The Pensacola and Perdido Bays Estuary Program (PPBEP) has been awarded a $750,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish a regional Water Quality Monitoring Collaborative.
The funding, from EPA’s Gulf Program, will be used to develop a comprehensive network of water quality monitoring sites across the Pensacola and Perdido Bays watersheds.
“Really the goal of this program is to establish a sentinel site network,” said Whitney Scheffel, a senior scientist with the Pensacola and Perdido Bays Estuary Program. “So we’ll be selecting up to about 30 sites across the Pensacola and Perdido bay watersheds and these will be led by the different partners,”
Project partners include Escambia, Santa Rosa and Okaloosa counties, the City of Orange Beach, and the Poarch Band of Creek Indians in Atmore.
Through the new collaborative, water quality data will be collected monthly over the next three years. It will be incorporated into PPBEP’s biennial State of the Bays Report and made available to the public.
“We're gonna be developing a dashboard for this project and will be monitoring the key parameters that were of interest to a lot of our program partners and our community members, as well,” she said. “Looking at bacteria and nutrients, chlorophyll-a, (and) also our environmental parameters: dissolved oxygen, turbidity, temperature, pH and salinity.”
Such information is necessary to help officials better understand the issues affecting those very large Pensacola and Perdido bay watersheds.
“To really understand what’s happening upstream and how that impacts downstream, we kind of have to have that site network scattered across in the upper parts, in the creeks, in tributaries and also in the Bay proper,” Scheffel explained. “So, we’re gonna be sampling all throughout Santa Rosa Sound, East Bay, Escambia Bay, Pensacola (Bay), Big Lagoon and Perdido Bay, as well as those upper smaller tributaries that feed into that larger system.”
Scheffel says this new program will expand and improve the work already being done by project partners by standardizing water quality monitoring parameters and methods and ensuring consistent and comparable data across the watersheds and creating a central source of information.
“Right now, Alabama and Florida use different methods for processing some of these samples for the different parameters that we’re interested in,” she said. “So this will give us an opportunity to work off the same sheet of music, if you will. And we will all be uploading these data to the portal, the water quality portal, that EPA runs and that will all be visualized on a dashboard, so our community members and partners can get to that information very easily.”
The scientific data will guide development of a water quality improvement action plan aimed at making the region’s waters swimmable and fishable. Also, Scheffel says it will inform local decision-making on projects such as Santa Rosa County’s septic to sewer conversion project.
“With this monitoring collaborative, with that series of information from surface waters, it could inform potential restoration projects, like those bigger initiatives for figuring out where there are issues with bacteria or nutrients, looking at stormwater management, conserving specific areas that need to be conserved,” Scheffel said, pointing to the recent example of Santa Rosa County’s recently approved contract to purchase and protect 27 acres of environmentally sensitive wetlands on the Soundside in Gulf Breeze.
According to Scheffel, the new water quality monitoring plan is currently in development and will require EPA approval. They hope to launch the new collaborative effort by this summer or fall.
