Economic Contribution Analysis of National Estuarine Research Reserves

Increased attention to the value of protected natural areas has led to the proliferation of ecosystem service valuations for coastal habitats. However, these studies do not provide a full representation of the economic value of these habitats. Protected coastal environments, such as the National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS), add jobs and revenue to their local communities. Institutions such as NERRS provide economic contributions that extend beyond their operational spending and jobs they provide. Spending by reserves and their partners ripples throughout the economy. We performed an economic contribution analysis at four pilot sites using input-output modeling through IMPLAN. Sites contributed millions in revenue and tens to hundreds of jobs in their respective regions. Each of the four sites had a different category of spending that was the largest contributor of revenue and jobs, which is likely due to the community context and location of the reserves. Understanding these contributions is helpful in validating funding for NERRS. Communicating these contributions along with ecosystem service values may increase support from community members who otherwise do not use or rely on NERRS as much as traditional reserve supporters.

Vegetation Coverage in Marsh Grass Photography Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Vegetation monitoring is one of the major cornerstones of environmental protection today, giving scientists a look into changing ecosystems. One important task in vegetation monitoring is to estimate the coverage of vegetation in an area of marsh. This task often calls for extensive human labor carefully examining pixels in photos of marsh sites, a very time-consuming process. In this paper, aiming to automate this process, we propose a novel framework for such automation using deep neural networks. Then, we focus on the utmost component to build convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to identify the presence or absence of vegetation. To this end, we collect a new dataset with the help of Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTMNERR) to be used to train and test the effectiveness of our selected CNN models, including LeNet-5 and two variants of AlexNet. Our experiments show that the AlexNet variants achieves higher accuracy scores on the test set than LeNet-5, with 92.41\% for a AlexNet variant ondistinguishing between vegetation and the lack thereof. These promising results suggest us to confidently move forward with not only expanding our dataset, but also developing models to determine multiple species in addition to the presence of live vegetation.

After Hurricanes Irma and Matthew: Living Shorelines Stabilize Sediments

Constructed intertidal oyster reefs, an example of a “living shoreline”, can protect against erosion and loss of habitat, but can they prevent erosion during high-energy storm events such as hurricanes? Oyster reefs were constructed in 2012 within the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve in Northeast Florida to stabilize the shoreline sediment and prevent erosion of an archeological site. Sediment cores were collected behind constructed oyster reefs before and after hurricanes Matthew (2016) and Irma (2017) to study changes in sediment particle size due to these high-energy storms. Pre-hurricane data were collected in 2016 from three different constructed reefs, as well as three control sites where no reef was present. Pre-hurricane sediment profiles behind the constructed reefs consisted of finer sediments, ~36% silt and clay, in the surface ~10-12 cm, with decreasing silt and clay and increasing sand content as depth increased. This was different than the sediment from the control sites with ~4% silt and clay in all depths sampled. Like the sediment profiles before the high energy storms, the post-hurricane sediment data showed a clear layer of finer sediment ~10-12 cm over coarser sediment. Although they were high-energy storms, the storms did not appear to significantly affect the sediment behind the constructed oyster reefs. Sediment profiles remained consistent after these storms but may not remain undisturbed during the next storm without some intervention because the oyster reefs have been degrading. KEYWORDS: Oyster Restoration; Living Shorelines; Hurricanes; Coastal Erosion; Sedimentation; Salt Marsh