Weather and Whatever - Episode 3- Seagrass, Salinity & Solutions: The Future of Tampa Bay

Tampa Bay has faced challenges, but it always fights back.

In this episode, I head back to my hometown to speak with scientists at the Tampa Bay Estuary Program about seagrass loss, rising temperatures, changing salinity, and what those shifts mean for the future of the Bay. From deploying temperature loggers in seagrass beds to innovative water restoration projects in local neighborhoods, this episode explores how science and community action work together to protect our coast. One thing has already been proven true- Tampa Bay does resilience like no other.

Transcript

00:00:00 Jaden Botini 

Good old Tampa Bay is a beloved coastal city in Florida, but have you heard of the challenges it faced a couple of decades ago and how it fought back? 

00:00:18 Jaden Botini 

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Weather and Whenever. 

00:00:22 Jaden Botini 

I'm your host, Jaden Botini, a broadcast meteorology student at the University of Florida. 

00:00:27 Jaden Botini 

On this podcast, we will be talking about anything and everything from all kinds of weather to whatever you can imagine. 

00:00:34 Jaden Botini 

Today's episode is taking us to a very special place, and that is my hometown of Tampa, Florida. 

00:00:41 Jaden Botini 

Tampa Bay is seen as a success story. 

00:00:44 Jaden Botini 

Once a struggling body of water, it made a comeback. 

00:00:47 Jaden Botini 

However, in recent years, it's been seeing some new difficulties. 

00:00:52 Jaden Botini 

But just like I've been saying in my past two episodes, resilience is key. 

00:00:56 Jaden Botini 

And fortunately, the Bay has already proved itself resilient, as it has made a comeback from its past struggles. 

00:01:03 Jaden Botini 

The new question is, what is causing the new issues in the Bay? 

00:01:07 Jaden Botini 

To better explain the history of Tampa Bay, Marcus Beck, the program scientist at the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, joins us. 

00:01:15 Jaden Botini 

I talked with Marcus about what the bay has been through and how the Tampa Bay Estuary Program continues to monitor it. 

00:01:22 Jaden Botini 

He explained how Piney Point wastewater once infiltrated the bay, but also how the bay fights back. 

00:01:29 Marcus Beck 

So Piney Point is a legacy phosphate mining process facility. 

00:01:35 Marcus Beck 

There's a lot of wastewater that gets produced from that. 

00:01:38 Marcus Beck 

And there's no practical use for it. 

00:01:41 Marcus Beck 

And so what happens is that water basically just sits on site. 

00:01:45 Marcus Beck 

So it's had its problems over the years. 

00:01:47 Marcus Beck 

And in 2021, there was a breach in the plastic liner of the holding pond for that wastewater. 

00:01:57 Marcus Beck 

And to prevent basically catastrophic failure of the facility as a whole and to prevent loss of property and risk to human safety, there was Florida Department of Environmental Protection gave a permit to the maintainers of the facility to release that water into Tampa Bay. 

00:02:18 Marcus Beck 

Just as they knew it wasn't going to be great, but it was like better than destroying property and harming people. 

00:02:26 Marcus Beck 

So that water is full of all sorts of nasty stuff, nutrients being the big one. 

00:02:33 Marcus Beck 

And so it was really just essentially a large influx of nutrients that can stimulate a lot of algal production in the water column. 

00:02:42 Marcus Beck 

And so we as a program sort of facilitated this event-driven response to the event by 

00:02:53 Marcus Beck 

facilitating monitoring of the water quality after that had happened. 

00:02:59 Marcus Beck 

Not just water quality, but we were looking at the sea grasses, sediments, anything that we thought could be impacted by this. 

00:03:06 Marcus Beck 

One huge deficiency we found in that whole process was we didn't have a good baseline data set for macroalgae. 

00:03:16 Marcus Beck 

In the past, when Tampa Bay was really 

00:03:20 Marcus Beck 

degraded in the 60s and 70s and a good part of the 80s, macroalgae was a lot more prolific, especially like Hillsborough Bay. 

00:03:29 Marcus Beck 

There's some pictures of it, like literally just on the surface of the water covering everything. 

00:03:35 Marcus Beck 

Macroalgae is a normal part of the ecosystem, but when you get this influx of nutrients, whether that be from a place like Piney Point or just 

00:03:45 Marcus Beck 

back in the day when these wastewater sources weren't really regulated very well, it tends to just out-compete everything. 

00:03:53 Marcus Beck 

So we were monitoring the macroalgae with Piney Point. 

00:03:57 Marcus Beck 

We were able to show that it changed over like the six months or so that we were monitoring, but we weren't able to say like, was this a normal like seasonal progression of the macroalgae that is typical to the summer? 

00:04:11 Marcus Beck 

Or 

00:04:12 Marcus Beck 

was this the normal amount that we were seeing? 

00:04:14 Marcus Beck 

We don't have any data or at least sufficient data to describe that. 

00:04:19 Marcus Beck 

There is some data out there, but it's not at the level that we can answer that question. 

00:04:24 Jaden Botini 

So the Tampa Bay Estuary Program is working on collecting more macroalgae data to better understand the bay's progress. 

00:04:32 Jaden Botini 

As I mentioned last episode, it's imperative to look at the health of what's living in the bay in order to better understand how the bay is doing. 

00:04:42 Jaden Botini 

A project that the Tampa Bay Estuary Program is currently working on in order to find solutions for the bay is deploying temperature loggers in seagrass beds to see if temperature is what could be affecting seagrass loss in the bay. 

00:04:56 Jaden Botini 

And actually, we got to join in on the project and get in the water, see how they deploy the loggers, which was super cool. 

00:05:03 Jaden Botini 

And wow, we were in a beautiful seagrass bed out there in the bay. 

00:05:07 Jaden Botini 

But to further explain this project, here is once again, returning from episode one, Sheila Scolaro, the Tampa Bay Estuary Program Program scientists. 

00:05:17 Jaden Botini 

Sheila, my question for you is if you find that the hypothesis is correct and if rising sea temperatures are affecting the seagrass, what would be some possible solutions? 

00:05:29 Sheila Scolaro 

Yeah, that's a really, a really good question because we're not going to throw ice in the bay to cool the bay down. 

00:05:37 Sheila Scolaro 

But you can help seagrasses by pulling, like pulling additional levers. 

00:05:44 Sheila Scolaro 

So if we know that temperature or environmental conditions might be contributing to that seagrass loss, we can reduce nutrients more so that it has more light to grow and reproduce. 

00:06:00 Sheila Scolaro 

It's similar to us to where like if you 

00:06:05 Sheila Scolaro 

If you are eating McDonald's every day and you get the flu, it's going to affect you more severely than if you were eating organic salads every day, you know what I mean, and taking vitamins. 

00:06:20 Sheila Scolaro 

So it's similar, it's kind of similar to that, so where like... 

00:06:24 Sheila Scolaro 

The seagrasses might be struggling because of water quality issues, and then temperature is kind of just that last little thing that comes in and knocks them down. 

00:06:34 Sheila Scolaro 

So if you can improve water quality, then they can be more resilient to these other environmental conditions. 

00:06:43 Jaden Botini 

That is very, very cool. 

00:06:45 Jaden Botini 

And knowing that once you find the cause of the problem, there's already a solution is a very great thing. 

00:06:51 Jaden Botini 

And I'm really excited to see the results from this study and how efforts will kind of shift to find what works for seagrass in order to keep it thriving, even as we continue to deal with these increasing temperatures in the bay. 

00:07:04 Jaden Botini 

Something else we're monitoring here in Tampa Bay is an increase in salinity levels. 

00:07:09 Jaden Botini 

And it seems to be due to not only changing weather patterns, but as well as the bay being more channelized, and now Lake Tarpon drains into the bay, so we have all this fresh water coming into it that causes that increase. 

00:07:23 Jaden Botini 

But of course, being resilient, a solution is in the works. 

00:07:28 Jaden Botini 

To better these water quality conditions, the Tampa Bay Estuary Program has made changes in Pinellas County. 

00:07:35 Jaden Botini 

I got to go and see how they're using man-made infrastructure to bring more salt into the bay, and there may even be some extra benefits that come along with this solution. 

00:07:45 Jaden Botini 

To better explain this project, here is the Tampa Bay Estuary Program restoration ecologist, Carrie Flaherty. 

00:07:52 Carrie Flaherty 

Basically, it's a man-made channel that used to be a creek, but it was... 

00:07:58 Carrie Flaherty 

cut off from the bay, right? 

00:08:01 Carrie Flaherty 

And it's up kind of near the St. 

00:08:02 Carrie Flaherty 

Pete airport. 

00:08:04 Carrie Flaherty 

And there was a weir, which is basically like a dam that's cutting off water circulation from the creek to the bay. 

00:08:11 Carrie Flaherty 

And within that creek, there was a lot of nutrient issues. 

00:08:15 Carrie Flaherty 

So the idea was to lower the weir so that we can get some saltwater flow and estuarine flow back and forth to kind of help alleviate some of the nutrient burden there. 

00:08:25 Carrie Flaherty 

And then also an association with that, they're going to be 

00:08:28 Carrie Flaherty 

seeing native plants along the shoreline. 

00:08:30 Carrie Flaherty 

And there's also, as a part of it, you might see the manatee grate. 

00:08:35 Carrie Flaherty 

So like we're lowering the weir, but we also didn't want manatees to go all the way up into this urban creek and get caught in a storm drain. 

00:08:42 Carrie Flaherty 

So there's a brand new weir that got put in and then like kind of downstream to that, there's a grate so that manatees can't go 

00:08:51 Carrie Flaherty 

farther up. 

00:08:52 Carrie Flaherty 

So the idea is to reduce some of the nutrient pollution coming into that part of the bay. 

00:08:56 Carrie Flaherty 

And it actually empties into old Tampa Bay, which that is one of our kind of problem areas as far as seagrass recovery. 

00:09:03 Carrie Flaherty 

So, you know, it's not supernatural, but it's going to be serving a purpose. 

00:09:10 Carrie Flaherty 

And hopefully there'll be a little bit more exchange, not only of 

00:09:16 Carrie Flaherty 

saltwater into the system. 

00:09:17 Carrie Flaherty 

There might even be some migrations of species as well that can now use that habitat as they weren't being able to use it before. 

00:09:28 Jaden Botini 

The aim with this project is improving those salinity levels in the bay. 

00:09:33 Jaden Botini 

But as Carrie said, we might even see some species migrating into the bay. 

00:09:38 Jaden Botini 

So I can't wait to see what can move in there as they continue this project. 

00:09:43 Jaden Botini 

It was so cool. 

00:09:44 Jaden Botini 

I got to go and see the weir that was put in, and it's literally in the middle of a neighborhood, which is crazy to think of how you're not directly on the bay, but yet it has such a huge impact directly to the bay, which kind of leads me into my next area of discussion here, and that is the community outreach in Tampa. 

00:10:03 Jaden Botini 

The hard part about community outreach in the Bay Area is that people who live so far from the actual body of water feel like what they do doesn't affect the bay and that they can't really do anything to help it either, which is not the case at all. 

00:10:19 Jaden Botini 

The Tampa Bay Estuary Program is aiming to reach all ends of Tampa and create the understanding 

00:10:25 Jaden Botini 

of you do live in a coastal area where your actions affect your environment no matter how far from the water you really live. 

00:10:32 Jaden Botini 

And I think that is really something that can be applied to pretty much the entire state of Florida. 

00:10:37 Jaden Botini 

Every action in the entire state really does impact some part of Florida's coast. 

00:10:43 Jaden Botini 

But the Tampa Bay watershed reaches all the way to parts of Polk County near Lakeland, which is an inland county. 

00:10:50 Jaden Botini 

So how do we get those areas to know they're included in the coastal community and all of the necessary environmental friendly actions that come with being a part of that coastal community? 

00:11:03 Jaden Botini 

To let us know how the community can get involved everywhere, it's Blake Simmons, the Environmental Social Scientist at the Tampa Bay Estuary Program. 

00:11:13 Blake Simmons 

So one of the things that we're trying to help with that is just helping them understand what a watershed is. 

00:11:19 Blake Simmons 

And so trying to help people understand this idea that every piece of land that we have slopes somewhere. 

00:11:28 Blake Simmons 

You know, it's all an island. 

00:11:29 Blake Simmons 

And so it's got, unless you go to the highest point, 

00:11:32 Blake Simmons 

In the US, everything else flows down from something. 

00:11:35 Blake Simmons 

And so trying to communicate to the people that live further inland that, hey, that river, that creek, that even like tiny, thin, you know, 3 inch stream that you have in your yard, that flows somewhere and that flows somewhere and that flows somewhere and everything leads to a large body of water to the ocean. 

00:11:54 Blake Simmons 

And so right now, most of our messaging is focused on just education about what a watershed is, what does it mean that you live in 

00:12:02 Blake Simmons 

the Tampa Bay watershed? 

00:12:03 Blake Simmons 

Well, it means that anything that goes into your local waterways eventually will make its way through some kind of route into the bay and then into the Gulf of Mexico. 

00:12:16 Blake Simmons 

And so we're currently just in this educational phase, but we know that's only going to be a small percentage of people that would actually change their behavior just because they realized, oh, I am connected to the bay. 

00:12:29 Blake Simmons 

And then so in the future, we'll really need to start targeting, okay, you know, thinking about specific behaviors and like really targeted populations, what else do they need to, you know, 

00:12:41 Blake Simmons 

to change their behavior so that they're fertilizing less often, or they're littering less often, or all of these other things that contribute to water quality beyond just, hey, it may eventually end up in the bay. 

00:12:56 Jaden Botini 

Education seems to be most important right now to reaching the community and really teaching people across the state that Florida slopes into the ocean. 

00:13:06 Jaden Botini 

And no matter how inland you are, your wastewater ends up in a large body of water. 

00:13:13 Jaden Botini 

I just wonder how many people are aware of that? 

00:13:15 Jaden Botini 

Because I think it becomes a thing where it's like out of sight, out of mine, right? 

00:13:19 Jaden Botini 

Like I don't see an ocean, so it seems nearly impossible that my water is ending up there, but it is. 

00:13:27 Jaden Botini 

And I think that message being communicated to all Floridians is an imperative first step. 

00:13:32 Jaden Botini 

So my final question for you. 

00:13:35 Jaden Botini 

Blake would be, what can people do that are just small things that do help and do make a difference in our environment? 

00:13:44 Blake Simmons 

Yeah, so it really depends on the type of issues that you have. 

00:13:47 Blake Simmons 

So if we want to think of infrastructure changes to more sort of like habitat changes. 

00:13:52 Blake Simmons 

On the infrastructure side, one of the campaigns that we have is called Pipe Up, and it's really focused around 

00:14:01 Blake Simmons 

reducing the frequency of sanitary sewer overflows, particularly throughout the watershed, but particularly in Pinellas County. 

00:14:09 Blake Simmons 

And so the key thing we're working on with that is that we have so many homes that were built before 1975, and most of them, their sewer lines haven't been updated or improved since then. 

00:14:22 Blake Simmons 

And so we want to encourage people to get their sewer line inspected for any leaks, holes, et cetera. 

00:14:29 Blake Simmons 

But 

00:14:31 Blake Simmons 

It's not typically something that plumbers offer kind of in their general packages. 

00:14:38 Blake Simmons 

And so a lot of people just don't even think about it. 

00:14:41 Blake Simmons 

It's not even presented as an option. 

00:14:45 Blake Simmons 

that's an issue, but also it's expensive to do it. 

00:14:49 Blake Simmons 

And so what we see is just what ends up happening is that people's toilets get clogged or they overflow. 

00:14:54 Blake Simmons 

And then they're like, oh no, now I need to spend even more money because now you actually ruined like your floors and everything. 

00:15:01 Blake Simmons 

And so the Pipe Up program kind of piggybacking off of Pinellas County's private sewer lateral rebate program. 

00:15:09 Blake Simmons 

So 

00:15:10 Blake Simmons 

It can be something that's as simple as getting your sewer line inspected. 

00:15:14 Blake Simmons 

And sort of like the more middle ground thing, fertilizer and just like yard work is another important thing. 

00:15:21 Blake Simmons 

So fertilizer is a big contributor to nitrogen pollution, but also a lot of people don't know that just like grass clippings and leaves, they all are, you know, organic materials. 

00:15:33 Blake Simmons 

So they contain nitrogen, they contain phosphorus, they contain all of these compounds that 

00:15:40 Blake Simmons 

algae really love. 

00:15:42 Blake Simmons 

And so they're the big contributors to algae blooms. 

00:15:45 Blake Simmons 

If it gets bad enough, it becomes red tide, those sorts of things. 

00:15:48 Blake Simmons 

And so even just something as simple as whenever you're mowing your lawn, whatever the thing is that spits out all of the grass, instead of letting it sort of spit it out on the sidewalk or the street side of the road, just doing it the opposite way so that all of the debris gets back onto your yard and just leave it on the yard. 

00:16:08 Blake Simmons 

If you're if you've got like leaves, you can rake your leaves, but don't, you know, throw them onto the street. 

00:16:15 Blake Simmons 

You can use them as mulch for your garden. 

00:16:18 Blake Simmons 

You can put them into like a bin, a compost bin. 

00:16:22 Blake Simmons 

Yep. 

00:16:22 Blake Simmons 

All those sorts of things. 

00:16:23 Blake Simmons 

So those are also relatively easy things to do that can have a big impact. 

00:16:29 Blake Simmons 

And it's sort of that mix of, you 

00:16:31 Blake Simmons 

you know, homeowner type of things, but also habitat related maintenance. 

00:16:37 Blake Simmons 

And then on the other side, you've got maybe sort of more of like restorative properties, and it's really about planting more native plants in your home or in your garden. 

00:16:49 Blake Simmons 

The UF IFAS program has like Florida Friendly Landscaping program, and which is all like dedicated to helping homeowners like find plants 

00:17:00 Blake Simmons 

and design options for plants that thrive in the Florida environment, permeable pavements, installing rain gardens on your property. 

00:17:11 Blake Simmons 

Those things are a little bit more exhaustive, time intensive, money intensive, but they're all sort of good ways to reduce stormwater pollution, to increase habitat, provide more habitat for native wildlife, 

00:17:27 Blake Simmons 

And getting back to how do you communicate about these things, it's also in the long term going to save them money because if you get plants that thrive in the natural craziness of the Florida climate, you spend less money having to water them. 

00:17:43 Blake Simmons 

You spend less money having to use fertilizer. 

00:17:45 Blake Simmons 

You can just kind of set it and forget it and off it goes. 

00:17:49 Blake Simmons 

So yeah, there's kind of like a big spectrum of things that people can do. 

00:17:53 Blake Simmons 

And obviously, you know, you can talk about like, you know, 

00:17:56 Blake Simmons 

Don't use plastic, bring your own bag to the grocery store and things like that. 

00:18:01 Blake Simmons 

What we call general pro-environmental behaviors. 

00:18:05 Blake Simmons 

But even like volunteering for cleanup events or just other sort of activities. 

00:18:11 Blake Simmons 

And so it's even kind of just like finding fun ways to improve the environment, create new environments that are available to people if they just want to have fun and still do positive things for the environment. 

00:18:26 Jaden Botini 

Like Blake said, doing the little stuff helps, even though you might not always feel like you're helping. 

00:18:33 Jaden Botini 

Being conscientious of how your house and your area where you live is affecting the globe on a much larger scale is the first step. 

00:18:43 Jaden Botini 

I encourage everyone to see how their community contributes to the environment and get involved as much as you can. 

00:18:51 Jaden Botini 

If you are in the Cedar Key or Tampa Bay area and want to get involved in the coastal restoration efforts you heard me talk about, you can head to the Nature Coast Biological Station's website at ncbs.ifas.ufl.edu and check out the info under their extensions page for Cedar Key. 

00:19:13 Jaden Botini 

And then for Tampa, you can head to tbep.org, which is the Tampa Bay Estuary Program's website, 

00:19:21 Jaden Botini 

where you will find opportunities under their Involvement tab. 

00:19:25 Jaden Botini 

Outside of these regions, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection website, floridadep.gov, and the Fish and Wildlife Conservation website, myfwc.com, is a great place to start, along with little things in your home, like cleaning up lawn clippings or having a compost bin, just like Blake mentioned, can truly be a step in the right direction. 

00:19:50 Jaden Botini 

Unfortunately, this is the last episode of this mini-series where I talk about coastal resilience. 

00:19:57 Jaden Botini 

It has been a pleasure talking to so many people with amazing insight on how the fight against a changing environment starts with resilience. 

00:20:08 Jaden Botini 

I have learned so many things these past few weeks and got to visit some very special places. 

00:20:15 Jaden Botini 

I hope you have enjoyed listening to my insight along with some professionals about protecting our coasts. 

00:20:21 Jaden Botini 

It is truly such an honor to live by the water. 

00:20:25 Jaden Botini 

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Weather and Whatever. 

00:20:29 Jaden Botini 

Rain or shine, it's Jana Botini, and I'll talk to you next time. 

00:20:33 Jaden Botini 

Bye.