Impacts of Nourishment Projects on Beach Characteristics and Essential Habitat Grant uri icon

abstract

  • The proposed project is to evaluate ?long-term? impacts on beach sediment character and essential habitat (e.g., infauna, birds, turtles) associated with nourishment. Our project provides an opportunity to evaluate the long-term impacts (i.e., 6+ years post nourishment) of beach nourishment to a region that has few anthropogenic impacts beyond the 2013 nourishment because the nourished and control areas are located within the Refuge. Studies simply evaluating change for 1-2 years post nourishment are creating a significant gap in our understanding of longer-term impacts, including impacts to those species further removed from the direct impacts of nourishment like birds and turtles. We propose a comprehensive study of the PINWR nourishment and control areas to evaluate changes in sediment character, shoreface morphology, biological abundance, and spatial/temporal variations of nesting birds and turtles on timescales of months to multiple years. Our team is uniquely posed to evaluate the long-term impacts, isolated from newer anthropogenic changes that may influence these same biotic and abiotic variables. The PINWR study area (control and nourished) has little to no anthropogenic influence except for the highway 12 corridor and the 2013 nourishment. Although there have been sand bags placed and dunes built on the southern-most stretch of the Refuge, there is more than 1.5 miles of the nourished area and the entire control region that has been ?untouched? by human impacts since the nourishment. Any change to those areas is a product of the islands natural evolution following the 2013 nourishment. This isolation of PINWR combined with the extensive annual monitoring conducted on bird and turtle nests for more than a decade by the USFWS staff and volunteers provides an unprecedented opportunity to spatially and temporally evaluate change associated an acute nourishment.

date/time interval

  • November 2019 - June 2022