Submerged Aquatic Vegetation

Demonstration Project: Prioritization of SAV Restoration Sites in Mobile Bay, Alabama

        Overview        |        Approach        |        Current Conditions        |        Future Conditions

The GoMRC platform is designed to support resource managers with decision-making on a broad set of topics that affect the Gulf ecosystem. During the first year of the project, the research team demonstrated how the GoMRC system could be used to support decisions on a specific high-priority topic for Gulf coast resource managers: prioritization of submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) restoration sites.

Mobile Bay, Alabama was selected as the demonstration project site for the SAV Restoration Prioritization Toolset. Like much of the Gulf coast, Alabama coastal systems have been subjected to increasing pressure from a variety of activities including urban and rural development, shoreline modifications, industrial activities leading to point and nonpoint source runoff, commercial and recreational fishing, oil and gas extraction, and dredging of shipping and navigation channels (Handley et al. 2007). Studies have shown dramatic decreases in SAV in recent decades as a result of urbanization, and increased development pressures are expected to pose continued challenges to SAV habitat in Mobile Bay.

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Mobile Bay is also well-studied with geospatial datasets that document SAV distribution as well as other coastal resources. A number of stakeholders interested in SAV restoration in the area, including the National Estuary Program, were able to contribute to the analysis and benefit from the project's findings. The ability to leverage and build on existing local knowledge and data was important for GoMRC to be able to demonstrate results in a short time frame.

Finally, the ecosystem stressors that impact the health of SAV in the Bay are representative of stressors seen throughout the Gulf coast. This offered the opportunity to demonstrate the extensibility of the model and methodology to other areas of the Gulf and provide further scientific understanding of valuable Gulf habitats.

The GoMRC demonstration project focused on two concerns of resource managers:

• How to prioritize restoration management activities based on current environmental conditions, and;
• How land use and land cover changes in the future might affect the quality of the Mobile Bay ecosystem.

The goal of both the current and future conditions analysis is to understand potential net improvement of the ecosystem as gauged by SAV restoration and recovery.

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