sale, some transaction, some kind of money exchange, even though the title still has it as the original owners, then yes, we can charge the person that's in the transition phase of becoming the boat owner. So that's a slight change to what it used to be. Where must the boat be located? It must be on the waters of the state in the wreck,
junked or substantially dismantled condition at any port in the state without the consent of the agency. Uh dock, grounded or beached upon the property of another. What is a wrecked vessel? This one's easy. It's if it is wrecked, submerged, partially submerged and cannot extricate itself without mechanical assistance. So if it can't get out by itself, it is wrecked. What is junked? This is if all the components are stripped out of the boat, making it unable
to operate as it should. And substantially dismantled. To be substantially dismantled, it must meet two of the three requirements or be missing two of the three requirements. The steerage, propulsion, and vessel hole. So if the steerage and the hole are both unacceptable, then it meets this. or if it has the trifecta, then it meets that qualification. Assessing whole integrity. Um, cosmetic issues on the deck are not what we're talking about here. To
uh qualify for this, it must be at or below the water line. Uh, actually compromising the holes purpose, which is to keep the boat afloat. So, that's what makes that qualify for that part. here um in the marinas and HOA situations which we we have a lot of those um those boat when they become derick in those private waterways or the private docks still falls on the owner of the marina or under the HOA guidelines to where civily under 8 no 328.17 civily they
can take action against the uh boat owner that's either pay their slip fees um and their ow money where then they can take actual ownership of the boat eventually sell it and hope to get their their return from the slip. So that's what that means. So Derek vessels would not be part of our investigation. Debters would not pay the price to remove those districts in those private entities and private interests. That's anyone know Villa of Venice area? your villa is man-made canals
and that is an HOA. The boats that actually sink there the water bottom belongs to the HOA or the homeowner itself. So the waters of that canal is not considered water of the state. So that too would not we would not investigate a dere vessel at the HOA or these private interests. investigating and investigating dirt vessels. We had a lot more slides but we me and Austin agreed just to eliminate that to kind of speed up the process but it is a long between six to
nine month process of training the ownership of the vessel going to the right for due process and that's just a key part of our standard operational procedures giving that owner opportunity to give him notice that his boat is sterile and that he must take action within 21 days to correct or put the boat back in compliance. Sometimes the owners lives in out of state. So we have to send a certified letter. We have to wait till it returns and get confirmation that he receives it. Then he has a right to an appeal process if he chooses that. And it can go on for a couple of
months by itself. Then eventually when you get to the general vessel stage, you sign off of ultimately the county here in Scam County, Robert Turpin and his staff will apply for a grant which uh we have money the state has money for the removal. to apply for the grant and then that can take a process of bidding and then when a contract is finally decided who's going to move he's given a period of time to have it done in this period so it can take six and n months I will say this Robert and I started working together about 27 years ago when I was a young guy look
at Robert he still looks young I don't know how you um but back then we didn't have administrative side of dirt vessels we just had the criminal and you have to rely on a county judge to you know find the guy guilty you know for the Derek vessel and then give him a period of time to remove it. So the legislators have really heard the the the voices of the people of the state realize D vessel is a problem in all 67 counties and they have invested with raw real law changes as
well as money you know to help deal with the der vessels and get them off the waters of the state. This is this is new also and this is good here. Now it says if we declare that boat derelict and sometimes what an owner will do he'll get notice right that hey your boat is becoming derelict he wants to get rid of it as quickly as possible so he turns around and this happens he'll just give it to a homeless guy homeless guy sees this as a beautiful place right he thinks this boat is
awesome I'll take it now that guy's no longer responsible now the drill vessel or it's going to be eyes of the homeless person it says now that you cannot not if we declare it derelict, you cannot live there. You cannot reside there. That's actually misdemeanor of the second degree that didn't used to be in place. And there's there times where the contractor that is that got the bid to remove the boat um will go there and that person is still on the boat, refuses to leave, and we have to take law enforcement action to get him off the boat and get the boat out of the water. So that's that's a good change right there. There's no grace period uh that
that is allowed other than the um when it's a hurricane. So when a hurricane blows through, we know what happens to boats. You know, they can be shoved up, they become derelict, but you have when a storm leaves the state of Florida, the 45day count starts. And what we do as an agency, we send an actual task force specifically to target all boats that are high and dry that are der. We give that on a notification that you have 45 days, you know, get with your insurance
company, get it worked out and get the boat back in compliance or let's get it removed. That's one exception. Other exception is a boating accident. So you're in a boating accident, you collide and it sinks. You have seven days now for that owner of that boat to make some kind of effort to get that boat surfaced and off the wire estate on the eighth day. Then we begin a dirt vessel investigation. Those are two exceptions. This is important. The legislators have been extremely um
supportive of this issue with dirt vessels so much they decided now for the first defense. is going to be a firstdegree misdemeanor. If that guy gets cited again, it's going to be a thirdderee felony. If this guy gets cited again for another book, it's going to be a secondderee felony. And that's that's jail time. The judge finds you guilty and adjudicated you guilty, you can you can go to jail and spend time there. So they're really trying to send a message out to make home or boat owners
responsible and in the seriousness of it and what is causing taxpayers to remove their vessels that they neglect it from the waters of the state and we know it's an environmental issue as well. All right. Before a vessel becomes derelic, usually it is at risk. And this is a good opportunity for us to remove vessels before they become too big of a problem. Uh at risk, there are six six things that make a vessel at risk. It can be taken on or has taken on water
without an effective means to dewater. Uh it can uh be open to the elements uh cabin open exposure and or it can be broken loose or in danger of breaking loose from its anchor. This could be as simple as the rope is really old. That looks really old. So that's probable cause. Uh the vessel's listing due to water intrusion. uh the vessel does not have an effective means of propulsion and the vessel owner operator is unable to provide a receipt,
proof of purchase or other documentation for having ordered the part they need. So if we see an atrisisk vessel and they have a receipt for the part they need to fix it, we're going to give them that opportunity to fix it. If not, we can do a propulsion test uh which we should be getting into here shortly. or the vessel can be tied to an unlawful or unpermitted structure. Articulation of reasonable suspicion for being at risk, non-movement for extended periods of time, excessive marine growth on the anchor uh anchor line, apparent inoperability
or of mechanical propulsion components, missing or obviously compromised steerage, rusted or seized steerage or propulsion, missing or broken mass, boom, or sails. and signs of steering or propulsion neglect. So they used to have I believe three days that where they would have to go do what they can do and then do a propulsion test to prove that the vessel uh is operable. Now uh our officers can demand that on the spot which speeds up the process for
that initial citation. Um, and we'll get into the multiple offenses here shortly there. Um, there has to be at least I know we're kind of getting we're supposed to speed up. So, yeah, this is the portion where they're cited for being at risk. These are the elements. You can see the increments increase from 100 to 250 to 500. That's in within 30 days of each citation. And you can see it has to be other than a quiddle and dismissal. And that's the
key part of it. and you have 24 months to do it. So, they can get three citations and that makes that vessel public nuisance. We can go from there. Here's the public nuisance part of it. If they get three in a 24-month period, it used to be 18 months, now it's 24. If they get three uh citations for that, then it can become a public nuisance vessel and then then it will be treated um as a derelch vessel without actually becoming a derelch vessel. So then can go through the exact
same process and get removed as a public nuisance. The vessel turn-in program is almost 2 years old now and it is an opportunity for boats to be for owners to turn over their vessels to us at no cost, no responsibility so we can take care of it before it becomes an issue. Um they just have to have a clear title in their name and submit an application for that. And if it's floating and in an at risk condition, then they will be eligible for that program and
we'll take it off their hands. Derelch vessels do not count and they're not eligible for this. They can be derelictked and then fix it to an atrisisk state and then be eligible for that. All right. This is effective January 1st, 2026. Long-term anchoring u means the anchoring of a vessel with one lunar nautical mile of a documented anchorage point for 14 days or more within a 30-day period.
Basically, what a documented anchorage point is is when an officer or even your staff gets to a vessel that just came into BHA and just anchored and we get the Latin longs, confirm the Latin longs and that becomes an anchorage point that begins the countdown. At that point, vessels do not qualify for this if they become at risk or deadly. These are functionality boats that can operate. Now, someone that comes in to buy a chica will have to apply for a permit. It's a free permit that issued by the state of Florida and then um it's good for one year. You have to always
renew it. Of course, you can have three boats and get three anchoring permits. Um the key point in this is one or an article model. I like that. That means if you have some kind of incidental movement of the If that's anchored, it's not going to know and void it and restart the counter again. Yep. You skip that. There's the application. That's the information you got to have on it. Just provided you get more ones as far as a year. The penalty is going to be a noncriminal
infraction. There's some challenges to this. I will be honest with you in terms of having you know um surveillance 24/7 you know um for that period of time but essentially if the boat never moves from that anchor point I think we can also prove in front of the court they'll never move okay just the exemptions government boats any kind of commercial fishery vessel recreational fishing vessel anything like that are exempt obviously and we're done sir we'll do the expert panel at Mary thank you Right on the
water. We'll see who ranks. Okay. Brent Whip is here from our water quality division. He's going to discuss water quality monitor. Oh okay. Okay, good evening everybody. All right, I'm Mike King. So, I'm the new water quality program manager. Um, so if you knew him, I am the new Dana Morton. Um, so I've only been here for about five weeks now,
so I apologize in advance if I rely heavily on my notes tonight, and I don't have quite as many cool pictures as Robert had. All right, so tonight I'd like to talk about the water quality monitoring that's being accomplished uh in Escambia County by the where to find that data. All right. So, Scampia Countyy's water quality division leads a comprehensive set of monitoring and restoration programs to improve surface water quality throughout the county under the integrated water quality monitoring program. Um, within this plan, we have three main program types. We
have bacteria control plans, ambient water quality monitoring, and we have special assessment basins. And under our BPCPS, there are three control plans that are active uh currently. So we have 11 mile creek, we have Carpenter Creek, and we have Bay Tahar. So each of these wersheds has about five or six monitoring locations that we sample monthly for fecal indicator bacteria and field parameters. So these data sets are critical for tracking progress towards state approved bacteria reduction goals, some as high as 65%.
So we also have our long-term ambient water quality monitoring program. So for this we sample 36 monitoring locations again um across 24 different water bodies. So those parameters include bacteria, nutrients, oxygen, turbidity, chlorophyll, uh field parameters, and I'll talk about all those pretty soon. Um, so this all supports long-term trend analysis, restoration, prioritization, and coordination with other agencies as well.
And then we've added our bays, bays, and sound program in 2023 because we got a new boat. And we now monitor 11 open water systems in and around Escambia Bay, Pensacola Bay, and Purito Bay. And then we have some um which one do we got here? Special and targeted programs that we do as well. So we have the biocheo basin management action plan. So we sample that monthly and we sample seven sites for fecal indicator bacteria and nutrients to track
uh the restoration progress um for that VMAP. And then when we do get high bacteria levels, uh we do do targeted investigations um most of the time the next day to identify potential sources. And then we do some monitoring around Crescent Lake. We evaluate the water quality data and groundwater interactions near the former Rolling Hills landfill facility that you see here. And then we got just a couple other special projects. So we have the special assessment basins
uh that focused on sampling for nitrogen and bacteria in Carpenter Creek and Botahar. Um we have the nutrient reduction project. So this year we completed monitoring for the agricultural best management practices in Pine Baron and more creek watersheds. And then over in Jones Swamp and Jackson Creek um they had over 16 acres of flood plane wetland restoration and that's being monitored monthly for nutrient and sediment. So these projects look to restore natural hydraology, improve habitat, and reduce pollutant loads.
So now I'm going to discuss what we take, what we're able to take at the county, and why we take these. So our water moni monitoring program, we measure eight key parameters to assess the health of the aquatic ecosystem um and identify pollutant sources. So our core indicators, our field parameters, uh temperature, pH, conductivity, and dissolved oxygen. We actually can um take those the same day. We have a water quality meter and as soon as
we put it in the water, uh we got an indication of what those core parameters are. Um and they just give us a snapshot of the ecosystem health right away. And then we have our lab parameters. So, our nutrients, chlorophylls, total suspended solids, and microbiology. So, we collect those with test kits, bring them back to our lab. And for the microbiology, we could have uh results up to the next day, and then the other ones take um about a week or so or a little bit longer. But
all this will kind of give us an indication of what's out of balance in the ecosystem. All right. I apologize for everybody in the back and most of the people up front, but um so I'll I'll try to let you know why we collect uh all these parameters. So for temperature, temperature drives um most of the physical and biological processes in the water. Um warm water holds less oxygen. So when low oxygen when the oxygen gets low in the water
it also puts stress on all aquatic life. So water temperature is seasonal but there are human causes as well. So water bodies heat up faster when the vegetative canopy is removed and when particullet get introduced into the water body. So rises in temperature can combine with nutrient loading to trigle algo blooms or fish kills um especially after heavy rains. Um pH u that measures how acidic or basic basic the water is. So Florida waters usually
range from six to about 8 and a half. Um but it's not uncommon to see pH values in the fives sometimes even in fours in our blackwater uh streams down here. And then a drop in that pH can indicate storm water runoff, decaying organic matter, or even chemical discharges. So, we've uh we've seen pH spikes in estuaries that's tied to algo blooms during warm months. And if uh if it's imbalanced long enough, it could lead to species stress and reduced biodiversity in our
waters. And then conductivity that measures the amount of um dissolved ions, salts, nutrients, metals in the water. So sudden changes that can show runoff, failing septic septic systems and groundwater intrusion carrying minerals and nutrients um from landfills or disturbed soils. All right. Dissolved oxygen. Um that's the amount of oxygen in the water that's available to aquatic organisms. and it's one of our most critical parameters that we take. So we do have seasonal
dips in dissolved oxygen when temperatures rise and also when we get alol blooms and we get the al algo blooms that die off and they decompose that um they consume oxygen in that process. Um, and DO helps us detect nutrient enrichment and pollution events as well as track success and restoration projects like um some stream bank stabilization. So, if it's off balance long enough, that could
lead to hypoxia, fish kills, and habitat loss. Um, that's why oxygen data is key for success uh for ecosystem stress. And then we also take nutrients. So nutrients are vital for plant and algaal growth um and they supply uh food for aquatic life but um currently excess nutrient is among the most common water pollution problem uh affecting all water bodies in the US. So excess nutrients
uh can cause uh excess biological growth which can disturb natural vegetation, insects, fish and other aquatic organisms. And then it can also feed harmful algolooms like we've been seeing more and more and those can produce cyanotoxins which can be fatal for wildlife and pets um as well as have detrimental effects on human health and in rare cases even death
very detrimental. So sources of uh nutrients could be heavy uses of fertilizer, leaky septic systems and storm water runoff. And then we do chlorophyll and that measures algal growth. So that's a biological response to nutrients. Um and then high chlorophyll levels can indicate nutrient enrichment that's occurring upstream. For example, um data from our bay system shows that chlorophyll concentrations tend to spike after heavy rainfall events.
I do have a couple pictures. All right. So, we got uh total suspended solids. So, this measures the amount of sediments and organic particles in the water column itself. So, high TSS reduces light penetration. Um it can smother aquatic vegetation. uh can carry attached pollutants like metals or bacteria. Uh and we'll see this especially after storm when uh construction runoff enters the creeks and tribes and over time this load could also fill in wetlands and reduce natural flood capacities as well.
And then finally we measure um bacteria indicators like E.coli and an oxide bacteria. So these bacteria rarely cause illness on their own. Um but they can um indicate fecal contamination from both human and animal sources. Uh which means pathogens which can cause uh illness will likely also be present. So monitoring these bacteria is critical for public health especially at recreational sites and shellfish harvesting areas. Um, as you know,
the Department of Health runs the Healthy Beaches program, and they use bacteria data to post swim advisories um when the bacteria levels exceed a certain amount. And our monitoring teams here at the county, we use that data um to try to trace back other potential sources from pet waste, sewer lines, septic leaks, um and any other elicit discharges that we can find. All right. All right. So how do we use this data? So all this data together we kind of
use it as a toolkit. So each parameter tells us a part of the story and then all together it kind of gives us a full picture of ecosystem health. So we can use the data to collect you know to fill in the puzzle and determine likely sources um depending on on what's out of balance. And then just getting into our group a little bit. So we are a small group um but we average an impressive 800 site visits uh roughly a year. So our water quality division
accounts for more than half um of all the total nutrient and bacteria water quality in Escambia County for this I think this data is over the past five years and that number is trending upwards. And then our work is part of a larger collaborative effort. So across Escambia County, there's almost 120,000 data points that are currently in the uh Florida states wind database. Um and that's all collected by only seven counties uh in Escambia County here. So we
uh Escambia County uh attributed 36% for that. Um D uh Department of Environmental Protection they accounted for 59 total across three different divisions. Um they take some more parameters that we don't take uh like chemical tracers like artificial sweeteners uh pharmarmacuticals some genetic markers right now um as well as pesticides and they do all the harmful algabloom toxins
and then that other 5% comes from um other collaborators. So we have the brim fisherman association. So they used to monitor about 48 stations uh quarterly. Um and they're looking to get their program back up and started. I think the last time they had any data entered was in 2000. Um we have ECUA. They do some quarterly sampling uh as well. do we talked about the healthy beaches uh Florida Lake watch their volunteer-led um monitoring program of nutrients chlorophyll
and clarity in our local lakes. So collaboration is basically the cornerstone of our water quality program. So that monitoring uh drives decision- making and restoration priorities. Uh and lastly, I just wanted to talk about where we can get that data from. So those two databases that I talked about was the Florida D uh the win wind win information watershed information network. Um so that's used to store data, manage data and they uh report data to interested users.
Anybody can go and download data sets. Um as well as um they report it using this to the EPA. Uh and if anybody's familiar with store at uh database, this is the this is what replaced it. Um and then data entered into win can be used for water body impairments for each parameter that's used. And then Escambia County, we put our data into here at a quarterly basis.
And then Escambia County does have its own water quality public data portal. So all the data collected by Escambia County in our division since 2016 is reported on this this portal. Um the sites can be found by map, site name or water body name. Um all parameters are searchable and graphed. So you can see the trend um since 2016. And then I have uh if anybody would like you can use those QR codes to link to those
sites today. All right, that's all I got. Thank you. Perfect. Thank you, Michael. So, some good news. Um my uh artificial reef presentation was done in my intro. So, we're going to have a time for a 15minute break here in about uh 30 minutes. Next up is Bailey Walkingshaw from the uh Pensacola Purto Bay Echuary Program State of the Bay report, which I have to say was a big factor in the decision process for doing this symposium. So, we took their
their information and then we kind of expanded it into our program. So, thanks to y'all. We're here tonight. Perfect. All right. Thank you so much for having us. We're excited to be included. So, my name is Bailey Wenshaw. with the Pensacola and Purto base estuary program. And just a little bit of background, I'm not going to hang out on this slide too long because Robert already covered it, but we take a watershed approach with the estuary program. So we do cover the Purto Bay as well as the Pensacola Bay wershed and we're really guided by our comprehensive conservation management plan.
So we have six core goals and what I'm going to talk to you today about is our state of the bays report and that's really getting at that first goal. So being a source of watershed information for our community. See if it will go. And it's stuck right here. I don't know if you can get it on yours. Perfect. Okay. So a little bit about the state of the bays report is that it provides a snapshot of the health of Pensacola Bay and Purto Bay wersheds and we update it every two
years. So the first report came out in 2023. So 2025, we just put out our new state of the bays report and we're really excited about it. One thing to know with the state of the bays report. It's an interactive website. You can go to state ofthebays.org. And the reason for this website is to really be easily digestible, have a lot of visual ways to digest the information that we're talking about. So it's really geared towards our community members to get a good sense of
what's going on with our waterways. It's also to determine if our waters are declining, improving, or staying the same. Oh my gosh, I have a lot of animations in. Okay, there we go. And identify areas where more information is needed to evaluate conditions as well as enhance our community's quality of life. So the state of the base report is kind of set up like when you go to your annual doctor's visit and it they just kind of do a rundown and diagnose, you know,
how things are going with you. What's your blood work looking like? That's what we did. So at the top you're looking at our four key indicators. So we have habitats, water quality, bacteria, and wildlife. Then along the bottom we have our scale of ecosystem health. So it can be improving, stable, declining, critical, or undetermined. A couple notes with our scale is that stable does not necessarily mean good or bad. It just means it's staying the same. And then with undetermined,
that tends to mean we don't have data to say one way or another. For the indicators, so for habitats, we're looking at oysters, seaggrass beds, wetlands, longleaf pines, habitat change. For water quality, total nitrogen, total phosphorus, chlorophyll a turbidity, and dissolved oxygen. For bacteria, we're looking at beach advisories and sanitary sewer overflows. And then for wildlife, we're looking at manatees. And we're really excited for 2025. We included fisheries as well. So, we'll talk a little bit more about that here
soon. We also have a new look and feel on the state of the bay report. So, we updated a little bit of the website and we updated the graphics to better reflect some of the new indicators. There we go. And we included interactive maps. So, we're really excited about this feature because we want people to go online and explore the website. So, this is pulled from the sanitary sewer overflows and you can actually zoom in, zoom out on the map, click the map. Before it was just a static image. So, this gives our community members a little bit more
utility on the website. Just a quick summary of where we've been. So, the 2023 report you can see improving. So seaggrass beds, dissolved oxygen, phosphorus, turbidity, sanitary sewer overflows, and manatees. Stable condition being chlorophyll a and wetlands declining beach advisories, habitat change and nitrogen. Critical condition, I don't think that's much of a surprise, but oyster reefs. And then undetermined, so we really don't have enough data to say is our longleaf pine forest.
Looking at 2025. So improving we can see that quite a few of the different indicators have shifted into stable. So we do have manatees. We've had more manatee sighting reports. For stable we have wetlands, beach advisories, chlorophyll a nitrogen, phosphorus turbidity, dissolved oxygen and seaggrass beds. Declining habitat change and sanitary sewer overflow. So we can see that beach advisories did move from declining to stable. critical, we still have our oyster reefs. And
then undetermined, we still have our longly fine force, but we also added fisheries. So that's something where we really don't have enough information to say it's a big data gap. So to dive a little bit deeper, just to give you a taste of what you can do with the state of the bays report, I'm just going to walk you through one of um the bay segments or a couple of them. So we have East Bay and Escambia Bay. I'm just talking about those tonight because it's actually where we're putting our first 100 hectares of oyster restoration habitat, which I'll talk to you later
on tonight about. But all of this data comes from 2000 to 2024. And it's long-term monitoring data from multiple programs. So these are just a couple um parameters that I pulled out just to look at just to show you some of the graphs that we have available. So total nitrogen being along the top, total phosphorus along the bottom, and then on the left side we have Escambia Bay. On the right side we have East Bay. So what you're seeing that little green dash line is the threshold.
So essentially anything above that is considered bad or an excess. So what we're seeing is Escambia Bay has a couple peaks of total nitrogen, but overall it's moving down towards under the threshold. And then for total phosphorus, it's also under the threshold. For East Bay, uh the total nitrogen and total phosphorus are both under the threshold. Now, all of this wouldn't be possible without our partnerships. Just like Mike mentioned, it's a very collaborative process. So, I'm not going to walk you through each one of these, but we have our data sources broken out by
the different indicators. So, we have our habitat and our water quality. You can see Escambia County is one of our really big partners. And then we also have bacteria and wildlife as well. And one thing I meant to point out earlier when talking about this, just going to go back for a second. I was specifically referring to Pensacola Bay. So when you go on our State of the Bays website, it does break it out between Pensacola Bay wershed and Purto Bay wershed. So for some of our community members that are over in Purto Bay, they might not really care what's going on in
Pensacola Bay and they just want to look at that information. So you can toggle between the two watershed systems and then get a little bit more in depth to the different bay segments as well. See just some key takeaways from the 2025 report. So the first one is that there's a need for more consistent fisheries monitoring in Florida. This became apparent by the data gaps when we were trying to pull together the different information. And this data is really valuable because it's used to predict future changes and inform local management decisions. Currently,
fisheries management decisions are based off of data collected in Appalachiccola Bay. So ideally, we would have our own fisheries independent monitoring here reflecting Pensacola and Purto Bay fisheries. The next thing, if I can get this up, there we go. Most of our monitored water quality parameters are trending in a positive direction indicating gradual improvement in ecosystem and water quality conditions. However, there are several limitations to the data set. So, there's limited temporal and vertical coverage. So, this means multiple organizations may only
sample during summer or at surface depths. There's also varying sample frequency. So, some years there might be really dense sample collection whereas other years might be really limited. and that most data are discrete samples and not continuous monitoring. This means that we might miss short-term fluctuations. So what we do is we take all of this information and it helps us inform future projects. So for example, our water quality monitoring collaborative, we received $750,000 over three years and that's to implement the idea of this water
quality monitoring collaborative. So all of the people out there that have currently or historically monitored for water quality, we've brought them in the room and they were a lot of them were represented at our comprehensive monitoring workshop back in February 2024. And it was pointed out that there's a really strong need to have a collaborative for consistent monitoring with comparable data. So we want to harness partnerships to expand spatial and temporal coverage across our entire watershed boundaries. We're also prioritizing parameters
of interest. So that's of interest to us and our partners. So this includes physical like do pH, temperature, nutrients like total nitrogen and total phosphorus and biological like bacterial and chlorophyll. A we're also doing a microbial source tracking project. So, this was hinted a little bit earlier on Mike's slide, but uh it we received $2.8 million from NERA with a purpose to identify sources of bacteria and nutrient impairments. So, our partners for this project
are Escambia and Santa Rosa counties as well as the city of Pensacola and the ECUA. Currently, we're at the stage of data uh compiling and synthesis. And then we'll be working towards stakeholder engagement. So that's like maps on the table, walk the watershed, and preliminary data collection. And if you're interested in diving deeper and taking a look at our 20 to 25 state of the bays report, you can scan here. It'll take you to our website or you can just type in stateofthebays.org. But I really encourage you to use it. Our uh scientists spend a lot
of time collecting all of the data out there that we can that's publicly accessible and we clean up the data to make sure that it's comparable and they spent a lot of time doing it and in the next few years we'll have the next report out but we're really excited for the 2025. So thank you. Thank you Bailey. Next we have Beth. Beth here from our water quality division or actually you're in the restore division and congratulations. I understand you just got a promotion and
um you're going to talk to us about the Pensacola Bay Living Shoreline project and this is a a a project that we get a lot of questions. If you spend any time on the water or if you live around Bayou Grand or Bayu Davenport, you're going to be very interested in what Beth has to say tonight. Your clicker is right there. Thank you. Hi, I'm Beth Gaylot with the Restore Division of Escambia County and that is projects funded by the Restore Act which are using the fines from the Deep Water
Horizon oral spill. I'm going to talk to you about our largest project which is the Pensacola Bay Living Shoreline Project. This project has three sites located near NAS Pensacola. Totaling about three miles of shoreline that are going to be restored. Site A up at the top is White Island, which will be recreational and habitat. Site B is Magazine Point, and site C down at the bottom is Sherman Inlet or Lake Frederick as it's known to the Navy.
Goals of the project are to restore coastal habitats, including foraging habitats for shore birds, waiting birds, and migratory birds. We're going to restore 71 acres of emergent salt marsh and 34 acres of sandy shoreline and dunes. There'll be reef habitat for fish, oysters, and other invertebrates. There'll be 16 acres of reefs and rock breakaters constructed in this project. The reefs will decrease the turbidity and improve water quality allowing recruitment
of up to 50 acres of submerged aquatic vegetation and that serves as nursery and adult habitat for recreational and commercially important shellfish and finish your crabs, red fish, shrimp, etc. And more project goals include resilience, security and navigation. plan to help further prevent further shoreline erosion by attenuating wave energy and that'll help protect the Bayud Davenport neighborhood as well as NAS Pensacola particularly sight C. The shoreline has eroded
close to the critical infrastructure of roads and communication lines. It'll also enhance the security of NAS Pensacola by providing physical boundaries at the 500 foot military exclusion zone using the breakwaters and submerged reefs. And site A we have dredging to use using that sand for dreading to build the islands, but it will also facilitate navigation from Bayu Davenport to Bay Grand out to Pensacola Bay and that'll allow flushing of Bayud Davenport as well.
And how do we do that? With money and a lot of it. We had uh several grants as well as county funds for the design and seven grants for construction totaling over $35 million. Um the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation contributed the largest portion of that. But our restore grant has, even though it's only $1.5 million, has has been critical because it's the most flexible. We could use it at different sites. We could use it for construction,
construction inspection, monitoring, and that's been instrumental in keeping the project moving. And the other way to get this accomplished is to build a living shoreline. Here, this is from the Noah website. there's like a gradation from the living shoreline to an armored shoreline. So instead of just putting working against nature with the um bulkheads and just putting rocks along the shore, the living shorelines are working with nature using natural materials such as rock,
plants and sand and also considering the natural processes of how the shoreline is rebuilt. So in this case, the first three options were not feasible for us because those are not um useful in the high wave energy environments. And since our shorelines are exposed to the Pensacola Bay, we had to use this breakwater setup which will have plants either installed as part of the project or will be recruited due to the reduced wave energy and the rocks offshore.
How effective are these living shorelines? So, we don't want to spend all this money and have not have good results. Fortunately, this year a study just came out about um three living shorelines that were constructed in the Big Bend area of Florida. If you remember, they had several tropical storms and hurricanes over a couple of years. They monitored elevation, vegetation, wave energy, found it consistently outperformed the armored shorelines. Wave energy was reduced about 50% in typical conditions and up to 28% during hurricanes. The living shorelines
persisted after all of these storms and showed signs of recovery. Um this is a diagram of one of the sites. The first picture at the top is when it was constructed in 2020 and then it started to recruit sand and u marsh naturally plants grew. Then some tropical storms occurred. It got knocked back a little bit but it it didn't change it too much. Then hurricane Adalia hit. That was a
category 3. It hit northwest. So they received the brunt of the storm surge. As you can see, it did lose um habitat in a couple of spots, but it still has significantly more than what it was started out with. So, we're happy to see that and we have high hopes for our project as well. Now, the first site I'm going to talk about is White Island. This is what White Island looked at looked like in 1951. This is what it looked like in 2021. It's just a little strip of it
left and another small piece at the north. You could see our um plans for the project overlaid with breakwaters and then submerged reefs, marsh islands, and that is going to take about 700,000 individual plants to plant those islands as well as um the sand islands for recreation. This is an aerial view from one of the residents nearby showing the progress
of as of October 2025. the two it's a little bit rotated. So the two residential islands are on the right hand side and then the marsh islands which are not planted yet are in the front on the left hand side and you can see the darker water where there's been dredging. Okay, this is the um before and after or it's actually during construction. This is November 2024 and that's August 2025. That's how much sand has been added. Almost all of the
sand has been dredged for this site. And now they're working on the rocks. And already the birds are appreciating the habitat. They're standing in the buffet line waiting to see what the treasure has dug up for them. Next, I'll talk about site B, which is magazine magazine point just around the corner on the eastern shore of NAS Pensacola. There's I think 10 breakwaters planned and in between will be the submerged reefs and rock piles. Behind that will be some marsh island similar to White Island
and that is going to take about 600,000 plants. Now I wanted to draw your attention to all the way at the right those five little circles. Those are the rock piles. That's what you're going to see in the next couple of pictures. So this is preconstruction, November 2024, and post construction. Those are those little tiny circles. So you can kind of get a feel for the scale of the project. That's just the very tip of the project. And it goes all the way south.
And here's one of our uh pelicans enjoying the Roth Pile. The third site is Sherman Inlet. And this one we have planned submerged reefs at the 500t exclusion zone marked with dangerous submerged rock signs. Breakwaters behind those. And then this is going to have sand additional sand installed along the shoreline pushed down to the breakwaters. But there are no plants planned as part of this site because it is near the airfield of NAS Pensacola which you can see up in the upper left.
Now, if I go back all the way down on the left hand corner, those two little itty bitty break orders, the blue semicircles, that's what you're seeing in the next picture. This is one of the very small break orders. And the sand has been excavated from Sand Island across just across the channel, also known as Robertson Island. It's piled along shore and the contractor is spreading it down along shore. So, this is November 2024.
This was during the air show last year. Um, the boats were getting close to the shoreline when they're supposed to stay 500 ft away. And now we have some rock and sand piled up on shore. Um, that's all I have for that today. Thank you very much. Thanks, Beth. And to finish out our habitat, uh Bailey, you're coming up for another five minute
uh briefing on on the habitat and then we'll be taking a short break. Okay. This is just a very brief overview or of um a few projects that we have going on at the estuary program. It's going to be very brief and we'll eventually do a longer update once we're a little bit further in the projects, but right now we're at a lot of the early stages of planning, stakeholder engagement, permitting, you know, all the really fun stuff. So, the first thing that I'm
going to talk about today is our Pensacola Bay Oyster Restoration Initiative. So, this is our goal of restoring 600 hectares of oyster habitat in Pensacola Bay over the next 10 years. So our short-term goal is to restore 100 hectares which is approximately 250 acres over the next four to 5 years. So we did receive 10.9 million from Noah for this initiative and then we recently received another 10 million from NIFWIF specifically to help with the implementation cost.
So the oyster restoration initiative we have a lot of different adviserss that are really uh instrumental to driving and informing this restoration project. So we work with wild harvesters, farmers, we have a special project action team which we lovingly call spat and then we have our oyster subcommittee as well and then we work with all of our partners you see at the bottom too. So all of these people bring really wonderful perspectives that go into informing the restoration project. We also have done a lot of different types of data collection. So
from bottom type mapping, habitat suitability model, water filtration model, vision mapping, stakeholder input and oyster spat and laral monitoring. So that last one, oyster spat and laral are uh staff have been going out every two weeks to deploy spat or sediment tiles and then those tiles have been uh sent to Dolphin Island Sea Lab where they're currently being analyzed. We also held a oyster restoration design workshop. So this was back in February. And the idea of this was to bring uh together all of those adviserss in a room and sit down
and give options and come up with different designs utilizing different types of materials, different types of restoration and reef building techniques. Um looking at volunteer labor versus bringing in like a big commercial company. All of these different options and then pricing that out. And with all of those different things that we've done, we landed on these subtitle locations. So this is phase one, that first 100 hectares that we talked about. So those are the yellow boxes that
are outlined by that big red box. So these are where uh we're slating that first 100 hectares. For the preliminary design, we've been working with our spat team in the community to refine oyster reef templates. And the idea behind this is that we're one program with one baywide permit using multiple restoration techniques. And then like I said, I'm going to be very brief. So already moving on, I'm going to chat to you about our living shoreline assistance program. So this program is for any property owners that are living in Pensacola or Purto
Bay area that are dealing with um some level of erosion on their waterfront property. So, we're helping eligible properties with financial and technical assistance to install living shoreline. So, previously our staff have done site assessments and landowner meetings and project design work is currently underway looking towards the future. Uh we're submitting permits for projects that were previously submitted in October. We're also developing reports to give
to the homeowners and then we're looking at project implementation in 2026. So, we're really excited about that. The map on the right is just showing you all of the site assessment sites that our staff have gone to. So, that's when they go out to the property owners that have submitted an interest form and seeing if their property would be suitable for a living shoreline. Moving on to Carpenter Creek restoration project. So, this is the last one I'm going to chat to you about. So the design, engineering and permitting has been funded by FD restore with nutrient and sediment reduction targets. This is a partnership
between the estuary program, MAFA and nickel, the city of Pensacola, Escambia County, ECUA, FDOT and others. The creek has been segmented and the project will be phased. So on the right side you're seeing the six different segments of Carpenter Creek. So those segments really um were isolated by different main roads. So like Davis Highway, Airport Boulevard, Bayou Boulevard. That's how it was kind of segmented out and it will be a phased approach and we're having to coordinate with over 200 individual land owners. So if you're interested in diving deeper,
we do have a Carpenter Creek dedicated page. So you can scan this QR code and go to it. We have a lot of really good visuals on there where you can see the plans for Carpenter Creek. And you can also email us. So, uh, our dedicated staff member that's overseeing this project, Zach, he is overlooking the Carpenter Creek at ppbbe.org email. So, if you have any questions, go ahead, shoot us an email and we'll get back to you.
That picture is just a little schematic of some of the proposed benefits that we're sharing with the community members. We've already held an open house for community members to come chat to and see some of the models and designs and we've been working on door knocking to get access agreements so that we can start preliminary data collection. So, thank you. That is all I have. Thank you, Bailey. And and Bailey will be welcoming us back in 10 minutes. So, let's say at 7:15 we'll be back in here to uh to start our wildlife section. So, thank you all very much
and I'll be happy to take any of your sheets if you've got your questions compiled thus far. Oh, I got questions. Tommy Brown. Oh my [Music] What's going on, man? environment stuff.
Okay. So we did all I'll take I'll take
You're good. We got Sorry about that. I'll probably I want
I don't know. So, it's bouncing off that wall. cuz I'll forget. I'm old. [Music] Okay.
Sorry. That's that's where most people All right. Now we Everybody, we have some uh posters that FWC was kind enough to uh to gift us. These are a little bit outdated, but they're still uh really nice. If you if you like fish and marine life,
there's as complete of a set as we have copies for. We have a bunch of them over here. So, please feel free to um avail yourselves of some great artwork. Bailey, you about ready? Oh, yeah. They're uh they're the fish posters. FWC fish posters.
So, I just found out that the U clipper should go to that direction. Okay. Is that why I was It's counterintuitive cuz cuz the receiver for the clicker is over here. So, it was bouncing off the wall and coming this way. That makes sense. I was like, am I going crazy? No, I was doing it. You should have just pranked me and just never told me. I appreciate you telling me. Well, it makes sense because I was having a hard time with it, too. I couldn't get my my video. So, let me So, Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Yep. There you go. There you go. Over there. Not so you be. Yes. Like that. Uhhuh. Okay, everybody, if we can go ahead and have our seats. Our next presenter is ready and raring to go. That shows your age when you say something like ready and raring to go. Something my granddad would have said. So, thanks again for coming tonight. Uh we're going to kick off our wildlife
section and Bailey is going to start us off. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm really happy now because I get to talk to you about manatees and manatees. They're always a favorite. So I'm going to first start by talking to you about panhandle manatees. So I apologize if you're already familiar with this program, but I'm just going to give a little brief overview. So panhandle manatee is a program that is a part of the Pensacola and Purito Bay's estuary program. The mission is to promote
awareness, education and protection of manatees and seaggrasses in Pensacola and Purto Bay wersheds. It was established back in 2021 actually by the National Wildlife Federation and it is a partnership program. So it would not be possible today without National Wildlife Federation, UFAS Extension and then especially the Dolphin Island Sea Lab Manatee Sighting Network. So just to give a little bit of background, Dissell's manity sighting network was established in 2007 with the
purpose to collect long-term monitoring data on manatees in the North Central Gulf Coast. And how our program works is panhandle manity spo focuses specifically on the Pensacola and Purto Bay region as an outreach program. So we're over there at like boat ramps and fishing pier saying like hey we have manatees report manatee sightings if you see them and we have a website panhandlemanity.org that people can navigate to. But what happens when you click report a manatee sighting we're actually
directing you out to Dissol's manity sighting network's form. That way we're not recreating the wheel. We're just working with our partners. So the manatee sighting network over at the CAB, they're the ones that are actually managing and collecting all of the data. So instead of starting our own collaborative or our own network, we're building on top of that data set that they've been building since 2007. So for Panhandle Manatee though, as I mentioned, it is an outreach program. So we do have some targeted audiences. We're specifically looking at people that spend a lot
of time on or around the water. So, our boers, our anglers, our locals, and our visitors. So, we're meeting them at boat ramps, marinas, peers, fishing tournaments, community events, festivals, coastal businesses, visitor centers, you name it. This way. And this is just some pictures of us going out there and leading this outreach. So, we tend to bring on a seasonal manity intern and they're the ones actually coordinating a group of volunteers that go out there typically on the
weekends in the mornings when boers are getting out out on the water or maybe they're a really early bird and they're coming off the water, but we're out there letting them know, hey, we have manatees in our area. If you see them, please report it to us as well as some seaggrass safe boating information. So to get a little bit on the data side, this is uh a graph of the Purto Bay manatee sightings. But first I want to draw your attention to the map up there. So each dot on the map represents a unique individual manatee sighting report. So what I tell people because I
hear it a lot is let's say you're out on Casino Beach and you're in a group of people. Maybe there's four other people with you and you see a manatee and you're like, "Well, I'm not going to report it because they're going to report it and I don't want to like confuse their data set." No, no, please report it. Because over at the CAB, what they do is they look at all the reports that come in and they're actually ranking the confidence levels because you would not believe that there are some really convincing logs out there that people convince with manatees. So,
if you don't have a picture or you don't have a video attached, if you get five reports from different people saying, "Hey, I was out on Casino Beach Saturday morning on this specific day." Then they're like, "You know what? That was probably a manatee and not a really convincing log." So, that turns into one data point on the map. But what you're looking at is there's a lot of these points over around the inter coastal waterway surround our beaches. One thing we really like to point out is that just because there's a lot of sightings there does not mean that there's
more manatees in that area versus uh higher up in our creeks and rivers. We understand that there's also more people there. So, we have more hotels, we have more condominiums, there's people out there boating more, there's fishing peers. So, there's better chances of seeing manatees and actually reporting the sighting. So, we use this information to inform people of, hey, even if you're up in Blackwater River, we get a couple sighting reports there. So, they could be there,
too. So, make sure and keep an eye out. A similar story when we're actually looking at the graph of the manatee sightings over the years, I pointed out the start of the panhandle manatee program, so in 2021. And what we're seeing is that there's an increase in manatee sightings, right? And what we would like to say is well there's also been an increase in awareness and outreach efforts. So yay we see an increase in sightings but we can't quite say that because we know while this is happening there's also been an increase in the overall Florida manatee population. So this trend is
following that trend of the manatee population in Florida as well. So it's likely a little a little b. So, you know, we would like to think that people are more aware and they're reporting manatee sightings, but we're also going to be conscious and say it's also following the trend of the manatee population increasing. Pensacola Bay tells a similar story. So, we're seeing most of those sighting reports are coming from the Santa Rosa Sound region, you know, the beachy areas, but we are still getting the occasional sighting reports up in our rivers or creeks. And then we're
also seeing um an increase over time. One thing to point out here is that 2019 to 2020 there's a pretty big jump there. And that's something we can actually say we are confident in awareness increasing. So one of our lovely partners with Florida Crant actually soft launched the panhandle manatee program. So people were more aware of like hey in our region especially please go ahead and start reporting manatee sightings. So we did get a little bit of a bump as more people were aware of were actually interested in tracking these sighting reports. Manatee mortality. I think
this is actually important just to cover briefly. Um so the average mortality for manatees in a year is between 400 to 600 individuals. 20 to 25% of that in Florida is watercraft related. In our region cold stress is more important. So manatees, they're migratory animals. So during the winter, they are down in central and south Florida seeking warm water refuge. During the summer, that's when they're migrating. They're either going up the east coast or over along um the
west coast. And we're a stopover site to Mobile Bay. So in our region about this time of year, as our water temperatures drop below 68 degrees Fahrenheit, they should not be here. We don't want to see them here. And if you see them here, definitely go ahead and give it a call because that could trigger a response. Um, in 2021, I just like to point out that there was an unusual mortality event along the East Coast because of the record-breaking 1100 manatees dying over the years. So 2022, we're still above that average mortality at 800. 2023,
we finally dropped back down into the average. 2024, we're still in that average. And then of this year, the most recent numbers are Halloween of this year and we're still in that average uh at least for now. But the important story to tell here is that this was caused by the Indian River Lagoon. So it's a story of there is too many nutrients going into the waterways causing an alol blue which leads to a seaggrass bed die off which unfortunately leads to manatees starving and that's unfortunately what they faced on the east coast. So when I go out there, people might
not come up and talk to me and really engage if we want to talk about like fertilizer and seaggrass, but they talk to me about manatees. So when I have their interest on manatees, I'm going to go ahead and talk about seaggrass information because if you care about manatees, you're going to care about seaggrass. And we want to make sure that this cautionary tale does not happen on our coastline because this is something that we're not currently facing. But we want to make sure that we're informing people so that we never get to this level either. Some good news though is that as those numbers have dropped back down, they uh declare that the
unusual mortality event along the east coast is closed. And some other really good news for our area is that the Gulfarium opened up their manatee cove exhibit. So this exhibit offers manatees that are in need of rehabilitation or long-term care a place to go. So before this, let's say we have a cold stone manatee out in the Santa Rosa sound. That manatee is going to have to be transported to either Mississippi or Central Florida because we do not have a facility
capable of rehabilitating manatees in our area until the Gulfarium. So right now they have two long-term residents that unfortunately cannot be re-released. They've tried before, they failed, so they're going to uh have to stay there. But uh in the future, they do want to be able to offer that short-term rehabilitation and releases. So that'll be really nice and relieving the pressure off of the other critical care facilities. So just some little takeaways from Panhandle Manity and
what we've learned throughout this past year is with our sighting data, we have had an increase in outreach effort, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's why we've had an increase in sightings. We've also had uh a little bit of stigma from community members when talking about slow speed zones. So, some people out there tend to think like, "Oh, if I report a manatee sighting, then there's going to be like a no wake zone right there, and I don't want that." So, we're out there letting people know. That's actually not true. What causes slow speed zones is going to be manatee collisions with boats. So, we're out here trying to help people coexist so that manatees can
live happy and healthy and that we can do that too and prevent those collisions from happening in the first place. And then there's also been some interest from different local authority groups and having some presentations for their staff just because not everyone is as familiar with manatees since it's not a longterm or you know it is a seasonal resident in our area. So, that has been of interest as well. Some future opportunities is that we're working with Argo on a boater app of adding in some different layers like seaggrasses and manatees. We're
developing radio ad messaging to try to reach a broader audience. We're working we want to work with water sport rentals to try to get more information out to people that might not be as familiar with our area and then uh offering presentations for local authority groups. And then we also came out with a seaggrass focus rack card as well. I know I blew through that because I can ramble on manatees for a while, but thank you so much. [Applause] All right, continuing on with our wildlife. Thomas Derbus is going to talk to us about shellfish.
Thank you, sir. Point it that way. Forward, reverse. So that way. No. How's everybody doing? My name is Thomas Dervvis. I'm the Well, I'm afraid to say it. I'm from San Rosa County. on me a little bit too much. Um, I'm the Crant agent from Santa Rosa County. I don't usually stand behind a podium, so this is kind of awkward for me. So, if you see me walk away and come back, I apologize. Um, a little bit about me just real quick, just who's this guy talking about oysters? I used to be an oyster farmer locally in our area, Pensacola Bay Oyster Company. I used to be a little minority owner and um, I work closely with our oyster farmers and all
the biologists in our area that work with oysters and shellfish. Um, so real quick, we had put up a menu or a little picture of the shellfish harvest zones to begin with with his talk. There's a little better picture of it that shows you you can only harvest shellfish, not excluding, not including crabs and that, but talking about buy valves in the area that's green. Um, a little bit even further down in that, you need to make sure that these areas are going to be open when you're harvesting them. We just had a recent closure because of the rain we had. Um what happens is FDAX will close at the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
It's a big mouthful. They'll come down, they'll they'll uh close it when we get a rain event that's over 3 and a half 4 in. Uh they'll come out and test it to make sure there's no feal call for bacteria and then they'll open it back up. It it's usually a weekl long process. Um we were closed two weeks ago. We just got opened up last week. Um we're going to talk a little bit about oysters. We have any oyster eaters in the crowd? If you're not, you can get out. No, I'm just kidding. Um, there are unsung heroes, so they do water quality. I wish this picture was a little bit better,
but in that tank the left, there's no oysters in the tank of the right. There were. Um, they really do help remove pollutants and excess nutrients. Um, improve our water quality here in Pensacola Bay. That's why we really want them here. Uh, we also kind of look at them as the canary in the mines. Uh, you know, the canaries were in the mines. If the CO2 levels got high, the canary would start to perish and they get out. Well, once we start to see oyster reefs declining, we know we have an issue in our base. There are canary in the mine. Um, they provide habitats for marine life. They enhance biodiversity and they do stabilize shorelines to prevent erosion. Um,
they also help break waves and they historically supported local fisheries here. I'm talking about wild harvest. We don't really do that anymore. We've kind of switched to an aquaculture here. Um, it does sustain jobs here locally and it does preserve some coastal traditions in our community which I love to have. A lot of the oyster farmers that we still have out there that are looking to tong, we're hoping to rebuild it with the estate programs vision. So, here's a little picture of the reefs in 2010 to 2021. I wish I could have shown you the picture from like 1886. There
was oyster reefs all over the bay. And as you can see, in 2021, they were pretty much diminished and gone. So obviously our commercial wild harvest has gone away. Uh in 1985 you see a really big spike. I can't remember exactly what had happened but they had a memorandum that said, "Hey, we're about to lose them. Dredge." Uh the oysters had gotten dredged and then as you can see the population just completely collapsed to where there was really no commercial wild harvest available. I'm not going to say there's no commercial wild harvest because there are a couple of people that
go out there, but as you can see, that number, that line is as close to zero as you can possibly get. However, we do have multiple oyster farms in our area. We have five local oyster farms that they span over 25 acres. They each manage anywhere between 500,000 to 1 million oysters. I said 1 million oysters. I just actually got off the phone with my oyster farmer today, the guy that's in the picture, he has 1.5 million on his farm. So, I was a little under on that. And if you could think about it, each oyster theoretically filters anywhere between 30 to 50
gallons of water per day. Do the math. Um, we had harvest area closures dropped significantly due to reclassified zones. That picture I showed you earlier of the zone. We had a more northern spot that was open that was always popping positive for fecal caulifform. Once we closed that down, we've really not been closed, which is amazing for the oyster farmers. And we do have one single oyster hatchery that opened this year in Garson Point. They're still working through the kinks, but we're hoping that they can support the region sustainable oyster farming and they can supply us with seed. There's a map of the oyster farms in production. Um, keep going. I I'm I'm really
nice. How about that? So, so I have Pensacola Bay Oyster Company on the left over there. Those two that you usually see along Scenic Highway, those are no longer there. I just had them up there. They got wiped out during Hurricane Sally. Um, one of the Scansa barges decided to go through both of those farms. Uh you have the East Bay Oyster Company and Pensacola Bay Oyster Company on the right side of Garson Point. And then most of y'all have probably seen Grayson Bay or Emerald Tides if you're driving over Garson Point um into Gulf Breeze. Grayson Bay will be on your west side. Emerald Tides will be on your east side. Oh, and sorry, one more thing. That was the harvest
line. That red line is where you can't harvest. Here's a little bit of information. If you want to learn more about the shellfish aquaculture industry in our area, shellfish.ifist.ffl.edu. go into Google, type in UF shellfish, and that's like the first thing that pops up. And then we also have the FDAX website that you can go on to and it'll show you all the closures, all the bay statuses. It's not just our bay, it's all the bays in Florida. Um, and it gives you just a little bit of a narrowed down focus on your area, if it's open or if it's closed, and the regulations in that area. I think my next slide is, if it'll go, scallops. um something we
don't really talk about much in our area because we really don't have much scalps in our area. Um but historically they were here. So uh back in the 70s they were around and then all of a sudden they just disappeared overnight. That's kind of what I'm hearing from everybody anecdotally. Uh we used to be able to go out in the uh sound and pick them and now they're nowhere to be found. Uh we do not allow recreational harvesting here even if you do find them. So if you do find them, good luck. Um they're in the closed area if you didn't notice that shellfish area. They're not going to be in the sound. it's not open. Um, and then there are signs of population recovery. So Rick Oconor
had started scallop search and I've luckily jumped on. It's been a fun little program. We go out, we let the citizens go out and try to find scallops. Here is our results. So as you can see from 2015 to 2023, it was pretty much 0 to two to three. And then all of a sudden the scallops got really happy in 2024 and decided to have babies. And we found 133 scallops. We were so excited. and then this year eight. So hey, what does that mean? They have a cyclical pattern, but that doesn't mean that restoration is not possible. So I talked with a researcher up at Virginia Institute of Marine
Science and he did research and restoration on bay scallops in their area. They started with an eel. So their scallops attached to eel grass and so they did an eelrass restoration first and then moved to scallop restoration. The cool thing about our bays is that we've kind of already started seaggrass restoration. So the man segrass and everything in the turtle grass in our area, which the scalps need, is really growing really well. Um so we're hoping that maybe in the future we can introduce brootock and larve to these areas. Um but that's kind of
in the future if we can find funding. Um it's just something we'd like to try. As you can see there, um, 2021 is when they first started introducing scallops into VIMS, the the area that they were doing up in Chesapeake Bay. And as you can see, it just kind of exponentially grew. So, we're hoping that if we follow that model, it'll happen here, too. Scan my contact information there. Um, think we'll have questions at the end. I was trying to go really fast because we it's kind of late. Um, but yeah, oysters stuff. Thank you'all very much. Thanks,
Okay, our our our presenter that traveled the farthest, Janelle, is here from uh from FWC. And Janelle Johnson's going to talk to us about finfish, fish with fins. Thank you. The one on the right is advances. The one on the left goes back. Thank you. Hi. So, my name is Janelle Johnson. I run the fisheries independent monitoring lab for Appalachiccola Bay. Unfortunately, our program, as Bailey alluded to, does not have a lot of data in this area. So, my talk is going to focus on what
we do in the estuary where we have established monitoring, what that data looks like, how it's useful, and then I'll get into what limited sampling that we've done out here. Um, at first, FWC is a really big agency with a lot of different divisions and offices around the state. We are part of the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute. We do work both inshore and offshore and our data are used in peer-reviewed publications, research reports, regional fisheries management decisions and stock assessments. And so when you think about fisheries management, stock assessment is really the backbone of what managers use to determine management strategies. And so there
are three main components to a stock assessment. I'm sure Aaron will go into more information. Um, but we are the fisheries independent monitoring group. There's also fisheries dependent data and then fish biology data. So our mission is to to provide timely, accurate, and consistent fisheries independent data and analysis to fisheries managers for the conservation and protection of Florida's fisheries. We do this primarily through this long-term yearround established sampling that we have around the state. So we do that in six estuaries including Appalachiccola Bay,
Cedar Key, Tampa Bay, Charlotte Harbor, that area northeast Florida kind of around Jacksonville, and then the Indian River Lagoon, which is separated into northern and southern portions due to its size. These long-term year-round data allow us to provide information for single species management such as distribution, abundance, life history information, and habitat usage. Our data are also useful for multiecies management in terms of like trophic interactions and community structure. We can also provide information that's interesting for managers to see in how populations
respond to diff different disturbance events such as hurricanes and red tides and hypoxic events. Uh we also have other projects around the state that look at addressing questions related to spatial gaps in our sampling regime, addressing species specific questions and work with restoration and monitoring. And so this map shows are just where we sample all around the state both currently and historically. Historically is that orange color and current is blue and includes those long-term year round monitoring sites. Unfortunately um this map is not up to date.
We are no longer in Chakahhatchee Bay and Santa Rosa Sound as of July of this year, but we'll get into that later. Our program uses a stratified random sampling design. So each bay is stratified by zones, and those can be bay zones and river zones. For example, in Appalachiccola Bay, zone C is our river zone and zones A and B are bay zones. These zones are further divided into grids which are stratified by habitat. And that habitat helps us with our site selection because we have different gear types that sample different life history stages of different fish species. And
so when we do our random site selection monthly, our sites are selected based on grids that have suitable habitat. And so we sample all suitable habitat within the estuary which makes our data sets very robust. We use three main gear types. The first is a 70ft sane and it's deployed in two different ways. The first is shown on the top where two people pull it along a gradient in the water and that's done in our bay zones on the bottom where the two people are walking along the shoreline. That is how we pull it in the river zones and that net is set by boat. This
net is targeting juvenile young of year and small species. We also have a 600t sane that is set by bet boat typically along shorelines targeting subad adult and adult species. And finally, we have a 20 foot otter that is targeting demersal and benthic species in deeper water habitats where our sains cannot sample. And so when I talk about our year year round long-term monitoring, these are the gear types that we're using. And this is the way that we're sampling. We also use this otter troll um seasonally in Gulfside estuaries sampling over shallow water seaggrass habitat.
And this project is directed for towards targeting juvenile reef fish species, but is also very good at capturing juvenile inshore species such as gul flounder and spotted sea trout. And so as I'm going through this, we'll come back to these seasonal seaggrass trolls. On site, we collect a variety of information including water quality and habitat. Um, for the catch, we identify all fish and select invertebrates to the lowest taxonomic level possible, which is typically species. We will measure a subset and count the rest. For some species,
we bring them back to get that life history information that goes into the fish biology data. So, the first thing we collect are odiliths. Fish have these inner earbones called odaliths. And as they grow, they lay rings on their odoliths, much like the trunk of a tree. So, we can remove those and send them to our aging growth lab where they will slice them and count them. And we can get an age for every fish from which we take them. We'll get identify the sex and get a gonad weight and then we'll take mercury samples. This is an example of what our annual effort looks like in
Appalachiccola Bay. So this is just to give you an idea of the spatial coverage that we have in these eststeray systems where we have this long-term monitoring. So the yellow is our river sains. The green is our small bay sains. The dark blue is our deep water year round trolls. The light blue is our seasonal seaggrass trolls. And the red is our 600 foot sains. And this is an example of the data that we provide to the division of marine fisheries management. And so you'll see figures like this throughout my presentation. These are indices of abundance or IOAs. And so on the x-axis
you have year and on the y- axis you have number per set. And so each spot rec each spot represents the average catch per unit effort for each year with the standard error marked. These data are for sheep's head from Appalachiccola Bay using our 600 foot sane. So these give managers just a good idea of what the long-term population structure looks like, what those long-term averages are, when they've peaked, when they've plummeted, and so forth. We can also tell some cool stories with some of these data. So these are common snook data from Cedar Key. Again using our 600 foot
sane. They started recruiting into our gear around 2009 to 2013. Um there were a few mild winters coupled with some really strong gear classes and the population just exploded. In more recent years there have been colder wetter winters. And what this has done is caused excess cold water discharge through the Swani River that has prevented the springs from acting as thermal refuge for overwintering snook. And so they've seen these mass fish kills and that's represented in their IOA here. Uh they do think they're going to start rebounding this year,
but we won't know for certain until our 2025 data are out. Uh I also mentioned responses to disturbances. So this is an example using common snook again, this time in Charlotte Harbor with our 600t saints. So their population levels were very stable until 2010 in which time there was a prolonged cold snap and the water temperatures stayed below the snook's thermal threshold for several days in a row and they also saw a mass die off associated with this event. The population began rebounding quite well until 2018 when a multi-year severe red tide events began.
And so these are some of the utility of these long-term data that can really show managers what populations are doing. We also pres pro provide length frequency diagrams for fisheries managers. So these are red drums statewide. This is standard length on the x- axis in millimeters and number of individuals on the y-axis. And so this is for all six estuaries with Indian River being divided into northern and southern portions and with the addition of Sarasota Bay which we sample every other month since 2009. Um this gives managers an idea of what the size structure is throughout the
state. So that's the utility of our long-term data. Um unfortunately out here we've only had a few short-term projects. The first stemmed from a proposed hatchery u many years ago that didn't happen. So two of the fish species that they were going to be rearing were spotted sea trout and red drums. So we sampled the with our small sains seasonally looking for young of year and juvenile habitat for spotted sea trout in red drum in these five panhandle estuaries. So Pensacola Bay,
Santa Rosa Sound, Chakahhatchee Bay, St. Andrew Bay, and St. Joseph Bay. Unfortunately, when the they decided not to move forward with the hatchery, our funding ended and we could no longer continue the sampling. So although we don't have a lot of data um I'm going to present to you what we do have. So this is location capture locations for juvenile red drum for the three years where you see black spots if you can see them are where we set nets and didn't catch any red drum. The red spots where we did with larger circles indicating larger catch rates and so that these are the
locations where we caught these young of year red drum in Pensacola Bay and Santa Rosa Sound. If we try and look at the indices of abundance, um, we can't get a lot of data because it's only a three-year period. So that Iowa is so zoomed in, things that look like they're big differences really aren't. For instance, Santa Rosa Sound is a second one down here, and that um is less than a .02 fish per hall difference, even though it looks dramatic. But if we combine all three years of data and look at it instead by month, we can get a little bit more information with the larger sample
size. So this is month along the x- axis instead of year this time. Red drum are known to recruit to the estuaries October, November, December. And that's pretty well represented in at least Pensacola Bay and to a lesser degree Chakahhatchee and St. Andrews Bay. Again, when they canceled the hatchery plans, our funding ended. So we left in 2019. We came back in 2021. As I believe it was 2020, the division of marine fisheries management went to management zones for spotted sea trout and the western panhandle did not have any FIM sampling happening at all. So we came out
to Chakahhatche Bay and Santa Rosa Sound using our 600 foot to target adult spotted sea trout and our seasonal seagrass troll to target juvenile spotted sea trout. We did this June through December and unfortunately this year due to extreme budget cuts we can no longer afford to sample out here. So as of July of this year was our last year sampling. So we only have four years of data from this. DMFM is currently working with stakeholders and the commission to change spotted sea trout management again to reflect the regional management strategies that they're using for common snook
and I believe working on for red drum. And so this is the proposed regional management framework for spotted sea trout in which case the Appalachiccola Bay does fall within the regional area. And so for these workshops in the commission we were asked to provide data and these are the data that we provided. The top represents our small bay sains. The center is our seasonal seagrass trolls and the bottom is our 600 foot sains. And so the black is Appalachiccola Bay. The orange is St. Andrews Bay
where we've done our seasonal seagrass sampling since 2008 and that is ongoing. And then the red is the most recent Chakahhatche Bay and Santa Rosa sound data combined. Again, unfortunately with only four years of data, there's not a lot we can do or say, but we do have a framework in place to sample out here based on previous sampling. and um Whitney Sheffle and I along with some other researchers and the rest of the folks at the Pensacola Purdue Bay estray program recently put in a grant proposal that was hopefully going to get us nine years of our sampling
out here year round but unfortunately we were not funded but we continue to have discussions and we continue to look at other options and uh hope to be established out here one day. We know that data are needed. Um, with that, I just need to take a quick second to thank all of our outside funders and collaborators, both inshore and offshore, and thank you all for your time. All right, continuing on with FinFish, Erin Pereira with FWC. She's actually
housed in our our offices here, so we're very glad to have her here, and she's going to talk to you about FinnFish. All right, can everybody hear me? Okay. All right. Let's see if this is gonna this way. Right. Just testing. Nope. There we go. Okay. So, thank you all for having me tonight. I'm super excited to be here. As I said, um or as I was introduced, my name is Aaron Pereira. I'm with the Division of Marine Fisheries Management at FWC and I am a regional biologist. Just quickly, I want to go over and outline
because I'm going to talk about a lot in a very short amount of time. So, I'm going to introduce myself and my role and what that means for you all as stakeholders. And I'm also going to talk about FWC's rule development process. It's really important to recognize how we make regulations and we'll get through it in a fun and interesting way. And then I also want to talk about our holistic regional management approach which is something that Janelle set me up perfectly to get started talking about and I'm going to do that specifically through the lens of red drum or
red fish in the panhandle and I use those two terms interchangeably. So as I mentioned I am um have a little bit of a hybrid role with the division of marine fisheries management otherwise known as DMFM. I am a regional biologist but I also am am part of the marine inshore species management team. So as a regional biologist I am responsible for working with stakeholders and other agencies and groups to develop relationships and figure out what this region needs. What kind
of resources do we have? Are there issues that are arising that I need to be aware of and take those to the division of marine fisheries management. And I'm also a resource and a liaison for stakeholders. If you don't know how to get in touch with FWC, I'm right here in this office. Uh, and so if I don't have the answer, I can point you in the right direction. And I also am very open to if you're on the water a lot, you see something, you have questions, observations, I'm that person to get in touch with. I really uh it's really beneficial to my job and the region.
So, I am also part of the marine inshore species management team, which really just means I am a fisheries manager with three very specific species currently, maybe more later. Uh, the spotted sea trout, what snook we do have up here, and of course, our famous uh red drum. So I spend a lot of my time looking at fisheries data that Janelle's team provided provides other habitat data that the Pensacola and Purto estuary program can sometimes collect and utilize all of that to
try to come up with a best practice management of these different species. And I like to highlight in here uh that I am originally from this area. I grew up in Navar. I was one of the first people at the Navar Beach Marine Science Station before it even had a beach station. uh when we were in a classroom and I went to the University of West Florida before moving to Hawaii for the last 10 decade or 10 10 decades. How old am I? 10 years. Uh it's weird thinking about my life in decades now and before moving back here. So I'm really excited to utilize my skill set in the region that
I feel like raised me and that I I'm very proud of having grown up here and fished here a lot. So the Division of Marine Fisheries Management, what what do we do? We our job is to conserve resources for the benefit of everyone both economically and just enjoyment of the public and ensure sustainability. We do that through developing fisheries management strategies, gathering stakeholder feedback. You'll see a lot of our workshops are being posted where FWC operates, especially DMFM, with a
lot of stakeholder feedback. We rely on the public to to give us insight on on what they're seeing and how that interplays with all of our data. We also provide education and resources to to um the public about our management practices as well as our conservation efforts. We're divided into three sections: fishery services, federal fisheries, and analysis and rulemaking. I'll quickly go through fishery services and federal fisheries because they're not my section and we don't have a lot of time today. Uh but fishery services is our outreach and education. Our artificial reefs,
you guys have a great relationship with our or Escambia County has a great relationship with our artificial reefs division or section. And also we do trap retrieval programs as well as issue special activities licenses. Our federal fisheries section is responsible for advocating for the state of Florida on the federal management section with the Gulf State Fisheries Council and the Atlantic State Fisheries Councils. And we do our best to maintain rule consistency between the federal government and ourselves. And I apologize if I have a little bit of a talking like I have a
sock in my mouth. I have a little bit of a dental emergency going on. So, please bear with me. Um, so my favorite section, the analysis and rulemaking section, which is exactly what it sounds like. We are primarily responsible for developing rules within state waters. In this case, within the Gulf, that's nine nautical miles offshore. With the Atlantic, that's three nautical miles offshore. And we do a lot of work with different agencies and stakeholders to come up with management plans. And we then we take those plans to the commission to vote on whether or not
to enact those management policies. So, one of the questions I get asked the most uh by stakeholders is how do we come up with bag limits? How are we saying this month you can catch a red fish, next month you can't? That's not a that's not a great example because you can catch them year round. But how do we come up with these bag limits? And this figure is the best that I can come up with in the moment of what it looks like. And it always starts with some kind of issue or concern. And that can be brought about by stakeholders who are seeing something on the water, other agencies,
researchers, sometimes law enforcement. They'll let us know that they're seeing something. And then we will decide to put that on our work plan and gather as much data and feedback as possible. And that usually starts with workshops, public meetings, is this an issue? Is this a one-off event? What? Gathering as much info as we can. And then we will typically bring a proposed rule to the commission from the feedback we've received and the data that we've collected. And then the commission will either approve or say no that's that's not what we want to do. I want you to go
in this direction or yes we approve but further research is needed before we totally make this an adopted rule for the state. So you'll come back and forth through this process of public workshops many many times. And then there is a final public rule hearing at the commission meeting and if it is approved that rule is then adopted. So you've heard me say we do a lot of um rule making. How and we're us utilizing data. Where is that data coming from? As Janelle spoke of we use a lot of
the fisheries independent monitoring data and that primarily comes from stock assessments. And pardon me as I reference my notes because I want to make sure I don't miss anything here. So stock assessments are a rebuilding of a fishery with as much data as possible to kind of get an outlook on what a population has look like over time. What kind of fishing pressure they're under, what kind of mortality they would have if fishing didn't occur period dot, as well as what kind of
reproductive capacity that they have. That is a huge undertaking. So typically we see stock assessments for individual species come out every four to six years. Some with more frequency, some with less frequency depending on the fish. So that is the primary way that most managers will get their information when it comes to making management decisions. But here in the state of Florida, we have started to do a holistic fisheries management approach which allows us to kind of break free of the the every five to six years stock assessment. So we will
utilize and it also allows us to break our reg our state into regions to better manage fisheries in the region because we all know what's going on in the panhandle is not exactly what's going to be happening in the Indian River Lagoon. So this allows us to do an annual evaluation of the fishery and address fishery concerns at a local scale. If you look at this picture here, this is our regions that we evaluate. And currently we are using we are using this
model on red drum and common snook and hopefully maybe spotted sea trout. We just took that to the commission and our proposed rule which we all just learned about was approved and we're taking it to the next round of public workshops which I'll have some more information on that later. So I said we use things other than the stock assessment. What other metrics are we using and how are we getting them annually? For the most part we're utilizing some ecosystem work or information including habitat, seaggrass beds, salt marshes. We're also taking a look at frequency of harmful algo blooms. We are also looking at anthropogenic impacts such as
fishing efforts, landings, releases that that you'll see when you uh get intercepted on the boat launch and people are interviewing you about what kind of fish you brought home that day. Then we also look at your typical your more standard approaches which is indices of abundance that Janelle's team provides for us as well as spawning potential ratio and escapement. And then another thing that we've really h I'm gonna just hammer this home all day is stakeholder feedback and getting an idea of what's actually happening from the perspective of anglers on the water.
We use all of this information every single year and we create an annual review. I have one here. I have copies that I can give you at the end of this presentation if you're interested. And this essentially puts together all the information that we're using as managers to every year evaluate the fishery. Now, not all of this data is updated every year. That's a product of our partners, different research, but it helps give us a good understanding of what's happening yeartoear and helps us track if there might be some changes and that allows us to have a proactive approach
to management and start thinking about making changes before it's critical. So, that's holistic fisheries management. And now I kind of want to go over what that looks like in action for red drum. And I am assuming most everyone here knows about red drum. They're one of our favorite fish and they're delicious. But just in case you are not, uh, they are an iconic fishery here, especially in the panhandle. They're highly valued as a sport fish and they're highly valued as a food fish. They inhabit varieties of habitat within the inter coastal waterway
and nearshore environments and um yeah they spawn in estuaries and coastal environments. So they are susceptible to environmental stressors which is why we include things like harmful algolooms and um in some species like snook temperature uh to determine their annual reviews. So I talked about a metric in the annual review is escapement for red fish. And escapement is essentially how many fish escaped the fishery which is in red drum is about four years old
when they're large enough to not no longer be harvestable. They're outside of the slot limit to catch. And essentially escapement is an estimate of how many fish escaped the fishery when it's being fish versus how many would have if there was no fishing whatsoever. So we are relying on modeling a bit here um and wonderful statisticians and scientists like Janelle and and the fisheries independent monitoring program to come up with these figures for us. And what you can see from this figure is in the 2020 stock assessment red drum we're doing pretty good. Their escapement is
well above the management goal which is 40%. We manage at 40% so that we can prepare for unexpected events. The sustainability threshold is about 20%, we like to manage much higher than that in case there's some kind of unplanned for event, harmful algo blooms, hurricanes, things like that. So the key takeaway here is the escapement's doing pretty well in the panhandle. The next metric I like to talk about or is in part of our annual review is stakeholder feedback. So, every three years approximately, we'll send out these annual um excuse me, angller surveys.
Has anyone gotten one in the mail or gotten one online in an email? If you have a fishing license, you are at potentially able to get one of these surveys, but we do have to do them randomly just to maintain the statistics. But it helps us get an understanding of regional differences. If everyone in the south Florida is saying red fish is great, in the north Florida red fish not so great. That's kind of directs us where we want to go and it also helps us understand angr perspectives over time. So if you're looking at the does this have a laser? Oh yeah. Oh, it
doesn't show up on the screen. Okay. So if you're looking at the top two figures, that's for higher and recreational anglers because we take a look at the opinions of both. And for the most part, this is from 2024's satisfaction survey. Most of your anglers are saying very good, good or fair when it comes to their fishing experience. Fair being the largest number. So what does fair mean? So that's something that we are kind of take into account that's telling us could this fishery be a little
bit better from the perspective of an angller? Maybe. Uh so that helps us and if next year it's suddenly very very poor, we've we've got something to really look at here. As Janelle talked about, um relative abundance is something we rely on and I'm not going to go into exactly how we conduct grab those numbers because Janelle wonderfully did it so much better than I could. But what you're looking at in this figure here is um small young ofear red fish on the top figure and legalized red fish on the bottom from Appalachiccola Bay. And what that's telling us is
young of year are on the rise. There's a little bit of a big error bar there, but there there is a trend upward when you're looking at the young of year. And there's a maybe not as dramatic, but a slow and steady climb in legalized red fish over the last few years in Appalachiccola Bay, which all are good signs for this region. Fishing effort in landings. So fishing effort in landings is something that's compiled by the marine I got to say it right. Let me check my notes. Marine
Marine Recreational Information Program. I always call it IMRIP, which is why I can't remember the name specifically. Um, but that is a federal program that has a lot of doside intercepts. As I mentioned, you might be fishing. You'll run into someone asking you what you're catching. And all of that data goes into a pool that shows us on this graph the effort, which is the gray bars, just how many people are trying to catch a sea trout every year in the trips in the millions. And then your releases generally track with your effort, which is the the blue dashed line here
on this figure. But what's interesting about the panhandle, is the orange line, the solid line, which is your landings. And those are staying relatively near the long-term average, which is telling us that people are following the regulations or they're practicing their own conservation conscientious fishing. because even though there's a whole lot more effort, people are the landings are staying about the same. So that's great because effort has doubled since when was that? The early 2000s. I was still in high school. Now it's now it's doubled that.
Um so the next thing we look at is habitat trends. We rely heavily on partners for this, different partners throughout the state to take a look at aerial surveys of different habitats. What you're looking at here is seaggrass habitats in the region and those are obviously very critical for recruitment and success of the species that we're interested in managing. So if we can monitor this, it can help us give an idea of what's going on habitat-wise uh in the short and long term. So in there are some recent increases in Purto Bay, Pensacola Bay,
Chakahhatchee Bay, and St. Andrews Bay. But if you're looking at those red lines, some of those are decreases less or greater than 1% decrease in Santa Rosa Sound, Big Lagoon, some various areas throughout the region. Uh there's many different reasons for that, many different hypotheses, and there are some groups that are maybe a little bit better qualified to talk in depth about that when we get to our our um Q&A portion tonight. But it is something that we take a look at as part of our annual evaluation. And I think last but not least, yep, last but not least is harmful algo
blooms. So we do see red ties up here. I think everyone's familiar familiar with corinia brevvis, which is a um can build up toxins in the water and cause fish kills. So we take a look at this every year using our our um algol bloom team and they will kind of tabulate the frequency and average duration of blooms in different areas and then we'll compare that to historical norms. So what's important here is it's pretty low frequency in the panhandle. Although we do get them. I've lived through a few of them. I think we all have if you've been here for a time. But in general, there
were no months where there were poss in 2024. There were no months of possible fish kills or probable fish kills for red tide. And the average duration when we do have a red tide event here is about three and a half months. So I'm almost done. The key takeaways here, uh, DMFM manages fisheries really closely and we rely heavily on stake stakeholder, uh, input. So, I'll have some information on where you can get in touch with me here in a minute. We're our holistic management
plan for the species we're working with allows for region specific insight and annual evaluation, uh, which is really great when we're talking about such important fisheries. And then the majority of the red drum metrics within the region are positive. And then as I said, stakeholder involvement is incredibly crucial. We have some upcoming spotted sea trout workshops which where we're going to be talking about incorporating spotted sea trout into the whole regional holistic management plan. There's a panhandle workshop that is virtual happening uh November 17th at 5:00 p.m.
and you can find it at our public comments page and there also is one in Appalachiccola coming up later this week. There's my contact information and let me know if you want to chat. I'll have some cards at the end of this conversation that I can hand out so I can stay in touch. Thank you, Erin. Now, we're going to be moving on to uh to the the reptilian
uh group of of animals and our wildlife. And Rick O' Conor is our our uh area reptilian expert. Get my laptop going. That's right. And David, if you could please switch the camera to the podium. There you go. Thank you. Okay. Good, good, good, good. Apologize. Uh, recently our IT guy upgraded my laptop from Windows 10 to Windows 11 and nothing works. Okay. So, we're having to Techn
is great until it's not. Uh, we're going to talk here real quick about an animal, the Diamondback Terrapin. I've been working with this animal in our Bay Area since 2005. Um, I don't know how familiar you are with the creature. U, this is it. We'll start with that. When I first started in 2005, almost no one knew what a diamondback terrapim was, unless they had relocated from the mid-Atlantic states and they went to the University of Maryland. Other than that, they had no idea. Uh, but now 20 years later, most of the talks I give when I go ask right away, who did you know what a terrapin is? They know. They've heard about this thing. So, the education is
getting out there. This is the animal. So, I want to introduce it to you if you've never seen or heard of it. It's an Emad turtle. It's in the same family with all the water pond turtles that you're familiar with, but it differs from its cousins in two specific ways. One, the skin coloring. You'll notice very light colored skin, white in this case. Sometimes blue, you can see a little blue to that one. Sometimes they're gray with dark markings where their cousins are the opposite. They're dark animals with light markings. Uh the second thing is it likes saltwater. Uh this is not a sea turtle. This animal can go in the Gulf. We have found them in the Gulf of Mexico. Uh but our
studies at the University of Florida have found that they generally start going south after about 28 days if they stay in full strength seawater. So they can be out there for a little while, but that's not where they want to be. They like the estuaries. I like the bays. It's the only brackishwater estine turtle in the United States. Uh why are we even interested in the Pensacola Bay Area? This graphic kind of shows us. The range of the Diamondback terrapin is from Cape Cod, Massachusetts all the way to the Mexico uh Texas border except for that gap right there. And so in
2005, that's kind of what initiated the panhandle project. I was asked can we put together a citizen science project uh that would actually just answer president's absence. That's really it. Are there tapens where that line says there aren't? And so that's actually how it started. That was objective one phase one and why we started the project. and then it did kind of focus on Pensacola Bay initially. Now the panhandle project does go from Baldwin County, Alabama all the way over to Appalachiccola. Uh the quick answer on that is yes, the animals do exist here. We did find
them. We found our first one in 2007 in Santa Rosa County. So we know the animals are here. Uh here's kind of how we did this. When we started setting it up, we did a suitability map of u what you're looking for is suitable habitat, also access to a good nesting beach. Uh so when we found one of those things were connected uh we put dots on the map and we started our citizen science just to go out walk the trails see if you can find tracks see if you can find depradated nest 80 to 90% of the terapin nest are dug up by raccoons so you'll see the digging e effort and the eggshells laying
around Randy Ax Sharp is one of our volunteers who works right there on one of the spots. Uh so yeah we go around and we were able to identify our first one in San Rosa as I said in 2007. Uh now that we've got that here, we kind of answered the question. We do have terrapens in the panhandle, uh particularly Pensacola Bay. Uh what's their status? How are they doing? Is this an animal that's stable? Are they abundant? Are they spread all over the bay? Again, very few locals even knew about them. So, we set up a nesting survey program. We train our volunteers in March. Uh
they go out April one and they survey the beaches from once a week from April 1 to September 30. Uh just to kind of give you some quick uh updates from the 2025 surveys. This is phase one which is presence absence. You'll see here yes uh no data from Franklin County right now. We did get it. I just didn't have it. Uh but yes, we have found the presence of these animals in almost every one of our in all of our counties. Uh I will tell you the frequency of occurrence of terapens in San Rosa is higher than it is in Escambia. Uh but they are found in both counties. Uh the nesting surveys
you'll see here again this is a 2025 uh the number of primary now primary beaches are defined as those beaches where we know they are nesting. We absolutely know they were nesting there. Secondary beaches are one of those pin drops you saw a second ago. All the stars are aligned but we don't have evidence. So we ask our volunteers to do the primary surveys at least once a week and then the secondaries when they have an opportunity to go uh go out there and just take a look. Do you see a head? Do you see a turtle? Are there any eggs laying on the beach? anything to say, hey, they are actually more widespread in the bay than they appear. Uh, so you'll see in Escambia County,
we have two primary beaches. In Escambia County, both of those are over in the Purito area. It does technically account uh include Santa Rosa Island, but for our coordinators, we have coordinators for each one of those counties. It's much easier for the Santa Rosa coordinator in Nvar to work with Pensacola Beach than it is Purto K. So, uh, that's where the some of the small, uh, figures subsets there, uh, are are talking about is some of those Santa Rosa are actually in Santa, uh, Escambia County. But we've got three primary beaches and four secondary beaches that are being surveyed in, uh, Santa Rosa. You'll notice the number of surveys, a lot of effort in Santa Rosa.
We get a lot more activity going on over there. In the others, Escambia, we had 99 surveys conducted this year. Um, and you'll see the numbers for the other counties because again, I'm overseeing the whole panhandle. Now, uh the number of encounters, you'll notice again most of the encounters 18%. You'll notice uh 30% frequency of encounter in Bay County. Uh that was the highest for this year. Just to give you a comparison over the year since we started in 2005, the average percent or frequency of incurrence is 25%. So, we tell our volunteers that you're going to go out,
you're going to go out a lot, but 90 or 20 75% of the time, you're not going to find anything. So, just don't don't give up. Hang in there. deal with the mosquitoes, deal with the nets. And we know now why people do sea turtle surveys because you're on a nice white sandy beach and it's early in the morning. You have to deal with all this the tapens are in the muddy situations. But uh again, for whatever reason, you'll see the total 14% this year. Uh the frequency of encounters this year was was low compared to what we've got in other years. Um this is also a tagging effort. We are now going to phase three that we know they're there. So you'll capture the animal.
Uh we'll talk I think I got a slide on this. Oh, I meant to grab it. Let me grab it real quick. Um, they have a habit. They're shellfish eaters, okay? They like to eat particularly mollisk because their favorites, but they will go into crab traps. Uh, and when they do, they obviously can drown. Uh, so to capture them, we use crab traps, but we modify the crab traps so they won't drown. Um, and we use those and we put them out uh in different locations. You'll see again the effort of the trapping. We did trap and capture several terrapens this year. 46 total
within the area. You can see how the breakdown if you'll go over scambia. We did capture one adult female. It was I'm sorry that was Yeah, that was a scambia was deceased. And then we got five and and actually we just got four more this week that we were able to put tag information on there. Uh so you'll see the breakdown of demographics there as well. Uh what we do with that tagging data, this is a large female. We put a satellite tag on. All of them get pit tagged. So, it's like a chip that you put in a dog. So, if someone catches another terrap and they can put that
uh transponder on and pick up the number and realize, oh, this is a recapture and we get get a recapture this weekend. Uh with the larger females, we can put a satellite tag on them and then figure out exactly how they're moving. The literature will tell you terapens don't move very far. They live in salt marshes. That's where they like to be and they generally feed and nest in a beach very close to that salt marsh. Uh so, it's rare for them to go more than 5 miles. But we've got several females up in our area in that open panhandle spot I just told you that have traveled over 30 miles. One of them we found traveled over 70 miles. So, uh, we're we're
publishing all of that data and it just basically tells you the panhandle terrapens do whatever they want to. They don't care what the book says. They're going to go where she wants to go. So, we'll try to get as much of those. The estuary program has just recently funded our project both for this tagging and now we've got some acoustic tags that we're going to be setting up this year. And what's going to be nice about that is in addition to picking up uh acoustic acoustically tagged tapens, anything that passes the receivers that have an acoustic tag on it such as snook and other animals will be able to be picked up. And so uh the array of acoustic receivers has now
been expanded. So we got many of those out there. So that is the project. Uh I'm going to go ahead and drop this because I'm the next speaker also. Um so that is the diamondback terrapens. So the wrap up on that glasses. Oh, I did want to show you this real quick. Thought I had a slide in it to keep them out of the crab traps. Now, the FWC does require this on all recreational crab traps. It is a by catch reduction device, also known as a BRD, also known as a bird. Uh the extension office cran is giving these away all across the state as is FWC. And so, if you have somebody who has a
crab trap and needs these, contact Thomas or I. We can help you out. Okay. All right. We want to skip that. We want to drop that. We want to find the next PowerPoint and we want to go live [Music] to this one. All right. Uh so now we're shifting gears going from wildlife to human impacts. Uh the human impact we're going to talk about first is is invasive species. This is another program
area that I that I work on. We're first going to define it. Everybody knows invasives mean bad, but we the word is used a little interchangeably different in different agencies and actually at the University of Florida. Uh this is the invasive species council. I'm a member of this council and one of our first tasks was to find it on campus. We actually had professors defining it one way to a student and then they're going to another class and that professor is saying something completely different. So we thought well let's at least at the University of Florida are our agree what an invasive species is. So for our definition it's got three factors. Number one,
it's not native to the area. Okay, that's number one. Number two, it got here by human beings. It may have been an accident. It may have just came by accident. Uh you didn't meant to bring it here, but you did. Uh so if it got here on its own, we wouldn't consider it an invasive. Uh and number three, it's causing a problem. There's a lot of non-native creatures that we have brought to the state of Florida that actually extremely beneficial, but these are causing problems. So, what you look at, again, Florida, this is just to tell you that Florida's got a big issue with invasive species. Everybody knows that. Uh, Florida and Hawaii in particular. Uh,
our climates are perfect. Anything that comes here and falls out of a box is going to do well. Uh, and we got all the international travel coming here. Obviously, Miami is ground zero for this uh because of the cruise ships and the air international aircraft that's coming through. So, a lot of hitchhikers, a lot of things are brought to Florida. Probably a lot of them not intentionally. Some of them there are um that end up becoming problematic for us. This is what we call the invasion curve. And so you'll see is what it really is looking at the area infested control
cost. That's a big thing. How much does it cost to deal with this thing? And then you've got the population. And it's broken into four segments you see right there. Prevention, eradication, containment, and then uh long-term management. So the point is the farther you are to the left, the quicker, more effective you're going to be to eradicate it if you want to get it out of Escambia County at the lowest cost possible. So option number one, prevent it from coming to Escambia County. Easier said than done. Uh it really is hard. We try to educate the public about potential
ones. I belong to the Six River Sizza, which is a cooperative management area that includes Escambia and Santa Rosa County. and we look at what's going on around us um as far as invasives and what could potentially be a problem in our county and try to alert people about that and sometimes we find new ones which you'll see examples of both of these I'm getting ready to go over so we try to get to that uh if you've missed it in a lot of cases you do you get to the next box we're going to try to eradicate it or it's a new kid on the block let's get rid of this thing now before it becomes problematic and a lot of times by the time you figure it out it's there you may
have even moved from eradication to containment which means we're not going get rid of this thing, but let's keep it where it is. Let's try not to let it get any further. And then of course you get into the green one. Uh it's gotten out. Uh so it's long-term management and it gets expensive uh to do this. A couple of these we're going to go through some representatives. Giant Salvenia Brit and I we've talked about this quite a bit. I did a work uh day this weekend. We managed to remove uh actually they're there. There they are. The WSC's they were they were the ones pulling it all out this weekend. So, we got about 60 gallons of of this material here. This is a plant that came
from South America. It was intentionally brought here in the United States as an aquarium plant for plant uh for aquariums and then somebody dumped it into the water. Uh it is well established in Texas and Louisiana. They've declared war on this thing. They've got all kinds of media going on over there. Uh a task force to try to deal with it. It did pop up in Escambia County. It's over there in the watershed of Biochica is where we found it. And so now it's like all hands on deck. Let's try to take care of this. So as far as I know, it's contained there. It hasn't reached anywhere else.
Um we have to educate the public. It's a floating plant as you can see. It looks kind of like duckweed, but it's a little bit larger than that. So obviously it can be moved by boat. Actually, I go out and do surveys on paddle boards and I see it on my paddle board when I'm coming back. So you can move this thing. Um but it's more like we're concerned about wildlife. uh beavers moving from point A to point B, a bird going from here that could get it on its feet and transport it. The nice thing about this panel, if you got a good thing to say about it, is it hates salt water. Uh it really likes fresh water. So those are the systems, but it is in biochica, so we're trying
to get rid of that. Beach vitex is a terrestrial plant that grows in the sand dunes on Pensacola Beach is where we are finding it now. It was from Asia. It was brought here intentionally to North Carolina as an ornamental plant. They decided to use it on their beach restoration after a hurricane event and it raised its ugly head. It It will kill everything on the dunes. It will become a monoculture. They do have a task. They call it beach cudoo in South Carolina. Somebody called said we got it on Pensacola Beach. Actually, it was uh Lucy and Bob Duncan. They found it their
place first on Gulf Breeze and said, "Rick, I think it's over on the beach." And I went over there and sure enough, it's there. Uh I have looked on Purto K. I've only seen one private property that has it on Purto K. It all seems to be pretty much on Pensacola Beach and most of it's on what I call East Beach, east of Casino, but it is on the spoil island. Uh somebody was talking about moving sand on the spoil island uh over there at Robinson Island. So we, you know, as they're moving that over for the living shoreline project, you want to make sure you're not moving that as well. So uh make sure everybody's on top of that. But the plant seems to be contained on
Pensacola Beach. We've been working on this thing for about 10 years now. And every time we think we've got it and we're all high-fiving, we see another plant pop up. The seeds, uh, the are small gray ones there in each, it's actually called a droop, and each droop has four seeds in it. Uh, and they produce literally thousands of these things on each individual plant. So, uh, the seed is dropping. We think we got it all. We probably missed some seed. A new plant pops up. You just got to keep at it and try to keep it contained. Try not to get it anywhere around the county. This is a new one. It just popped up this summer. Um this is a thrush cowery. Uh it's about an inch
and a half so long. It is from the Indonesia area. It's been slowly moving across uh towards Africa. It reached uh the Caribbean several years ago. It then popped up in Miami. And so the state has now been paying attention to us. And this summer we heard about it over a little bit east of us. Oh, we are frowning this thing in the panhandle. Uh I immediately put out a call on this thing. I had somebody call me within 15 minutes of my first post who was walking the beach at Florida. Is this it? And I said, "Yes." And then Robert's already reported them as well. So, we do have
these in Scambia County. They seem to like shallow water and they seem to like brackish water better in the Gulf, but all of them we're finding right now have been uh in the Gulfite. The Casino Reef, a lot of reports from there. Park East, I'm hearing a lot of reports from there. So again, we're having people try to remove this uh and get to this thing before it spreads out too fast, too far. This is an interesting one. This is a green muscle. Beautiful green. It's about inch and a half, two inches long. Uh it's kind of like the zebra muzzle. They got a real problem with this thing in Tampa. Uh clogging up water lines and everything going into the sewer pipes
and all of that. Uh it was listed as verified in Scambia County. Dr. Shirley Baker at the university tried to find uh the sample of this thing to verify was it really a green muscle. We were told it was sent to Smithsonian Institute. We checked with Smithsonian. No one seems to know where it is. Uh so we don't know. We but it is on the national database, Edmap's national database, and I'm one of the verifiers for that for Escambia County. So I know if the pin got put on the map, somebody had to verify it. So we're just telling folks about this particular uh clam. Again,
it's about inch long. You can see it's green in color. Uh clogs up water pipes, the lower units of your motors, things like that. So, it's kind of a zebra mumble muscle type thing. Uh tiger shrimp. We hadn't hear anything about this in 10 years, but I just wanted to put it on radar. About the time the lion fish started blowing up, we started hearing about this. Robert and I were both savvy to it. I went and talked to the shrimpers about it that at that time, they said they got it mainly in the fall, this time of year in November is when they caught some. uh they only got about four a week and so they ate them. Uh finding most of them at the mouth of Bio Chico in Escambia Bay. Uh but
since then I have heard nothing. You have heard nothing. So we don't know that this is a but we just let people know it's it looks just like our native shrimp is except for the coloration. Uh it's in the same genus as they are, but it's much larger. They're about yay big. Uh, and there was a study done in Louisiana where they put them in in tanks in a lab and they would consume the brown and white shrimp that we have here and it forced them to run up into the grass. So, there's concern there that the native shrimps that the shrimpers are going after might actually be avoiding the traditional shrimping grounds to avoid this thing. Uh, but again, we haven't really had a lot of
things talked about in the last 10 years, but I just wanted to let everybody know about it. We all know about this. Everybody's heard about the lion fish. Uh the thing we got on our radar right now is the estuary. We know there we're in a long-term management plan with the Gulf of Mexico. Uh a few years ago, somebody called us uh a gentleman had caught one on rod and reel at the fishing pier at Fort Pickins. Uh and then the National Park Service asked, "Hey, can you guys do a survey and a sweep and a remove?" And so we did. We did four or five of those and they removed about four or five each time. Uh they never saw more than that, but every time we go back, four or five. Yeah. So
they're there. But I don't know. I Dive Park West. I usually look there. There's a series of little reef balls right there by the Grand Marlin. I'll peek at that every year just to see if they've reached that far. Uh we unfortunately haven't been able to get funding to go beyond that. I would like to look at the bridges just to see if the animal has uh entered the Pensacola Bay area, but we do have some verified records in Big Lagoon. I know you talked about that, too. So, we know that there are records. We just don't know how abundant they might be. Tilapia, this is a new one. Uh, I was actually doing a a community program and someone said, "Hey,
look at this weird carp." I went, "That's that's not a carp. Where'd you see that?" That was at the far right end of Biochica, the arm up there, just by past W Street, just east of W Street near the wildlife sanctuary. So, I got in there, looked. Uh, they make boughowers, uh, which are big holes, nesting things, but they're not really called nests because when the eggs are fertilized, the females carry them in her mouth, and when the babies hatch, they kind of swim around, and when they sense trouble, they'll go back into her mouth. But it's just a place for the males to claim this is my spot. Uh and I counted 29 of the bowers. So we did remove 25 this spring. U and so
we think it's contained actually because I do that survey looking for Salvenia and stuff in the other side of Chico, but I have not seen any evidence. But we're asking the folks on Biochico to become familiar with this thing. If they see it off their dock, we need to know. Um but we do we think this one is is pretty contained. We might be able to do this. a terrestrial frog getting into the amphibians, a Cuban tree frog. They're here. I don't know how widespread they are, but I get reports from the pine forest area. I get a lot of it out from Big Lagoon. Uh, but this is a tree frog. Our tree frogs are about an inch, two inches. This thing, I've got one in a
jar. It's about the size of my hand. So, they're like bull frogs. They eat everything. They love electric panels. They'll uh shortcircuit your HVAC system. And they love to go down the sewer pipe vent on the roof of your house and be in your commode. I had a lady call me from Pensacola Beach. She opened the lid and like, "Nope." And she just I can't go with that thing there. So, uh, people just don't like this. They just don't like this. But we do have them in Scambia County. So, we're trying to educate folks. You know, let us know they're there. We can teach you how to you, uh, humanely euthanize them if you need to. Uh, the last one on this one is the mammal. The only
mammal we've got right now that I'm aware of is Nutri. They are on Purto K. They seem to be living on the golf course. We've been watching them for several years. When I first found the dead one, I let Tim know about it. Nothing. They seem to be contained there. They seem to be contained there. I do get calls and some photographs from the golf course, but uh they're aware of it, and we're just hoping they don't go anywhere else other than that. So, as long as the folks out there are aware, then uh they'll let us know if it becomes a problem. So, that's it for me. [Applause] Thank you. And to wrap us up, Bla1 Butts with Ocean Hour is
going to talk about marine debris. Thank you very much, Blaze. Okay, you have a presentation. The clicker you pointed at that same one I have. Okay, thanks for staying to the end. And I'm not going to talk as fast as everybody else because I'm just getting over a cold. So, let's go. Uh, I'm a volunteer with Ocean Hour and Okay. Ocean Hour was started by two ladies, Barbara Moser and Sharon Goodakus. I always
have problems pronouncing your name. In 2014, this year we're going to be uh to our average of about 32,000 pounds of trash picked up from area beaches and parks. Uh we focus on Pensacola, Gulf Breeze, Pensacola Beach, and over the last year we've uh have a group that started up in Okaloosa. Uh the top litter is cigarette butts. So in one hour on two hours, our volunteers picked up 1,200
cigarette butts on Casino Beach. and a student from UWF made us a turtle made out of cigarette butts and worldwide. This is the largest source of plastic in our oceans. These are some of the locations where we pick up trash. And the goal of of of go of Ocean Hour is not only to pick
up the trash, but what can we do to stop it from getting on our beaches and in the storm water in the first place. So, this part is where we picked up at various locations. I put in a few pounds of where they're for each area. Um, Pensacola Beach, Pensacola Beach East, and Pensacola Beach West. We also have a lady in the county. Her name is MNA and she's picked up um anywhere in a low year about 2500 pounds and close to 5,000 pounds herself and she's very dedicated.
We also have other volunteers in various parts of the city that will text us or uh notify us on Facebook that they picked up. The average person picks up between 10 and 12 pounds in an hour. Okay. Some of the successes. Uh this is the part where we're trying to prevent it from getting into the waterway in the first place. You may have seen the beach trash bags. This was a Boy Scout
project. And SRIA does put garbage bags back in this. And this is for people that go out on the beaches and instead of just throwing it down, there's a garbage bag that they can then bring it up to the uh garbage towns. We've also started what's called a borrow bin. And this is for uh parents that have kids that have all the beach toys and instead of just leaving them on the beach or throwing them out, they can put them back in the borrow bins and anybody else can use them.
And these have been very successful at the hotels really like them. And most of the hotels now have these for their uh visitors and also the cleaning crews will take the left behinds in the rooms and put them in the borrow bins. U give you an idea of plastic straws. This is how many pastur plastic straws were picked up and by 21 volunteers in one hour on Quiet Water Beach. So we started,
this is about three years ago, we started by asking the bars and restaurants to only give out straws when people ask for them. It's shown to be relatively successful. Uh last year we received $100,000 from the impact 100 grant and we did was put in solar compactors at various city parks and the water bottle fill stations. These water bottle fill
stations produce cold water instead of those green ones you see around which is just whatever comes out of the the ground there. I'm starting to lose my voice. uh three stations since Christmas time have been uh replacing about 3,000 one single-use water bottles a month. Um, we've been successful with these that the city of Pensacola earned a $30,000 grant and they're
going to be supplying this type of water bottle fill stations instead of those the green ones you've seen at some of the soccer parks. We've installed a couple ourselves through uh donations, etc. in golf around the community center with tennis courts. You'll see ours there also. uh in the recycling industry, aluminum cans are recycled five times as often as plastic bottles. So, we've started doing is uh some of the schools over in G Breeze. And we're going
to have these around the uh Gulf Breeze side of the um three mile bridge. Uh the recycle aluminum cans. The kids are really interested in this. I'll show you another one later on that talks about this. And has anybody gone to the Bay View Community Center for any of the activities? You'll see this dolphin. And in a six-month period, it generated $1,100 in aluminum. And we've made an
arrangement with one of the recycling committees, recycling uh companies that they'll send us the check for multiple additions and then we give it to whichever organization or charity is involved in it. Um we're looking at getting more of these made. Uh the the guy that made this for us isn't doing it anymore. So we're looking at one of the high schools in town that their um welding shop is
interested in doing this. So, we're kind of trying to arrange how to do that. Um education is really important and uh Amy started this. which has been quite successful is there's a campaign put on by the recycle society uh for schools to see who can raise a million aluminum cans. So we started there and this is in the dumpster. This picture was taken a few weeks ago. Kids really get into
this and this is what I think is uh going to be big part of the future is having the young kids aware of you just don't throw things out on the ground especially around where we live that uh tourism is the second largest source of revenue and jobs and here I travel a lot all over the United States and we don't do a very good job with litter kind of sad really here
and we have all these tourists come by and they drive by on our interstates on Scenic Highway. Oh, whoever did the oyster, we're no longer picking up the parts of those two oyster beds off Scenic. They used to have these big black P plastic things that weighed 17 pounds each and we used to get three or four every month and we haven't gotten any in over a year. So, that was good. Some things don't work out. And this is one that we thought the over in Baldwin County,
a lady came up with this very simple uh booklet or book that we thought would be a good idea to give to all the elementary school libraries in Scambia and Santa Rosa counties. Didn't work out too well. that weren't very receptive for some obvious reasons, but we tried. Another one is um we tried to with cigarette butts like this one's at Chimney Park and anything that
goes in this park is in storm water that ends up in the bay. And I sure would like my six-year-old grandson to be able to swim and fish in the bay in the coming years. So, we've got to stop doing this kind of thing. But what ended up happening mostly we got trash in it, not cigarette butts. Another thing is that this past summer we were seeing more and more, especially out at Park West,
was wedding parties using synthetic pedals. That's 232 that four of us took over an hour to pick up. And we're trying to have the SRA notify wedding parties not to use synthetic pedals. Um, some other uh roadblocks to keeping stuff out of the water is two state laws.
One is 403. Um they grocery stores can't force you to use anything other than plastic bags. It's a preeemption law. You can't charge for. And then the second one is my favorite is styrofoam. You cannot stop businesses from providing styrofoam containers like cups, the clam shells,
etc. Whenever I go out to California, I never see styrofoam anywhere because they don't do it. And locally, Firehouse Subs, when you take have a takeout or they give you a clamshell that's made of paper product that is compostable and it's not Styrofoam. The thing that I dislike about styrofoam is it never goes away. It just gets smaller. And I'd like to shout out to everybody that gets this license plate as they give us a very nice
check every January from that because their money they raise are for environmental activities. So, they've been doing this for years for us and we really appreciate them. Uh, that's how to contact us. Volunteer at oceanourfl.com. And I hope I talked fast enough, but I need a drink of water. So, thanks for your attention. Thank you, Bla1. We're uh we're at the end of the presentation. So,
what I would like to do now is give the uh marine advisory committee the opportunity to go to the deis. And while they're doing that, um if you have any of the sheets with questions on there, uh Matt and I will pick those up and we'll compile them. We already have a few. So, uh we'd like to to offer the the opportunity to to get those questions compiled and uh we'll see you up there in about five minutes. Anybody have any of the sheets? You have