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Restoring a Damaged Estuary

The Indian River Lagoon is actually a system of lagoons stretching for more than 150 miles down the east coast of Florida. The northern half of the system, roughly centered on Cape Canaveral, includes Mosquito Lagoon and the misnamed Banana and Indian Rivers--not rivers at all, but estuaries set off from the sea behind barrier islands. In its southern half, the system narrows to a slender continuation of the Indian River, which forms a portion of the intracoastal waterway to the point where the barrier islands disappear near Palm Beach.

Indian River Lagoon traverses six counties--Volusia, Brevard, Indian River, St. Lucie, Martin, and Palm Beach--and two of the state's five water-management districts. The total watershed includes 356 square miles of lagoon surface and 1,901 square miles of surrounding basin. The terrain comprises coastal ridges, barrier islands, natural and artificial inlets, impounded marshes, drainage canals, and seagrass habit. Home to more than 4,300 species of plants and animals, the watershed also contains 20 percent of the remaining mangrove forest on the U.S. east coast.

The lagoon and its connecting uplands, marshes, and wetlands forms a functional ecological system that no longer functions in a completely natural way. Humans have drained wetlands to establish citrus groves and impounded saltwater marshes to control mosquitoes. In the first half of the 20th century, six districts ditched and drained the coastal landscape for flood control or to prepare the land for farming. In some places humans have also altered the western boundary of the watershed: surface waters that once flowed into other basins, such as the St. Johns River and Lake Okeechobee, are now diverted into the lagoon. Today, up to 60 percent of the Indian River Lagoon drainage basin consists of artificially extended watershed--which now contains two and a half times as much land as it did in 1916.

The Threat from Development
Population in the vicinity of Indian River Lagoon increased by more than 124 percent between 1970 and 1990, and is expected to reach nearly one million inhabitants by the year 2010. The region's twelve major urban centers include two of the nation's fastest-growing cities--Palm Bay and Port St. Lucie--and development pressure is particularly strong for single family homes along waterways. The Kennedy Space Center, at Cape Canaveral in Brevard County, has attracted much of the area's development.

In 1990, Florida passed the Indian River Protection Act, which required that point-source pollution from municipal wastewater plants be eliminated by 1996. Today most of the pollution within the watershed comes from upland development--pollution exacerbated by the manipulated hydrology of the basin. Freshwater flow to the lagoon has been greatly increased by drainage projects, altering the salinity of the lagoon. Increased freshwater flows also have increased the flow of nutrients, metals, pesticides, suspended solids, and organic stains from developed areas in the basin. Nonpoint sources--stormwater and tributary discharges--now make up more than 60 percent of pollutants found in the Indian River ecosystem.

Degradation of the lagoon became apparent by the mid-1970s. In 1981, a symposium on the future of the ecosystem led to formation of the Marine Resources Council of East Central Florida, a coalition of residents working to set priorities for the estuary's protection. Council workshops between 1985 and 1990 helped raise public awareness of the lagoon's problems and generated recommendations for the government action. In response, Governor Bob Graham formed the Indian River Lagoon Field Committee, whose findings prompted passage of the state's Surface Waters Improvement and Management (SWIM) Act in 1987.

The goal of the SWIM program--authorized under the Act--is to upgrade water quality, improve or maintain existing natural conditions, and protect threatened and endangered species--not only in Indian River Lagoon but in five other aquatic ecosystems across the state. The program develops and directs a recovery plan for the ecosystems, including nonpoint pollution prevention and public education. In 1991, Indian River Lagoon was accepted into EPA's National Estuary Program; planning and management of the area is now coordinated jointly by SWIM and NEP.

A History of Land Conservation
In the early 1960s the federal government began buying land in the northern section of Indian River Lagoon in an effort to create a buffer around the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Eventually, more than 140,000 surrounding acres will be protected--an important nucleus of natural lands that includes the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, one of Florida's top tourist destinations.

Acquisition of land by the state for conservation purposes goes back to the 1970s, with the establishment of a series of programs that extend to this day. The Conservation and Recreation Lands program (CARL), Save Our Rivers, and funding programs such as the Florida Preservation 2000 Act of 1990 (P-2000)--and its extension, the Florida Forever program, approved in May 1999--have all included the protection of water among their land-acquisition goals.

Originally formed as flood-control agencies, Florida's water management districts now play an important role in acquiring land to meet water-quality standards. The St. Johns River Water Management District, for example, has acquired over 100,000 acres of the Indian River Lagoon watershed with state CARL funds, including a 30,000-acre buffer along the St. Sebastian River, originally designed as a manatee protection program.

In addition, all six counties in the watershed have adopted locally funded land-acquisition programs of between $20 million and $100 million since the mid-1980s.

One Local Funding Effort
One ambitious local funding program is that of Brevard County, home to the Kennedy Space Center and barrier island resort towns such as Cocoa Beach. In 1990, a citizens group, Preservation Brevard, spearheaded the local funding effort after the group became alarmed at the disappearance of the county's biological diversity. In September 1990, voters authorized a $55-million limited-tax bond for the county's Environmentally Endangered Lands (EEL) program.

"Florida is wet," observes Nancy Higgs, a Brevard County commissioner. "People here are tied to the waterways--they love fishing, boating, and just sitting on the beach. They may not focus much on an individual endangered species, but they draw the line at development that's going to harm their use of the waterways." This public awareness has enabled Florida to weather the anti-environmental backlash of the mid-1990s, Higgs believes. "Even the most extreme property rights advocates now recognize that protecting our waterways and the lands that affect them is a fundamental concern for our Florida public."

While some earlier land-acquisition efforts tended to focus on either wetlands or uplands, EEL's effort has tried to link marine and terrestrial ecosystems, according to Duane DeFreese, the program's former coordinator. "This is one of the first local land-acquisition programs to look at public land holdings as an integrated package," DeFreese says, "one that forms a conservation network, as opposed to a collection of individual parcels." The program--about 75 percent complete--has protected 15,000 acres, and while the tax has not produced as much money as was projected, those funds have been leveraged with support from the state's P-2000 program.

One key to the EEL program's success was the rigor with which its scientific experts chose the lands to be acquired, DeFreese believes. The group had sought a quantitative method to select target parcels, but was unable to do this because of the need to include such unquantifiable considerations as politics, local economic needs, and existing landownership. In the end, selection was based on qualitative criteria including the presence of endangered species, connection to other parcels, importance to native communities, and the parcel's role in the larger ecosystem. Many critical wetlands and mangrove marshes have been restored as a result of the program--including former mosquito impoundments that have become once again the nursery and refuge for important fish species.

A Blueway for Indian River Lagoon
In the early 1990s, Indian River Lagoon's six counties and two water management districts with the cooperation of the National Estuary Program (NEP), jointly developed a sweeping proposal for state CARL funding to create an Indian River Lagoon Blueway. Through acquisition of almost 9,000 acres of wetlands and uplands--626 parcels in 45 targeted areas--Blueway lands would connect with other public lands to form a natural buffer corridor along the lagoon. Completed in two phases, the acquisitions would cost a total of $54.5 million.

"NEP provided an umbrella for the counties and the districts to wrap up all their efforts and pool their resources so that we can acquire the most desirable lands remaining along the lagoon," says Blueway project manager Ken Berk. Berk works with the land acquisition division of the St. Johns River Water Management District.

The NEP's Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan for Indian River Lagoon notes that such a program "will be a critical step toward protection, preservation, and restoration of the integrity, productivity, and biodiversity of the Indian River Lagoon's resources for this and future generations."

Developing the Blueway proposal was a complicated effort that grew out of the Brevard County EEL program. The six counties then formed the Indian River Lagoon Land Acquisition Working Group, which spent several years inventorying private parcels along the lagoon's waterways. This list--cataloging thousands of properties worth a total of $300 million--was prioritized by a seven-member committee of scientists and local experts, using a qualitative ranking system similar to that used by the EEL program. Criteria included size of parcel, natural resource value, quality of the land, presence of endangered species, ease of connection to public land, and manageability. Each parcel was evaluated using a three-tier analysis based on its value to individual endangered species, the local biological community, and the larger ecosystem.

The St. Johns River Water Management District--with funding from NEP and the district's SWIM program--is currently developing a Pollutant Load Reduction Model as a more quantitative tool for land-acquisition decisions in the Indian River Lagoon watershed. "It will take five years to establish, calibrate, and verify the model, which is based on data collected by the district, the counties, and the U.S. Geological Survey," says Joel Steward, technical program manager for the district's Division of Environmental Sciences. Data collection is expected to be completed by the end of 1999 and by 2002 the data will validate the model. "The model will provide a powerful tool for land-acquisition programs such as Blueway by allowing a more specific targeting of stream segments and land parcels according to their contribution to pollutant load," Steward says.

Former EEL coordinator Duane DeFreese believes such models are becoming important tools to show the relative costs and benefits of land acquisition, and he sees the failure to develop basic modeling tools as a weakness in land-acquisition programs nationwide. "We have to be able to show we didn't just pull parcel selections out of our pocket," DeFreese points out. "We must show that our decisions make basic economic sense. We put huge dollars into buying land, and huge dollars into managing it once bought, but we put very little into the kind of fundamental economic research needed to show the value of these programs."

"CARL funding for the Blueway acquisitions is by no means secure," DeFreese notes. The Blueway concept of linking a large number of parcels to protect a single natural system is a relatively new and complicated one. Blueway proponents have had to push for recognition of the intangible ecological relationships that are the basis of their proposal. In addition, Florida's P-2000 program is being replaced by the new Florida Forever funding program as the source of CARL funds, and the counties must push to maintain the project's ranking through the transition. Fortunately, the Blueway project enjoys strong public and political support and has been able to make a strong economic case for land protection. A recent NEP study estimates Indian River Lagoon's annual value to local economies at $700 million.

In the meantime, the Blueway partners are pushing ahead with acquisitions while the land can still be acquired at reasonable cost. For example, the St. Johns Water Management District has already bought more than 1,000 acres in Blueway parcels. "We have to act quickly when properties are available," DeFreese points out. "If we don't, we may lose our chance forever."

NEP director Martin Smithson agrees that time is of the essence. "We need to accelerate our land-acquisition programs today," he says. "Florida's population projections are startling. We have to accomplish our work over the next 10 to 15 years if we are going to outpace development and growth."