Save Our Indian River Lagoon on 2025-10-17 8:30 AM - Oct 17, 2025

here. Rick Nipper here. Bruce Larson has not made it yet. Kimberly Newton just emailed me. I'll check on that. Deborah Harmon here. Laura Lee Thompson here. Nicholas Sanzone here. Richard Bankhead here. Aaron Adams on teams. Kurt Smith here. Fred Goldstein also on teams. I know he's here. I can see him online. Barbara Wall Scanlon here. Eric Manez here. John is not here today. Charles Menudo. Eric Manez here. All right. We do have a quorum. Love the agenda. Has everybody reviewed the agenda? And do I have a motion? So moved. Second. Okay. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Minutes from last month. Everybody reviewed those, I hope. And do I have a motion? I'll make a motion to accept the minutes. Thanks. Second. Thanks. That's Laura Lee. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Last. You're up, Terry. All right. Good morning. I have the October progress report. We have 112 community projects completed and 2,227 homeowner projects completed to date. We had, this month we had one more quick connect processed for a total of 512 and 555 agreements executed. Septic upgrades. We completed 17 more of those out of 564 to date and 876 total agreements executed for those. We executed the EARL NEP grant contract to connect 50 homes to sewer. We also executed the task order for GHD consulting to start work on the Canaveral South muck dredging project. We also removed three derelict vessels. We received 15 project applications with the portal that was open. 13 are new and two are project revisions. So those will be coming to you next month. The Sykes-T septic to sewer project, this month the pump station foundation was poured and the line installation is nearly complete. And the vacuum pit installation is underway. South beaches A, we had two of the 37 connections are completed and we're still working on those agreements. We have 23 of the 37 agreements executed. MICO, we have one parcel connected and are still the final as-built are still under review. South beaches O and P, the construction and construction engineering services contracting is currently underway. The South Banana B, Merritt Island C and Merritt Island F construction bids are in queue. And the remaining county septic to sewer projects are in various phases of design and engineering. The basin 1280B, Flamingo Drive, the contractor started site work on that project. And then the basin 1263, 1335 and 1349, those are the pond retrofits. There in the plan is Welty, Wickham and Conservation Place and Lake Washington and Croton. Those projects, the materials have been delivered and should be completed later this month. Titusville is starting construction on the Tennessee Street Baffle Box and they are awarding the construction contract for the Osprey and Coleman Pond circulators. So those should be relatively, well the circulator should be relatively quick projects. The Grand Canal muck dredging project has about 534,000 cubic yards of material dredged as of October 1st and will be completed by the end of November. The O'Galley muck dredging project, we are working on the consent agreement with FPL for the access road. The Sykes Creek muck dredging project, we have the request for proposals under review for soliciting landowners for disposal. The Canaveral South and Titusville muck projects, we're contracting with the engineering firms to further evaluate alternative assessments for those projects. The Cocoa Beach Gulf muck capping project, they are anticipating to have the bid submittals by 1031. So the end of this month, we'll have the request for qualifications and then later in November, they're going to be opening the pricing documents for those. The Titusville Causeway multi-trophic resiliency project with the wads and everything, they are finishing a few punch list items on that project and that's just about done. And then we have a few contracts underway and then videos, we're going to be working on those stormwater turbidity curtains for the Welty, Wickham and Conservation Place and Lake Washington and Croton. We'll be doing videos on those and hopefully doing, wrapping up the Apollo general aviation baffle box as well. This month, we had a couple of presentations. Melanie presented at Pond Watch, Virginia at the Melbourne Regional Chamber of Commerce. Aaliyah and Brandon participated in that Oyster Gardener appreciation event. And then we participated in the Dixie Crossroads Indian River Lagoon Coalition event. Virginia, myself and Brandon were there. Abby did the National Night Out in Titusville. And then Aaliyah did another Oyster Gardener workshop. And then I also participated in the NERT, the National Estuarine Restoration Team meeting, on Wednesday. Tomorrow, we have the Indian River Lagoon Day. We will have a table out there and Abby and Alex will be there. And then in the two weeks, we have the Marine Resources Council event coming up for the Low Impact Development Conference. And that is all I have. A lot of good stuff. Well done. It'd sure be nice if, and I don't, I don't have a clue how we, but all this, this information on here, everybody in the county. I'm sorry. I'm speaking to you. I'm sorry. Tough being a redneck. Oh, I can't think, I wish everybody in the county knew all that was going on. I, I, you know, you're, we're all trying and somebody wants to know what the initials are. And you think about all this huge amount of work that's going on. I, uh, from a construction point of view, but I don't, I don't know how to do that. We're all certainly working on it. Yeah. No, it's not a complaint. It's just, you know. Well, if you want to participate, I'm sure with staff on any of these events, you're certainly welcome. Yeah. Any, any one of the, any one of you are welcome. You had homecoming. We couldn't get there. There were explicit instructions emailed out on how to come in the back way. Oh, I didn't get it. Thank, thanks for the lead in. I, I did want to comment on what an outstanding, um, night that was at Dixie Crossroads. It was, it was mostly focused on fishing and the impacts that, um, the sorrel money has had on the, the huge improvement in the fishing conditions in the lagoon. And we had commercial fisheries represented and recreational fisheries represented and powerful, powerful messaging coming from both industries on the improvements that have occurred since 2016 when, when the lagoon crashed. And, uh, it was really, really good. Lot, lot of good comments on the economic impact, you know, of, of recreational and commercial fishing in the lagoon. And it was, it was, it was powerful. It was good. So I hope there's a tape of it. So if you, you can look at the tape, Dick, I'm sorry that you, did you get tangled up in the homecoming parade itself? We, we came in from Pat and I came in from 95 and, uh, and all of a sudden it hit and we didn't know, we didn't know it was homecoming or you, you, you got in behind the parade. So I'm really sorry. You should have checked your emails. No, I didn't get it. Seriously. Oh, you didn't. No. Oh, I'm sorry. No, I'm not complaining, but I, we apologize that we weren't there. Financial report. Good morning. Good morning. Okay. We have received 4.8 million in July collections. The total revenue from concept some conception is 484 million. And for the monthly financial statement, the anticipated 516 million in revenue by the end of the fiscal year, the actuals received so far 457 million. And for the expenditures this fiscal year, the total assigned to projects and programs is 114 million. And actual spend is 33 million. Is there any questions? Thank you. Thank you. So now the special presentations, uh, or do we want to do? Yeah, I think we need to move down to the oyster bar monitoring video first because the auditors should be here in about 30 minutes. All right. So we'll go down to, um, D. Is it? So this is, uh, D, the comparison. E. B, the video. B, the video. Yeah. The oyster monitoring video. Okay. Video. Okay. B. So today we are at one of our reefs that we've built in the Indian River Lagoon, our oyster project. So the Brevard Zoo is building the reef and UCF is monitoring the reefs for us. The University of Central Florida Coastal and Estuarine Ecology Lab, known as CLAB, we've been working in the Indian River Lagoon for over two decades. When Brevard County developed this Save Our Indian River Lagoon program, we were hired as an independent contractor to do the monitoring. Oysters are an important, um, ecosystem engineer in the lagoon and a keystone species in the lagoon. They like to live on top of each other. So that's what makes that big reef. And it provides homes for lots of different animals in the lagoon. And they also are filter feeders. So they take in water and they run it over their gills and they produce and spit out nice, clean water. So oysters help us filter out the nutrients that cause algae blooms like nitrogen and phosphorus. Today, we are pulling up the monitored bags that exist on this reef. We pull those out and then we are opening those bags up and counting all of the live oysters that are in them, measuring the length of those oysters, as well as checking to see what other organisms are in there. Barnacles, tube worms, other little crabs, that sort of thing, to see what else is living within that reef. As we said, it's a whole ecosystem and that's what we're, we are in fact finding. So here we're finding lots of oysters. We're finding oysters that are growing. Here's an example where an oyster has, which originally settled on this oyster shell, has, as it's grown, is connected to a separate oyster shell. This forms what's called a bridge. This is what oysters do in oyster reefs. They provide that three-dimensional structure. So that's what we're starting to see here as well. We've learned a lot over the last six years. We've also changed our methodologies a little bit. And now the project has evolved and we're close to over 20 different oyster reefs in Brevard County. They don't have the larval source like we do in Mosquito Lagoon. So that's why they are having to use the the garden oysters as a way to sort of jump start these places where they're doing reef restoration. And of course, we've seen a lot of the reefs that are near natural oyster populations, like the one here at Riverview, has a lot of oysters. So those ones are doing the best. So moving forward as we increase the populations, we can move into areas that don't have as many oysters. So kind of making an oyster highway and increase the populations in those areas as well. So I've lived in Brevard County my whole life. And after I graduated college, I was really excited to come back to Brevard and work with the Brevard Zoo. In the conservation department, it's important for us to restore the habitat that we've lost. Okay, that was a nice intro. So Tyler's going to present next on his over a decade of subtitle oyster restoration in Brevard County. Tyler, you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, so long time no see. My name is Tyler Provancha. For those of you who don't know, I'm a conservation manager with Brevard Zoo. I also actually grew up in Brevard County. I was born in Rockledge and have been a local ever since. And, you know, have quite the attachment to the lagoon going out fishing as a kid and all of that. And when I was in college, I got to get involved with the Restore Our Shores work that was going on and decided to kind of stick around because I enjoyed it so much. So I'm going to talk about kind of that. That video was a great introduction to where we were a couple of years ago. And I'm happy to talk about all of the things that have changed since because a lot has changed. So just general outline, I'm really going to be focused on, you know, why are we doing these projects, how our materials have changed over time, and our construction processes, as well as site selection and supplementary programs. And I'm really going to leave a lot of the focus on monitoring to Alex and Paul when they do their talks. So to just kind of hop into it, to kind of just for clarifying sake, really the goal with the projects that we're building for our subtitle oyster reefs, which I believe Olivia in the video said 20, we're now decently over a hundred reefs. So a lot's been done since then. We're really building projects that prioritize the establishment growth recruitment of oysters. We're not, a lot of people get confused that we're building breakwaters or something like that. That's not the expressed goal. And one of the ways that we've done this, I don't know if anyone's familiar, but just kind of plugging it back in 2021, Jenny Hanson, as well as a few other members of the zoo and others kind of work together to build a habitat suitability index, which is what one of our guiding documents for when we're actually doing oyster restoration. And the minimum success criteria that we kind of outline in that is 50 oysters per meter squared. Since then, our projects, we've seen much higher numbers than that 50 oysters per meter squared. So I believe in one of the most recent monitorings, we were seeing 1400 oysters per meter squared. So several magnitudes higher than that number. But generally that's like kind of our minimum goal when we're doing these projects. And then we also have kind of, we have to permit every project through the Florida Environmental Protection. So DEP, US Army Corps of Engineers and FWC for signage, depending on kind of the scale or scope of the project. And this is a map of some of the reefs that we've built so far. You'll notice that there's kind of a focus on one part of the lagoon, which I'll talk a little bit more about later. So something that I always like to bring up for kind of context, like historical context, just because I've heard there's a lot of talk of where were oysters in the lagoon originally, you know, we don't have a ton of information. But what we do have is historic oyster landings. And we see that back in the 60s and 70s, there were a high number of oysters that were being actually pulled in Brevard. And this data is from FWC as well. You can see that little newspaper blurb on the side is somebody pulling out 80 bushels of oysters in a day. And really kind of, they were pulled for both consumption and then the using of culture for construction as well as I'm sure other uses. But because there was such a historical, very fast decline, we don't really have a good idea of where those oysters were. A lot of the information that we have is more of, you know, talking with fishermen in the area who may have, you know, fished those reefs 60, 70 years ago. So it's something to consider when we're, you know, started doing these projects, we didn't have a lot of idea of where to focus. So I'm going to kind of just run through all of the different construction methods that we've done over the past 10 plus years, and kind of starting with bags, which is what that video focused on. The work that we kind of started was based on a lot of the work that we had seen up in Mosquito Lagoon, and they're different systems. So when you're working in Mosquito Lagoon, it's a intertidal habitat where you're getting tidal fluctuations, whereas we're doing primarily subtidal restoration. So that means our oyster reefs are not getting that same tidal fluctuation, so they're always submerged underwater. And that is something that has happened. That's a type of oyster reef that exists in other parts of the world. But because of that, it kind of makes, you know, we had to learn how to do subtitle oyster restoration. So the way that those projects started was with bags, and you can see some photos of them out in the lagoon there. And really what we saw was during our initial deployments, we would see really good numbers initially, and then we would see declines over time. And really the main reasons for that are sedimentation and loss of material. So the bags would a lot of times, they don't have the relief needed for our system to really hold up long term. And so you would see burial or declines in the densities on those reefs because of partial burials, and then the sediment would move again, and then it would rebury. The other thing with these was permitting limitations. So when you're building with plastics, obviously there's a lot of concern about microplastics and things like that. So there was a lot of hesitation from the different agencies about, you know, is this the right fit. So the first kind of method that we did to adapt to this was in 2021, and it was gabions. So gabions are a galvanized steel mesh cage, and we basically kind of followed the same around size that we did for bags. So they were comparable monitoring results wise, and filled them with shell. And the kind of benefit of gabions compared to bags is there's a lot more structure. So they're able to hold structure for a longer time. And as they break down, theoretically, you're just being left with the kind of concrete cemented reef together, kind of like what Paul mentioned in that video. These worked really well, and they still do work very well in areas that have that high recruitment. When you get into areas that are a little bit more marginal, it can be a little iffier. The main reason that we moved away from this method is more of a like a logistical construction one, because you to build a gabion and get it deployed, you have to have a workshop to build the gabion, you have to have a second workshop to fill the gabion, you have to move the gabions, and so and then you have to actually put them onto the reef. So it's a lot more labor and like manpower involved. And then if you're putting a gabion, like that entire middle part is all gabions, that's a lot of metal material that's going into the water. So the next kind of idea was, is there a way that we can reduce the amount of material that we're using, but still get similar recruitment? So that's where we kind of go to corrals. And the idea with a gabion corral is that we're doing a perimeter of those gabions. So basically laying like a square and then dumping up to about 15 inches of height of shell in the interior. And this works because one of the requirements for all of our permitting is that our shell needs to be contained to the project footprint. So the gabion works to hold, the gabions work to all hold that shell in a fixed perimeter. The other thing that we kind of did with this method is that we were using six inch tall gabions originally because it matched the bags that we were using. We moved to 10 inches instead because it wasn't, the structural integrity was better if you were just using one on a wall instead of two. And we were really excited about this method and we've seen really good results with it. We actually still do use it occasionally just because we have a lot of gabions left over from the tons of volunteer workshops that we used to do to build them. But we wanted to see if there was like a way to go to all natural material. So that brings me to our current method, coquina corrals. Coquina corral is very similar to a gabion corral. It's just all natural material. The one thing that we've kind of learned with them is it really depends on the availability of coquina, but we try to target about one to two foot diameter boulders when we're building with them. And the way that we kind of construct these is we'll go out and we'll lay a perimeter and then we will go out with a boat afterwards and dump shell in that interior part and involves raking a lot of a lot of it sounds easy. It's not, but that kind of brings me to the construction changes that we've done over time. So as you kind of saw in that video, there's a lot of when we were doing bag projects, it was very volunteer focused. We had big groups of people that were kind of moving things down shorelines and that's super like it's super nice to involve the community and I'm really thankful for all the help they gave. But in order to scale up to build to the reef to kind of reach our goals for the program, we really wanted to optimize it further. And the best way to do that, one of which is a barge. So now that we have earlier this year, actually, we were donated a barge by a private donor who I'm very thankful for. And we had worked with contractors beforehand, but having our own barge was is really helpful just because you can limit the amount of cost and we have a full time construction team that can now run and actually build a reef out in the lagoon. And even once we switched over to the barge, we've had to kind of learn what methods with the barge are best. So that top corner photo where you see a skid steer dumping shell into bags, the original method we used was contractor bags. And basically what it is, is we built a custom wood frame and we would fill those bags and then we would move them, put them onto a boom onto a rented barge and then dump them in. And that method worked a lot better than hand moving things, but it's still time inefficient because you have to fill the bags. So that's a second, that's more staff filling. And then you also have to, when you're emptying the bags onto the reef, especially as you use the bags more, they do not cooperate. So they're hitting a bunch of bags with sticks, hoping that you can get shell out. And we were like, there has to be a better way. So with the barge that we got built this year, we tested out methods where we're actually dumping full, just full loads of shell onto the barge itself and then shoveling directly in, and that has worked very well. And then the other thing that we've kind of done this year, which this isn't really a construction optimization, this honestly, it makes construction more difficult, but I feel that it's necessary and worth mentioning. When we've been building these Coquina corrals or Damian corrals, you'll see that we're dumping, you know, 10 to 15 inches of shell into that perimeter. That's a lot of shell. And if you, the way that like from the checks that we've done recruitment wise, we're really only seeing oysters recruit in that first like top six to nine inches. So that's a bunch of material that is not actually being utilized by oysters. And if you talk to anyone who does oyster restoration anywhere in the US, they will tell you that shell is like the thing that everybody hurts for, it's very hard to get enough of. So we looked for other options. And what we found is fossilized shell, it's, it's not its real term, it's what we call it. I believe quarries use the term bulk washed shell. But effectively, it's a bunch of larger shell hash material that's been mined with Coquina. And what we do is we lay the bottom six layers or six inches as a layer of fossilized shell, we then rake out that layer, and then we add oyster shell onto the top of it and slope it out. And then that way, we're using about half of the oyster shell that we were originally using. So we can utilize that kind of section where recruitment is more likely to occur more effectively. So this is a graph of how much square feet we've built each year. So really, what I want to draw attention to is, you know, between 2020 and 2023 was a lot of that time where we were doing material tests with the county. So doing projects where we were looking at like, let's do a Gabion versus Gabion corral comparison or something like that, and then monitor it and see how it does over time. And then we were also trying to figure out ways to improve construction methods. And I guess what I'd like to point out is between 2023 and 2024, as we started using the barge, you can see almost a double, like doubling of the amount of square footage that we're able to construct. And the 2025 and dark blue is what we've built so far this year. The 2025 and light blue is what we're projecting to build if everything goes to plan, you know, no hurricanes or anything like that. So a little over 50,000 square feet from where the previous year we built about 28,000 square feet. So I'm really excited about that. And next year, we think we can do even better because this year we had to set up two barges in order to be able to run them. So definitely, we'll hopefully optimize the time a little bit better. And the other, I would say, major change from that kind of video that I would like to talk about is site selection. When we first started, we didn't have as much of an idea of what areas were the best. And really, it's been kind of an iterative process that we learn with each project. There are a lot of site specific concerns that you have to kind of address when you're surveying a property and the HSI helps a lot with that. But some of the ones that I would point out, distance from shore, for instance, we used to only be permitted to be allowed to do 10 feet from mean high water line. And when you're building projects very close to shore, you're going to have refractory waves. So you're getting twice as much, you know, wave action on your modules. And that's not a huge deal for some of the project types we use. But when you were only doing bags that just made them even more susceptible to damage. Depth, flow and sediment are also kind of parts that we talk about. But I won't go into super detail. If you have any questions, you're welcome to ask. And oyster recruitment, I would say, is probably one of the more important ones. Olivia kind of foreshadows it in the video where she's like, some areas we're getting a lot more oysters. Really, where we focused our builds are in those areas where we're seeing higher amounts of natural recruitment. So really, from like Pineda to 192 in the north IRL, and from 192 south, we do see recruitment events in other parts of the county. They're just more sporadic. So because we have a consistent wild oyster spat population in those parts, we've really been able to build in those areas to great success. And again, I'm not going to go too much into monitoring. But I do want to caveat that as we're kind of doing these things, we're having, we went from building with oysters that are, you know, relatively low numbers on bag projects, more around that 50 per meter squared kind of value, to some of these corrals that are in the thousands per meter squared. And so the way to monitor those different types are very different. And that's kind of what Alex will talk more about in his talk. So to kind of jump off of that, I'm going to go into a few of the different kind of supplementary projects that support our reef program. The first being spat monitoring and our oyster health study that we're doing. It's been funded under Restore America's Estuaries, and we're happy to partner with UGA and UF to not only expand spat monitoring, which when I say spat monitoring, you'll see that little kind of mini gabion that's attached to a brick there. Basically, what we're doing is each month we put out that with fresh shell, and we're checking how many oysters recruit month to month. And so we've been doing this since 2021. So you can kind of build like a like a database of like how often is recruitment happening in each area and to what magnitude. And that's really helpful for when you're trying to target, you know, what areas should we reach out to homeowners for or what areas do we want to focus on for our projects. The this year with Ray, we've actually been able to expand it as well to collect populations of wild oysters and garden oysters in order to look at the kind of health or viability of those oysters reproductively. So we can see if they're actually going through the reproduction process, and also seeing like what level of parasitism they have, you know, how just as a whole healthy they are. We're still collecting a lot of that data and will be through early 2026. But some of the two takeaways that I would say are the most interesting are spat monitoring kind of very closely follows what we've seen in the past, where we're continuing to see higher recruitment in that southern part of the lagoon, which with natural reefs in that area like Sebastian River or Turkey Creek. We kind of expect that, but it's still cool that the data tracks. And then the other thing that I find very interesting, we had some samples taken of our garden oysters and we actually have seen that they're reproducing. So when people are hanging oyster gardening habitats all over the county, they are theoretically releasing spat, which is super cool. Kind of jumping off of that into oyster gardening. So oyster gardening is a program where we're raising oysters off, having homeowners raise oysters off their docks for six to nine months. And then we, when they return them to us, we will actually seed them onto reefs where we see lower natural recruitment. So we can almost kind of kickstart or supplement that population. In 2024, we had over 100,000 live oysters, which is a really good season for the number of gardeners that we had. This year, we're going to be concluding, we're going to have our oysters returned at the end of October. I think this year will be a little bit lower just because it's kind of dependent on the spat that you receive as well as lagoon conditions. And if any of you have been out on the lagoon recently, it's pretty turbid. It's water's pretty high. It's pretty fresh. And our last kind of program that I'll mention is shuck and share. So we have to get all of the shell that we use for our actual construction and shuck and share is how we do that. So once a week, we have our 550 truck go around the county and take oyster shells from 25 different restaurants. We also partner with a shucking house to get oyster shell from them as well. We currently just have the one route, and we're really focused on Brevard. But actually starting next month, we're going to have a second route so we can go down south and hopefully to Orlando to increase the amount of shell that we can get even more. And that's really most of what I wanted to talk about. I'm going to leave a lot of the data stuff to Paul and Alex. Next year, we're hoping to build at least an acre and a half of oyster reef. We'll see how it goes and continue to monitor all of the kind of pilot projects that are currently out there. And kind of my last little thing that I want to say is that this takes a village. There have been so many people who have worked really hard in the community volunteering and helping us as well as my team and the people who came before me who have done so much good work to get this stuff off the ground. So, yeah. Thank you. I volunteer gardeners from homeowners. I volunteer. I live on the west side of the Indian River, about three miles south of the Panita Causeway. And I have a tremendous amount of oysters growing on my coquina rock and my dock pilots. Awesome. Yeah, if you want to sidebar, I can give you the contact information. We're actually right in the middle of training all of our gardeners for the season right now. So we make sure that each of our gardeners goes through like a training process so that we're kind of consistent. We're making sure that oysters are consistently cared for the same way. So I can give you those dates and times. And if you're interested and you can make them, we'd love to have you on. I have a quick question. I don't know a whole lot about it, but I've seen a couple of companies that are working on, I guess, artificial oyster substrate that you put in the water pre-seeded. Is that something that could work here or are there reasons why that wouldn't? I guess I think about it in terms of it's going to take you a lot of time and resources in order to get the same amount of square footage that you could just get by very quickly adding shell in the method that we're doing. And there is published literature that shows that oyster shell is kind of the best substrate for oyster recruitment. So that's why we're trying to focus on that natural oyster shell as much as possible. I think those methods have uses in other project types, but really with our goals of trying to build as much oyster habitat as possible for filter feeder establishment, I'm really happy with our current method. You might mention you do use garden oysters in that fashion of getting them started. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's kind of the whole point. One of the points of the program is to get those raised up and we're doing something kind of similar where we're laying them on like the top layer of a reef in a lower recruitment area. Sorry if I kind of flew through that part. Dick has a couple of questions from, from Aaron. Yeah. One of our guys couldn't make it, but he's called in. Oh, I'm sorry. Again. Okay. I think. How do method and results from the, uh, Bavard 200 restoration compared to other restoration activities and other extra estuaries? Um, I'm, it's kind of a hard question to answer without, uh, I need to like look into it a little bit more, but Paul is going to be talking more about our results. So he might be able to answer that question a little bit better than I can. Okay. It's one of those things we're looking at subtitle versus intertidal. They're very different systems and there's only a couple of other subtitle, um, oyster, like areas where oysters are commonly restored. And then they also have different monitoring. So that's kind of where Alex's talk is going on. How do we make these comparable? Yeah. Hey, there's another question here. This is from Aaron. Um, and this is about interacting with the fishing community to see what the use of these reefs are with the fishing community, whether they're seeing more fish around them and, and they might be impacting current fishing activities. Yeah. So, um, we, I mean, this is obviously from my experience, just going out, I've gone out and built reef before and like walked away to get something for a water sample and come back and there's more fish out there, like fish love structure. Um, and we've even like, there's some photos that I didn't include, but of like some of our builds this year, you'll just see like bunches of sheep's head, like juvenile sheep's head, like swimming over the reefs and stuff like that. We have another, uh, smaller scale project, um, separate from this, that's actually, um, coming up with visual and transect monitoring methods for fish habitat. And something that I would like to do in the future is actually compare some of those artificial fish reef, uh, restoration types with, you know, natural and also like our reefs to see, is there any difference in the species of fish that are using these and how are they using them and what juvenile species are using them? So. Okay. Good. Great. I have a question from Fred Goldstein. He would like to know the estimated square footage functional now based on multi-year oyster placement placement. I want, I don't, I know it's about three acres. I don't remember the square footage off the top of my head and I don't want to miss, uh, misspeak, but I, it's about, we have about three acres right now. I wanted to first thank you and the zoo for everything you're doing because I'm always impressed with all the volunteers and all the young people that are out there in the river working so hard. And in your, the beginning of your presentation, you mentioned that you wanted to know the history of oysters. And, um, just to make a point that in 1978, the federal government took over the ownership of the land under the river, if it wasn't deeded. But down in Valkyrie and Grant, there used to be oyster leases and you might be aware of all that. Okay. And there's a couple of old people that used to be really fishing always in the river. And one is, uh, Clayton of Clayton Crab Company. And I think he's still alive. I talk to him every couple of months and he's just amazing and could tell you so much history about the oysters and everything in the river. And I'd be happy to help contact him and get you all there. Okay. If there's someone, I'll contact you. Yeah, that'd be great. Okay. I'll be happy to give you a call. I'll make sure he's healthy. Awesome. Thank you. That would be interesting because I can remember the spoil islands down off a rock point going back into the early nineties to the early two thousands. And there'd be piles of oyster shells on the beaches where campers would just come and take their fill of oysters and leave behind big piles of oyster shells. You don't see that anymore, of course. No. Go ahead, Nick. So with all the outreach that's been done in the past and the visibility of the zoo, is there any intention of having a location that can be for maybe tourism or for people visiting the area to get an experience of what's going on without disturbing the work being done, but with highlighting the work that is being done as an educational tool? Like if I was on a boat or something that maybe a galley and went out, there's this little site or something that says, Hey, here's a sign and talks about the project on the water or something like that. Yeah. So, um, for a lot of our, uh, we, we did do that for some of our older, uh, bag sites. We had them as kind of demonstration sites with signage. Um, we, for a lot of the kind of early 2020s, we moved to doing more projects that were, um, single family homeowners. So obviously it's, can't really do a demonstration site there, but now, um, really one of the things that we also are trying to do for our process is, uh, go for like larger, um, project footprints in areas. So I have, I, you know, working with, um, public, publicly accessible areas. That's definitely something that we could consider in the future. And I, I agree with you. I think that's a really good idea. I was thinking like the library of pineapple. That is actually, I, I, we surveyed that this year and I need to talk with city of Melbourne, but I would like to do that site next year. It's a beautiful site. I think it'd be really, I think so too. Same page as always, Tyler. Great job. Great work. Anyone else? Yeah. Just go ahead. I don't know if this would be your domain or not, but, uh, with the addition of new habitat and oyster, you know, bars and all that, um, do we have any way of estimating how that might affect just the overall capacity of life in the lagoon as you're adding more habitat? Um, that's a very hard thing to quantify scientifically. I mean, again, going from bare sand to, um, that kind of like interstitial space where different invertebrates can live. Like you definitely see a difference. I, Paul might have some photos of it, but there's a lot of just, you find a lot of very interesting things like in the reefs themselves, all sorts of stuff that I've, I've never seen anywhere else. I think one example was like decorate. I've seen decorator crabs and things like that. Um, but, uh, I would say, yeah, just adding, but it's very hard to quantify like how much or, and also different species use different types. So. Anyone else? I'd just like to mention that, that you all can, anyone can volunteer to help on these things and they have an ongoing project at Castaway Cove that's just finishing up and, and still ongoing. And that would be an excellent one to see because you can see it from the, from the dock there. Yeah. And, um, once, uh, basically every December we, uh, well, December, January, February, we go out and do a yearly monitoring of all of our sites, um, just as like a check in to see how they're doing. And we always need volunteers to help us out with that. So if you're interested, um, you can reach out to my email, uh, or the Restore Our Shores email. We usually don't publicly post them because we don't want large groups, but we definitely appreciate anyone coming out and we'll teach you ID and let you see all that stuff. It's fun. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Thank you, Tyler. Yeah. I'll add the link is on the progress report for the Restore Our Shores volunteer options. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. Thank you guys. Thank you. Okay. Um, do I have to guess who's up next? Uh, I believe the auditors are here, so it's up to you if you want to go. Yeah. Let's go ahead. Let's go ahead and finish up that. Kurt, you're on. No. All right. I don't know how you follow that. That was pretty exciting. Um, I'm, I'm Laura Manlove. I'm a managing director at RSM and, um, the zoo, you probably are already aware, but the zoo also has a program for corporate development and corporate events where you can take your team and go for a day and work on building those artificial reefs for oysters with the zoo's guidance. So we've done that before and it's a really cool event. Just wanted to give a plug out there to any companies who are looking for some ways to grow their team or spend some time together as a team. It's a great opportunity. Um, we're here today to present to you a report that we have done on the sorrel funding for this year. This report was presented to the county's audit committee, um, in their September meeting. So they have seen it and it has been transmitted to the county commissioners. With me today is Catherine McDaniel. She led the field work here, the audit work, um, with the county and she's worked with Virginia and her team for several years now. I'll direct you to page three. Did everyone get a copy? I just want to make sure everyone has. Yes, they do. Great. This is our executive summary page. This is kind of where we summarize the entire audit in case you don't want to read every single page, which is okay. That won't hurt my feelings. Um, to give you a little overview of what this audit entailed, we look at the revenues that the county reports to you all as being received for the sorrel projects. We look at expenditures, um, were the funds used appropriately and were they, um, properly allocated to the right expense accounts and the right projects and the right contracts. And then thirdly, we look at procurement. So of the projects and expenditures that we select, were those vendors procured properly following state requirements and following the county's procurement guidelines as well. So to give you, uh, the good news and the bottom left, you can see we had no findings in our audit this year. Um, we did test 49% of the total expenditures through the program for this scope period. And we tested 19 of 74 active projects. Whenever we select our projects for testing, we do make sure to spread and include projects, uh, different projects each year so that we're not always testing the same contractors and the same projects. And, uh, we have touched every project to date in our annual audit reports, just for your awareness. I will direct you back to page seven. Um, if you're interested in the revenue testing, um, page six, but, um, quite honestly, it's, it's pretty straightforward where we really, uh, have more complex audit procedures is starting on page seven and eight with our expenditure testing. Wanted to give you the detailed breakdown. If you're interested in which projects and which contractors we did test, uh, all that is listed here. And the steps on the bottom, the audit steps that we take are listed as well. You can see check mark. If it's passed, we do have some footnotes there. If there's something notable that we needed you to know about that particular step for that expenditure. And of course, if it's an a, for example, if, um, it is not a municipality, then the municipality proof of payment wouldn't apply. So you might see some NAs in these cells, if something doesn't apply to that particular expenditure. But those details are laid out on both page seven and eight. It's too big to put on one page. So we have two pages there for you. Um, in our procurement testing this year, um, in our sample of expenditures, none of the expenditures, um, had new procurement. So there was no RFP or RFQ or, um, other competitive solicitation that was issued during our scope period. There was one invitation to bid that was put out during our scope period. So we took a look at that. Uh, the rest of these are task orders issued off of existing contracts that we tested. Um, so we did look, we still look at some procedures related to those, even if it's not a brand new solicitation, we'll look at the internal purchase order process and payment request process that the county goes through to make sure that they're following their procedures, um, proper approvals, proper signatures, et cetera. Um, so the results of that testing are summarized as you can see on page nine. And again, we had no exceptions in this, in this round of testing, happy to answer any questions about the audit that you may have. And thank you for your time. All right. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. Should we clap for the auditors? Alex, do you want to share your screen? No, we're going to go to, um, D, the comparison of subtitle oyster reef monitoring methods. Alex Warren. Alex, do you want to share your screen? And Alex, if you could introduce yourself. Can you hear me and see the PowerPoint? Yeah, just put it in presentation mode. And also introduce yourself, please. Yes. All right. PowerPoint's working. We're all good. Yes. Yes. All right. All right. Well, hello. My name is Alex Warren. Uh, currently I am a second year undergraduate student at the University of North Florida studying coastal and marine biology. Uh, and last summer I was an intern with Brevard Zoo's Restore Our Shores program where I conducted a project on the comparison of subtitle oyster reef monitoring methods. Uh, and before I dive into the project, I do just want to give a little bit of background information. So Restore Our Shores works with the Eastern oyster, which is a foundational species found in the Indian River Lagoon. Uh, and this essentially means that they create very important habitat, uh, with their oyster reef structures. So they provide habitat to animals like sheep's head and Florida stone crabs pictured here. Um, they're also very important filter feeders. Uh, and so this can help filter our waterways and prevent things such as harmful algae blooms. So unfortunately in specific areas of the lagoon, there are problems with a lack of substrate or and or a lack of recruitment. Uh, so recruitment is the process and where, uh, oysters release their babies or their spat into the water. Uh, and they have to find suitable substrate to land on and grow. Uh, in some areas of the lagoon, there's not enough of this substrate for them to land on. And in other areas, there's not a lot of natural recruitment. So spat in the waterways to begin with. And the solution to that is to construct oyster reefs. Uh, as these, uh, we fill these with, uh, loose oyster shell. These are leftover from our shuck and chair program. So we take leftover, um, oyster shell from seafood restaurants across Brevard County. And we use those to construct these reefs and provide suitable habitat for recruitment. And as you guys probably know, this is all done through Brevard County Save Our Indian River Lagoon program. Uh, so just a little bit. I know Tyler mentioned these, but about the different reef types, uh, we've been using over the past 10 years. Uh, so on the left here are, is an example of a bag reef. Uh, so this is a bag filled with that loose oyster shell from shuck and chair. Uh, after that, we moved on to gabions, which are those small metal cages. From there, we went to gabion corrals, which use those same gabions to form a perimeter around a bunch of loose shell in the middle. And then most recently we've added coquina corrals, uh, which are a similar premise except these coquina boulders around the outside to create a purely natural, uh, reef. So, um, after these reefs are constructed, we also want to monitor them. Uh, so a big reason why we do that is because we have switched between these methods pretty rapidly and we want to see how these different reef types are doing. We also want to see how different areas of the lagoon may be doing compared to others. Uh, and we do this monitoring through two major methods. Uh, so the first of which is visual inspection. So we would, um, use a random number generator to put, pick, uh, random points along a reef and we would lay this one foot by one foot quad over the selected point. Uh, and we would look under those 25 intersection points, uh, with that nylon string and we would see and record, uh, what was found under each of those intersect points. Uh, so that could be something like a live oyster. It could be substrate. So any loose shell or building material, it could be sediment, uh, like the sandy or mucky bottom, stuff like that. Uh, after we do a count of those 25 points, we would look at how many live oysters were found underneath the quad in total before flipping the quad over on itself and doing a second visual inspection. Uh, from there, we would move on to the polling sample method. Uh, so we would lay this one foot by two foot quad there on the left over the area that was just visually monitored and we would pull up three gallons worth of oysters. Um, and then we would count how many live oysters were found in total for that sample, uh, as well as noting how many recently dead or boxed oysters were found. Uh, we would also, uh, as you can see on the right, take the shell lengths of the first 50 oysters, uh, measured, uh, for each. Uh, so with that, it brings me to my project. Uh, so the main goal of this project was to find a correlation between these two methods and be able to correspond one with the other. So essentially, if we had a certain visual inspection score, if we could correspond that to a certain pole inspection score, um, so the two methods both have their pros and cons, uh, the pulling up samples is great since you're able to look at the oysters on dry land up close and get a really good look at them. Uh, however, when you're pulling up oysters from the reef, you might be breaking apart, uh, the reef, uh, which is kind of going against what we're trying to do to begin with, uh, which is where visual methods great since it's a very, uh, non-destructive way of viewing our oyster reefs and monitoring them. However, with the ever-changing water conditions of the Indian River Lagoon, sometimes there can be a little bit of question with accuracy. Um, so the idea would be to be able to correspond these two so we could, uh, better monitor our reefs going forward. Uh, so for that I had to do data collection. Uh, so on the right here is a map of part of Brevard County with each red dot representing one of the 16 sites I visited. Uh, so for each of those 16 sites, I did two visual, five visual inspections and then five, uh, corresponding poles for each reef type up there. Uh, so for example, if a reef had both gabion and gabion corral reefs, I would do five poles of the gabion reef and then five poles for the gabion corral reefs. Uh, this left me with 97, uh, data points to look through. Um, and obviously with any data collection in the field, there was always going to be some challenges as we can see in the middle there of me fighting some waves to return a sample of oysters. Uh, but this gave me a very exciting, uh, data set to look through. Uh, so here we have a bar graph with each of these values representing a correlation coefficient. So essentially the closer these values are to one, the more correlated the two variables are meaning as one is increasing or decreasing, the other is also increasing or decreasing at a similar rate. Uh, so those dark blue bars, those represent the number of live oysters that were found under the intersection points compared to the number of live oysters found in the old sample. And then those green bars represent the number of oysters found underneath, uh, the quad as a whole. And then that compared to the number of oysters found in the sample. And we can see the latter of which, uh, was a lot better correlated having an initial coefficient of 0.586. But from here, I wanted to try and remove some biases from the data set. Uh, so my first thought was to remove all sites that were marked to have murky conditions or ripped open bags. Uh, so some of the bag reefs, as you can see in the image on the right there, had their bags literally ripped open since they were kind of buried in the sediment, uh, and this could lead to the oysters getting loose. And I was afraid would make the data inaccurate. Uh, to my surprise though, this actually decreased the correlation. Uh, though upon further thought does make a lot of sense since if visually I'm not seeing a lot of oysters because of poor conditions, then there's probably not a lot of oyster growth happening there to begin with. Similarly, I, uh, thought about removing all bag reefs from the data set and again found that this decreased the correlation. Uh, since I originally thought to do this again, since a lot of the older bag reefs were kind of sedimented and some of them had been ripped open. Uh, from there, I decided to look at size of the oysters. So I took the average size of all the oysters measured across the study and then took a standard deviation above and below that point. And I excluded any, uh, poles and, uh, corresponding visual inspections, uh, from sites that had an average oyster size, either above or below those deviations, essentially meaning that sites that are poles that had exceptionally large oysters that may have been blocking my view from other oysters or sites, uh, like this one here that had exceptionally small oysters, uh, that would be very hard to see visually were excluded from the data set. Um, like for example, in the picture here, um, I don't know how well you guys can see, but there's those little like white circles around a lot of those oyster spat. Uh, there's probably well over, uh, 50, maybe even a hundred oysters just on that one shell there, uh, which can be very difficult to see when you're in the water. Uh, and this greatly increased the correlation, raising it to 0.819. Uh, the other factor I wanted to look at was the number of oysters growing through the unit. Um, so for our bag and gabion reefs, sometimes oysters would actually grow through, uh, the building material, as we can see in the image here of some oysters growing through a bag. Um, I used a similar method, uh, to taking an average of this, uh, value and then doing a standard deviation above it. And so any reefs or any poles with, uh, an exceptionally large amount of oysters, uh, sticking through the bag that would be inhibiting my view from the oysters within the bag got excluded, uh, which kept the correlation about the same. However, when combined with the size exclusion measurements, uh, raised the correlation coefficient to the highest of 0.822. Uh, and at this point, my data set had gone from 97 to 51. Uh, so I decided that that was a good place to stop. Uh, and this comparison is again seen in this scatter plot. Uh, so on the X axis, we have the number of live oysters found, uh, underneath the quad. Um, and then on the Y axis, we have the number of live oysters found in the corresponding poll. And as we can see, there is a general positive correlation. So as one is increasing, so is the other. Uh, but while I had this data, I wanted to look at some other things as well. Uh, so I was wanting to compare the different reef types to see how, uh, many live oysters are found in each of them. So on the left there, that is a graph of the average number of live oysters, uh, found with the poll method for each reef type. Uh, as in, and as we can see, Coquina corrals, uh, had a, on average, a lot more, uh, oysters than the other three reef types being significantly different. Uh, and on the right is the same statistic, but with the visual method, how many live oysters were found, uh, which you can see less of a difference with Gabion, uh, with Coquina corrals there. Uh, however, they were still significantly greater than back reefs. Uh, so although Coquina corrals are one of the newer reefs, so naturally there is going to be a lot of recruitment. However, this statistic is very, still very exciting to see, uh, since there's definitely a potential for reef success there, given how many oysters could be found, uh, meaning this is definitely a promising option going forward. Uh, but with that, I am happy to say that the project goal was reached. Uh, I was able to find a pretty strong correlation between the visual and poll methods. Um, and this will be very, uh, important going forward, and it could also help us with a lot, uh, with sharing our data with other, uh, research since a lot of them use the pool method. Um, and then also this, there is some important data to look at with the building materials, specifically knowing that Coquina corrals are a promising option, uh, for the future. And honestly, I do think a very important thing I've learned from this project is the need for, uh, more standardized procedures. Uh, for example, in the middle there is how I started doing the visual inspection using an aqua view from the surface. Uh, I felt that it was kind of hard to keep still and didn't give you the best view. So, partway through my study, I did switch to a mask and snorkel method, which I felt was a lot more accurate. So, small procedural changes like this, also, uh, defining things such as how far under each intersection point to check for live oysters, I think should be defined going forward. Um, but with that, I think, I just want to say thank you guys for listening and want to ask if you guys have any questions. Any questions? Yes. Go ahead, Charlie. Uh, very nice job. I don't know if you're working on a master's, but, uh, that looks thesis worthy. I have a question about the cost, and I don't know if perhaps it's better for Tyler, but have there been a cost, uh, a unit cost from going to the gibbon bags to the coquina corrals that kind of shows the difference? It looks like what the results they're getting from the newest method is yielding the best results, but I was just kind of curious, are there some cost comparisons? Um, I don't know if we've ever done, like, a full cost breakdown, but I know, like, when we were doing, um, when we were going to switch from gabions to Gamian corrals, we did. I don't know if we've done it again for coquina corrals because some of those switches were made because we were trying to go from the permitting perspective of all natural material. Uh, I think it would be wise to do it though, and we definitely could. Yeah. I mean, it looks like just the magnitude with the coquinas and you're building bigger reefs, and you're probably going to yield a much better return on investment. But yeah, I think so. Any other questions? Go ahead, Loralee. Yeah. Again, I have a question for Tyler. Don't go away, Tyler. So, you know, in, um, some of the oyster farms that were up around Apalachicola and Cedar Key, they found that, um, when they started doing the oyster farms that seagrass came in naturally recruited. Are you seeing any seagrass around any of your, your sites? Um, so we definitely do see seagrass, uh, in proximity to our sites. I would hesitate to say that it's because of our projects. Um, it definitely like, sometimes we're building decently far offshore. Sometimes we're building closer and there really is a little bit of variation. Uh, there has been talk of co restoration and Jenny's actually giving a talk on that like later in this meeting. So you, she can probably answer that question better than I can, but we've been talking about maybe doing some perspective, uh, projects next year if funding allows to look at planting behind some of these projects and actually look at establishment. What about water clarity? Cause they also reported that, you know, from a drone, they could visually see the water was clear around their oyster reefs. I think, um, it's a rather large volume of water. I would kind of, I would, I think it would maybe be difficult to actually quantify that difference in clarity just because you have so much mixing going on at all times. Um, but I would have to look into it more to, to know for sure. Maybe on a calm day. Yeah. On a calm day. Thank you. Well, I've got to say there's no pity here for sampling in rough conditions. That's the life of a scientist. So just get used to it. Yes. Fred has another question. If I can get there again. Um, you touched on the age of the sample associated with the type of reef material. He would like to know your thoughts on its influence, given the changes in water quality over that time period. Might that have a larger influence? Sorry. Can you repeat, did you mention something about water quality? Yeah. He said, he says you touched on the age of the sample associated with the type of reef material. So he's asking your thoughts on its influence, given the changes in water quality over that time period. Um, so I'm not entirely sure about water quality. I didn't really look at that specifically. Um, but something that didn't quite make it in the powerpoint, but I am trying to look at, uh, a little bit with my data going forward is how, um, age correlates with success. Um, that's still definitely a statistic I'm trying to look through. Uh, so if you maybe keep in touch with Tyler, I could maybe provide more about that information in the future. Okay. Well, I guess what he's, his point is that we know that going back a few years, the water quality was worse. So we do see it improving. So I guess he wants to know if there's, do you think there's some correlation there? Like I said, I'm not entirely sure. I haven't really done a lot of analysis with that. Um, and with my project, uh, between the different reef types, although that is important data, that still was not the main focus of the study. Uh, so I do think in order to make comparisons like true comparisons between reef types, especially like over time, I do think that would require its own study and more data and more time. Uh, more, I think the takeaway from my project is more of just that, that since we have this data and I'm just going to look at it real quick, uh, Coquina corrals are a promising option to go forward. And it's definitely something we need to look into, uh, more going forward. I can kind of hop into, um, I think it definitely could play a part, but the thing that's kind of hard with all of this is that there's a lot of co variation or like co variables at the same time. So you're having to control for, you know, location in the lagoon, what was the water quality in the lagoon at that time and how old that reef is and the method it was done with. So I think it's hard to make, uh, judgments without a lot of data mining. Um, but it's definitely possible is what I would say. Yeah. And I, and I understand the difficulty of the answer because you have changing conditions like two months ago, the river in front of my house was very, very clear had been for a long time. I was amazed that starting probably a year and a half ago, I could see white sand at the bottom of my dock. Uh, I thought I'd never see that again, but now we've had all this wind and the water is very turbid. So it would be hard for you to draw any kind of conclusion, I think, because of the changing conditions. And I think it's something that you would almost like some of our projects, we use sensors like continuous sensors for our deployment. So we can try to pair some of that data or make some conclusions from, we didn't have the ability and the scope of this intern project to do that, but I think that's definitely something that could be talked about more for future ways to bring it out. Thank you both. Now we're going to have Paul Sacks talk. Well, we're, we've got about half our members are new, so please introduce yourself and, and talk a little bit about what's, what's happening. Um, morning. Thanks for having me here. Um, I'm a researcher at UCF in the Coastal and Estuarine Ecology Lab. Um, I've been working doing monitoring with, uh, the SOAR program starting in, uh, 2019. Um, I'm not from around here originally, I'm originally from upstate New York and along the way we ended up, um, my wife and I ended up in, uh, Florida about, uh, beginning of 1997. So, uh, and we've been working in the Esqueda Lagoon since that time period. Speaking to the microphone. Okay. Um, and based on our work there, whatnot, um, UCF and C-Lab was recruited to do the independent third-party monitoring of a bunch of a number of the oyster projects here in, um, the associated with, uh, Sorrel in Brevard County. Um, so that's where our, our background is and where my background is coming. Um, Dr. Donnelly, uh, was going to be here today, but she had some other conflicts come up, uh, so she's unable to be here today. Um, so, okay. All right. I just, okay. Down. There we go. Okay. Um, so in, um, our purpose here is we were part of the, uh, the SOAR project had a couple of number of different goals. One is to do restoration, uh, especially of the filtration systems, including oyster, uh, building your increasing number of roister bars. Um, and UCF is providing the independent monitoring of those. We are not doing any of the restoration ourselves. We are just brought in to monitor select projects. We do monitoring for up to two years after, uh, the construction of the project. And this is to provide data for, provide monitoring data so that people like Brevard Zoo and others who went on in the county here can make decisions on what's working, what's not working, and, uh, use the adapter, um, uh, management and restoration projects. Um, projects started off with a lot of garden oysters, as you showed before, in, uh, shell bags. Um, we used, we worked at a lot of northern Indian River Lagoon sites and learned over time things, you know, there are better ways to do it. Um, and a lot of projects now are taking advantage of natural recruitment and there's better site collection, uh, going to newer materials, less plastic, and so there's a lot of new things coming along. So, um, that's how that's been going. Just a quick review of an oyster life cycle because that does have a role in how restoration, uh, succeeds or not. Oysters are reproduced when the adult, uh, males and females release sperm and egg into the water, okay, broadcast spawning. The sperm and egg mix, the eggs are fertilized over about, approximately about two weeks. Those eggs, uh, grow up and they turn into free swimming larvae, um, and just for reference, the size of this larvae, like this, just before they settle and when they initially first settle, is about a quarter of a millimeter, okay? So, very, very tiny. At, when they, after about two weeks or so, once they're mature enough and they find, if they're able to find a nice hard substrate, they prefer oyster shell, um, but if I find a nice hard substrate, they will settle and attach onto that other, that hard substrate and start growing, okay? Now, they will then grow up into adults in, uh, here in Florida. That can take anywhere from three to 12 months before they get to reproductive size, and for comparison, at least in the past, it was two to three years or more in Chesapeake Bay, where they're, you know, colder conditions and so forth. Um, we've looked at a bunch of different sites over the years, um, the sites shown in yellow here are the ones I'm going to talk about here today. Um, the northernmost site here is McNabb, okay, in Cocoa Beach, okay? It's north of, uh, the Pineda Causeway, a little bit, uh, for reference there. Uh, Rainwater is this site here just down south, just south of the, uh, O'Galley Causeway, just out offshore where the, uh, O'Galley River comes in. Um, let's see, go. Number 13 down in the, uh, yellow, uh, circle there down in the southern part there is, uh, Turkey Creek offshore, which is, uh, in the lagoon about half a mile. And then the last one is, uh, just south of the Pineda Causeway, um, the Banana River pilot project. So these are the ones I'm going to be talking about here today. Um, monitoring methods that we've been using, where these are established, the protocol was established with, uh, in 2018 in coordination between the C-Lab, what methods, you know, you know, standard monitoring methods and with, in consultation with, uh, Bavari County Natural Resources Management folks. Um, they have been modified somewhat over time to accommodate new restoration materials and methods and, um, um, so that we're able to keep up with what's going on and we're providing relevant data. Monitoring for other breakwaters or the oyster barge rolls, for oyster survival, recruitment and growth, among other things, occurs at one month, three months, six months, 12, 18, 24 months after deployment of the, uh, the structure. Um, samples for selected for monitoring and a minimum ratio of one sample for, uh, 25 feet of breakwater or module length. Um, we've been doing, um, in some cases more than that. Samples are collected of all that we pull are collected of all living oysters from a two square foot or a quarter square meter quadrat per sample site. Two square foot quadrat is used when we're comparing, um, two samples that are, uh, gabion because they have two square foot area, surface area. Um, whether we're not trying to compare two, um, gabions, we use a standard quarter square meter quadrat. Um, all samples after they've been counted on shore or whatnot are then returned to the sample site, um, you know, immediately for afterwards. Um, so they're, they're all returned back to the site within the, you know, a couple hours. Um, the sensitive data include, um, number of live oysters per sample, shell heights, that is the measurement of size of the first, uh, 50 randomly selected oysters from the sample. Okay, first site we're going to talk about is, uh, McNabb Park. Like I said, this is up in Cocoa Beach. Um, it is, and it's located along a side of a small park there, um, along sort of a dredge canal and dredge channel, and as well as some sites across the channel next to some, uh, mangroves. Um, this is a challenging site for restoration. Um, it, because of that they used different methods trying to see which one, what might work best. They used both gabions and structures called, um, cement jute prisms. These are triangular structures or prism structures to help hold shell in place. Um, again, this is an area north of where there's reliable, um, natural recruitment or any natural recruitment. Um, so this was seeded with both gardened oysters and spat on shell oysters. Okay, gardened oysters are like what, um, has already been described. Um, spat on shell oysters are where oyster shell, like would be used as colch. They've been placed in an area where there's a lot of oyster, uh, recruitment, natural recruitment going on, and then they're brought on to the site. They used spat on shell, uh, where they had been previously set out at the hog point, uh, site. They tried using spat on shell coming from a oyster hatchery. The oyster hatchery was unable to provide any, um, any spat for them. So that's why they went to the more natural recruitment from a site, uh, natural site down at hog point. All the modules are subtitled. The modules are constructed a couple of several different times, whatnot, between April and July of 2023. We did the final monitoring, uh, this past July. Um, and the map here shows you sort of a variety of the different treatments that were used. Some were in, uh, gabions next to the mangroves, and they used both gardened oysters as well as spat on shell oysters. The densities of spat of seeding went from anywhere from like 177 live oysters per square meter to over 2500 square oysters per square meter for the spat on shell. We also tried with, uh, prisms, and there are rows of gabions and prisms with different treatments along this seawall there. There are a total of seven different, uh, treatment strategies that were tested and tried out. However, after two years, none of these treatments met the criteria for sustaining success as described by the Brevard County, uh, oyster habitat, uh, suitability and rehabilitation success plan. So this is a very difficult place, um, to work with. There are still a few oysters surviving there, but the recruitment, the oyster numbers were very, very low and recruitment was extremely low or non-existent. In contrast, rainwater. This is, um, a site there, uh, just south of the O'Galley River, south of the, um, O'Galley Causeway. It's on the west side of the, uh, Indy River. There are seven modules there. There were four, well, seven, six of them were, uh, corrals, four of them were gabion corrals, two were coquina corrals, and there was, for control, there was one of these, uh, a module constructed of metal gabions. All the modules are subtitled. In this location, natural recruitment provided all the oysters. They did not see this site at all. This was constructed in September to October of 2023. 18-month monitoring was, um, completed this past April. We'll be doing the last monitoring, uh, at the end of this month and the next month. Um, in April of 2025, we had very large numbers of oysters. So the oyster modules are located both on the eastern side of this point, around the north end of the point, and a little bit into this, um, embayment here. The O'Galley River is coming out across, you know, just north of this site here. Um, as you can see for the oyster densities, uh, this past April, they went from a low of, um, just under 500 oysters per square meter in the embayment area here to over, you know, 2,000 oysters per square meter out along this outer part here. Um, so oyster, by the success criteria, this would be sustaining. We'll do a final analysis of that, um, when we finish monitoring, uh, later this month. Um, if you look at the note, this graph here shows the number of live oysters in each, um, time period, each of the different kinds of modules. Um, and what this shows is that there was an initial spike of recruitment right after they deployed these, um, these modules. So they all started off with zero oysters on the shell coast that they put there. Okay? Within, you know, a couple months, there were thousands and thousands in there. Okay? Per square meter. Now, it decreased by April of that year. That's because these tiny little oyster spread, the, as they're growing, you saw a picture there, previous slide, uh, talk, where there could be hundreds on an individual shell. As they grow, they crowd each other out. There's also predation from crabs and other things in there. So the oyster numbers naturally would decrease, um, they decrease somewhat. But again, by the following fall, there was an increase in numbers again. Okay? So it's sort of a cyclical. But what the things that indicates is that there is recruitment going on, and it's been going on there for a couple of years. Okay? Um, we see that in terms of the average shell heights. Okay? This refers to how big the oysters are. Okay? We saw an increase in sizes here through the first year after those initial ones. These initial sizes are extremely small. Those are the, you know, the first set of oysters. They start off about a quarter square meter when they first settle, and they grow up, um, start growing fairly rapidly. Um, by, you know, the first spring, they're pretty, you know, getting pretty decent size. This decrease in size here is because there's a new flux of tiny little oysters matching, you know, outnumbering the, uh, the larger ones. But notice the size ranges here. And then by the end, by last spring, sizes are going up again. Um, we only have data for the gabion corrals and the coquina corrals for the last time period because we could not get into the gabion modules. The gabion modules are, as you saw, they're a metal cage filled with oyster shell. Oysters grow, settle in there on those shell that's inside the gabion, but then they grow. They grow up out through there. This is a picture here showing what one of those gabions looked like in last April. You can see a tiny little bit of metal here of the gabion itself, and the rest is all covered over the oysters. There's 90 to 100% cover of the gabions here. We could not break into these things without, you know, destroying the reef. Okay? This is where we did use a visual inspection to get numbers, but we could not go in there and actually measure those sizes and everything like that. This is a great problem to have. When you look at the sizes here, again, I want to point out that this is natural recruitment here. We'll look at this bottom graph here. The line here shows the relative sizes, the numbers of the different sized oysters in the initial monitoring we did in November of 2023. The vast majority of all the oysters were in the smallest size range. It's basically one to 10 millimeter sizes. Okay? Then they decreased. The largest ones were just under 50 millimeters. They started growing larger and larger. This black line here shows what we measured a year ago. And you see that there's another large number of small oysters in there. That's that second pulse, another year's worth of pulse of new recruitment happening there. So again, this is indicating that this is likely to be a well, you know, a sustaining site. So not only are there large numbers, but there's recruitment. There are two aspects to the success criteria. Not just numbers, but is there natural recruitment happening? And this indicates that they suggest that that's really happening. We'll get better. We'll really be able to confirm this by the end of this month. But also notice the sizes are getting bigger and bigger. The initial monitoring, we didn't have anything over 50 millimeters. Last spring, we had sizes that were over, you know, 15 centimeters to 150 millimeters or larger. Okay? Those are very large oysters that have been settling there and they've grown there in, you know, in this case, in 18 months. So that site looks pretty good. Turkey Creek Offshore, this is the southernmost site that we've been looking at that we've been monitoring here now. This was constructed last fall on one of these submerged spoiler islands southeast of the mouth of Turkey Creek. It's about half a mile offshore. Okay? For reference, Castaway Cove, which we've monitored in the past, is located up here, and Wexford is located down here. Both of these did very well. Turkey Creek is composed of eight modules, four gabion corrals, four coquina corrals. All of these are subtitled. This past week, they were quite subtitled. There's natural recruitment of oysters on these modules. They were constructed in September to October of last year. Six-month monitoring was completed last April. We were just out there this past, you know, Monday and Tuesday of this week. And so far, the results are looking good. What I have here are the numbers through April. Initial number of oysters per sample, okay? Initially, there were over 600 oysters per sample, average. Increase we saw when we did the January of the three-month monitoring. That may be because there were small ones that we could not see in our field measurements, why not, that, you know, just grew up to be larger. There was a decrease by April. Again, there is no recruitment during the winter months, but there is mortality due to overcrowding, predation, things like that. But even in April, there were over 1400 live oysters per square meter, okay? The size of the oysters shows a similar pattern to what we saw at Rainwater. Initially, all the oysters are very, you know, quite small, but they are getting bigger and bigger, okay? And just in terms of the numbers here, a brief overview from what we collected this past, you know, earlier this week. There was an average of over 900 oysters per square meter from what we were monitoring this past year, which, over 900 per square per sample, which corresponds to over 3,700 live oysters per square meter on what we looked at this past week. So, we'll bet, you know, final numbers and all that sort of results when we get a report written, but there hasn't been time on that. The last side we're going to talk about is the Banana River Pilot Oyster Project. This is up in the Banana River, an area that has historic, at least during the restoration work, has had low natural recruitment. This is located south of the Pineda Causeway, and it's located along these mangrove islands, along the edge of these mangrove islands here along the eastern side of the Banana River. This is constructed with coquino corrals, okay? Coquino walls and just culture in the middle. Because this is an area that's historically had low rates of natural recruitment, this is seeded with garden oysters. And the oysters that were brought into seed here were left, which is good in this case, I think, is that they were left as in the clusters that came out of the cages from the oyster gardeners and whatnot. So, I think that has helped increase survival. It was constructed last fall, in September to October. We did a six-month monitoring this past April. We will be doing the next 12-month monitoring later in November. At the six-month monitoring, there is an average of over 350 live oysters per square meter. The size ranges stay pretty consistent, although this blue line here represents the sizes when we first monitored a month after deployment. And these seem to indicate that there has been oyster growth since that time period. So, the oysters are surviving, and they're growing in that site. It would be very interesting to see if there's recruitment will go back there in November. Finally, the last thing that UC Lab has been involved, is getting involved with, is looking at some of the clam monitoring. Right now, the clam monitoring involves doing monitoring of sites, pre-monitoring of sites, where there is planned clam releases. Okay, the pre-monitoring began in September, this past September. Okay, and the purpose of that monitoring is to simply document the diversity, in other words, all the different kinds of bivalves that are in that area. Okay, not see if there are any hard clams there, but also see what else is in the area, and see how many of those that are there. Okay, so Dr. Donnelly is leading up that part. They're just doing the initial pre-monitoring of that, so to see what is actually there before any seeding goes on. All right, she would be better able to answer those questions, and they'll be better at understanding what's going on after they complete all that sort of work. So, if you have any questions, thank you very much. Questions. Go ahead, Nick. All right, so we've all been kind of talking about the rain event that we've had, and all the rain that's in the lagoon right now, all that fresh water, do you see that impacting the health of the oysters? When we were at Turkey Creek this past, you know, being of the week, salinities were about 20 parts per thousand, which is in, well within the ranges of oysters you're able to tolerate, and it's not really out of the range of anything that we've seen so far over the several years we've been working. Good, good, that's good to hear. So it's getting diluted, but it's also, there's a ton of water moving south. When we were at Turkey Creek on Monday and Tuesday, if you let go of the reef, you were washed off the reef within seconds. So, um, currents are very, there's a lot of water moving out there right now, so. Glad to hear, salinity's still pretty good. But, um, and the oysters we saw all looked great. Great. This is really more of a comment, but a comment on what Nick said about the rain, and, of course, after, uh, October 1st, the fertilizer ban stopped, and I know where I live, they were spraying fertilizer all over the place. I would imagine that's probably kind of common. So, uh, you know, maybe adjusting this fertilizer ban to accommodate the actual conditions as opposed to due to an out-of-calendar event and how that affects the lagoon and the, uh, the restoration efforts, I guess, will be determined. Can I add something, or, okay. I just wanted to add on the, um, projects that Paul spoke about. Um, the Cocoa Beach McNabb project was a city project put into the plan a few years ago, and that was one of the furthest north projects in the Banana River Lagoon, so we knew there would be some risk with that, um, and we learned a lot from that project, and so now we're moving forward with that, the zoo's Banana River pilot project, so we're trying to see that recruitment move from the south up north. Yes. Yeah, we did, years ago, there was projects at Marina Isles done at the south end of Banana River, and it did have some recruitment there at the mouth of it, of Banana River. So, other projects further north and up into some of the canals had no recruitment there. So, yep, Banana River pilot will be very interesting to see what it looks like next month. Um, that, maybe this is a premature question, but, um, I know in the past we've sort of had a couple of instances where we were choosing between a, a, uh, clam and an oyster project, I think, to, to fund. Um, do we have any insights on what's the more efficient use of dollars at this point, based on, you know, what's going on out there? I don't have any basis for which to answer that question. Yeah. Our, our project has been focusing on how is the specific oyster project doing in terms of, you know, number of oysters, size of the oysters, that sort of thing. Um, comparing to, comparing costs, comparing to other types of projects, you know, clams or whatnot, we have not been involved with any of that sort of thing. To expand on that, um, as it says on the slide there, they just did the pre-monitoring in September. So the clam projects haven't actually been deployed yet. So once they are, then we'll be doing post-monitoring. Um, I think we're doing like three, six and 12 and 18 month, um, surveys to see how they do. So we'll have something in the next year or two with that. Or Don. Sure. Uh, for the McNabb project, you said you use prisms, uh, the, the jute fabric prisms. Is that the Mark Clark from UF method? Yes. Uh, I know that Mark had gone through different iterations of combinations to create the slurry mix that's used to hold that together. How long did those prisms last? Um, again, we were not, we were not involved with the construction, but we did monitor those things. The prisms themselves, um, were pretty much, they were completely degraded by this July. They were going, they were getting soft and going to pieces, um, within six or so months. Yeah. So, um, similar. But that, I have heard that in places where oysters cover them completely up with, you know, so there's, you know, excellent recruitment and whatnot, um, they are reported to have, you know, last pretty well. Um, in this case that did not happen. Um, so I'm not sure, you know, that that may have been a factor as much as anything else, as opposed to, you know, what mixture of cement and jute that they used. Um, so there, there's a lot of factors there that you should consider before you are saying one thing's better than another. Right. So. No, that's very, very good. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Since you brought up the Marina Isles project, I want to ask a question that's related to that. Barbara was actually instrumental in having that site created originally as a pilot project. I was in the water one afternoon helping to lay those flags and watch the, uh, project fail, essentially, um, in those times. And to the question that was raised much earlier about fish and other creatures in those reefs, it was fantastic to see what happened there initially. And then the sedimentation and so forth, uh, impacted that. And for most people who don't know, that, uh, site is about just less than a mile north of Dragon Point where the Indian and Banana Rivers come together. So I'm anxious to see what happens in that northernmost Banana River project that you're working on right now. But my question is, when I looked at the two successful sites that you showed us pictures of at O'Galley, the O'Galley River, and then the one farther south, the, um, those two photographs of what the oysters look like were substantially different. And I immediately reacted to this, the O'Galley photograph, because that was what that, um, growth, um, whether it's algae or plant material or whatever, um, that actually occurred very quickly at the Marina Isle site. So is there any significance in those two sites in terms of, um, that, that growth? Or why is it that we're seeing different kinds of pictures from those two reefs? Okay. From Turkey Creek and, um, rainwater. Okay. Um, they're sort of more in the open lagoon. There's a lot more water flow past those sites. Um, and there's a, a ton of recruitment in both those sites. I mean, we've. Well, we have, um, you said there was some recruitment of Marine Isles, but there also, the Mathers Bridge is right there. So there's quite a bit of boat traffic. I also know coming out of both those other locations, there's boat traffic because of the rivers that come in there. So I, I'm just wondering if it's just. I think to really address that, you'd have to look a lot more at how much water flow and comparing the sites between, you know, the amount of water flow. Um, there were different methods being used. Um, so there's a lot more to site characteristics there than, you know, do they would need to look at to really be able to answer those kinds of questions. So, um. But at this point, both those sites aren't successful. Turkey Creek and, um, I mean, we're only, you know, getting started on that, but Turkey Creek looks like, it looks like it's very successful and, um, rainwater also looks very successful. I mean, in terms of oysters, but you also mentioned number of fish, why not? Um, we've seen fishermen around both of those, um, there are fishermen, you know, on Monday there at Turkey Creek commenting that, you know, all those fish that they're able to, you know, that they see and catch around there, why not? There's a lot of, there's a lot going on there, but we've seen it at, you know, rainwater as well. So. Do you have a question, Barbara? Okay. I do have a comment just in case you can see you're terming it rainwater, but that's really the point at Ballard, right? Ballard Park Point. Um, it's just, just to the south. I'm thinking it's right before going into the. Okay. So Ballard Point Park. So Ballard Park is here. And this is a little point just further out from that. So, um, I think this, so Ballard Park is where this little loop, the road loop is located here. This is the, you know, Hill Galley River coming out here. So this is a little bit further out into. This is across from that, right? Yeah. Yeah. So if you go to the park, you look right across, there's a house and there's a point there. Um. So you're saying rainwater, are you talking about the owner's rainwater? Mm-hmm. And that's why you call it rainwater? Mm-hmm. I believe they own that point, if that's what you're talking about. That's the point. Mm-hmm. And Ballard Park is right down below. Yeah. Ballard Park is going to be. Okay. Over in this area here. So that's where that is. Yeah. Thank you. Yep. Yeah. I'm trying to envision, um, the, uh, gamete production. Gamete production is in, uh, late summer. And, um, it starts when the water starts getting warm. So late, late summer. Okay. When you start a water start, it'll start in March and April. Sure. But there's a really big pulse, it seems, here in the Indian River in late summer or going into fall. Okay. And then the best chance for fertilization would be right over the reef. Where there's sperm and egg are released, yeah. Yeah. So calm conditions would be really, really good to have during those periods. I have not studied the reproductive process. Yeah. I'm just, I'm just trying to envision the whole process here. Yeah. Um, so. So. And we do have a question from Fred, um, Goldstein on the genetic, uh, makeup of these and whether there's any genetic work being done on, on. I think there's been done, but I, genetic work has been done, but I'm not familiar with that. I've not looked in that sort of thing. Um, I know initially, early on, when we talked about trying to, there's talk of trying to get more oyster filtration going on and reestablishing oysters in, um, the Indian River Lagoon. Based on our success up in the Mesquita Lagoon, there's some thought of trying to bring oysters, garden oysters and whatnot from, uh, if you will, from Mesquita Lagoon into the Indian River Lagoon. But apparently decades ago, somebody had done enough, there had been found that there's a slight distinction, genetic distinction between the two sets of oysters, so that we're not allowed to bring oysters from Mesquita Lagoon into the Indian River Lagoon. Um, although apparently that does not apply to bringing clams from anywhere to anywhere. So, um, so that was something that, that's as much as I'm aware of. Okay. So. For instance, uh, when, when the, um, pilot project in the Banana River was built and those garden oysters were used, those garden oysters are probably from everywhere within the Indian River Lagoon system. Uh, you would have to ask people from the Vard Zoo and people who are involved in collecting and organizing all the garden oysters. We just, to be honest, we, we count the oyster, we go out there, we count the oysters, see how big they are, that sort of thing, and we have not done anything beyond that. That's, that's good. Doing the genetics is beyond our, uh. Yeah, this is, this is Fred's question, so I'm trying to just make sure that it's, it's answered. Can I help in, like, real quick? Um, for garden oysters, uh, so we collect, we collect wild brood stock, uh, specifically from the Brevard County portion. So we have a special activities license with FWC, and we are, uh, confined to the genetic kind of area of Brevard County for our collection. So anything that we're using for gardening that then goes out is from, like, a Brevard County brood stock. Okay. Just, okay. Yeah. So, so complete. Yeah. Well, that sort of makes sense that the ones that are here are adapted for this location. Okay. To start bringing them in from elsewhere, they may not be as, you know, adapted for these specific conditions here, so. Well, Fred, I hope that answered your question. Aaron. Oh, Aaron. Okay. Aaron. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. So we have a video. Is that next? Yes. This is a video, um, to kind of preface Jenny's talk on the, um, seagrass restoration project that she's going to talk about. Good. Thank you. We are here today at William J. Manzo Memorial Park in Titusville to plant seagrass to better understand seagrass restoration in the Indian River Lagoon. Seagrass has been on the decline in the lagoon over the past decade or so due to excess nutrients that have entered our waters, which fuel algal blooms that shade the light that seagrasses need to survive. And so we're helping with this project in monitoring it over a two-year period to help to understand methods that might best support future restoration efforts. This project is an experimental design that was put together by Brevard County. We AquaTech eco consultants are out here executing that experimental design for them. And what they're doing is they're testing out some different seagrass transplanting methods. Throughout the site, we have different planting plots in which we're employing different planting methods and then also different protections for some of those planting units. We've got three different planting units that we're using here. One of them is our nine inch peat pots. So those have a specific number of shoots of our shoal grass inside of them. And then we also have a smaller version of that, which is called a seagrass plug, which has a lower shoot density, but of the same species of seagrass. And then our third and final planting unit is going to be a staple unit. So those are also a very specific number of shoots that are fastened onto a staple in order to help secure that planting unit with the roots under the sediment surface and the shoots coming up out of the surface. So with the enclosures, we're trying out a couple of different methods to protect some of the planting units from herbivory. We've got one which is called the herbivory exclusion device, which is essentially a closed top cage that's going to be placed over top of the units. And then we've also got some exclusion fencing, which will rise up above the water level and provide similar protection for the planting units as well. We're also trying out some planting units that don't have any protections in place just to see how those fare. We will be monitoring the project by deploying sensors that look at dissolved oxygen, light, the temperature, the salinity of the water, all these things that impact seagrass growth and survival so that we know how the response might be tied to our environment. And then we'll also be monitoring the grass itself to see how it's growing and spreading over the next couple of years. We're going to be trying out this same experimental design in two different locations in the Indian River Lagoon. This first one's going to be happening right here in Titusville, Florida, and then the second one will be occurring in Melbourne Beach, Florida. Seagrass is actually the base of our food chain here in the Indian River Lagoon. It is our primary producer. It's one of our key foundation species. So without the seagrass, things like manatees, turtles don't have the food that they need to grow and thrive here in the Indian River Lagoon. Seagrass is also a nursery ground for many of our important recreational and sport fisheries. It's a place where a lot of different types of invertebrates and vertebrates grow and transfer back and forth to neighboring systems like oyster reefs. And when they're large meadows can attenuate waves and they help protect our shorelines. So they serve many, many purposes when we have those nice robust healthy seagrasses and they can sequester or recycle nutrients and carbon just like the rainforest. This project is being made possible by a number of grants. One is in partnership with the Brevard County Tourism and Development Council grant program. One was through the Florida Department of Environmental Protection Resiliency grants and then we have MATCH coming from the Save Our Indian River Lagoon Program. In the last decade we've seen a decline in seagrass in the lagoon mainly from algae blooms that block the sunlight that they need to survive. It's important to reduce the excess nutrients that are feeding the algae and we can do this by tackling the sources of that pollution. Things like reducing the contributions to stormwater by doing simple things like keeping our grass clippings off of our driveways and roadways by reducing or eliminating the use of fertilizer, picking up our pet waste or making sure we maintain our cars properly so they're not leaking oil and other fluids onto the roadways that wash down into our lagoon. Thank you. Jenny, if you'd introduce yourself. Again, we have about 50% turnover so make sure that everybody knows who you are and where you've been. Sure. I'm Jenny Hansen. I am here today as an environmental scientist with Brevard County. I work as a temp peer periodically to help out with seeing this, as you saw, somewhat massive and complicated project through its completion hopefully. But it's really awkward to see yourself on a video so it's fun to follow myself but nice because I'm glad that was there. It helps a lot with the background behind this project. So today I just want to give you kind of an update on where we are. We planted that video that you just saw. The project was planted in June, July, late June, early July of 2024. So we are one year out and it was, as you just heard, put in place in order to help us understand different restoration methods and how we may influence our efficiency and effectiveness of seagrass restoration. So we had an acre and a half of seagrass that we were given grant funding for to plant and we spread that over two distinct locations to help, again, look into this. Does augmentation, can we augment seagrass recovery through restoration efforts? What does that look like? What are different efficiencies that we might be able to look into by how we do it and help address some specific questions through an experimental design within that restoration to inform future restoration efforts? The two sites, the one the video was recorded at is the one you see on the upper right panel at William J Manzo Park in Titusville and the one on the lower right panel is the site in Melbourne Beach at Hogpoint Cove, which is adjacent to environmentally endangered lands. At the lower site, which I'm only briefly going to touch on today and I'll tell you why in a little while, is also an oyster bar project that was coupled with this to attempt to try to look at co-restoration of these two sites, maybe help improve some site conditions by having them there. I will say off the bat right now, this is just one instance of trying that out, so keep that in mind. The way we chose these sites, we worked off of the product that was led by Dr. Mark Fonseca in cooperation with the county and a number of other partners, including St. John's and a few others, to attempt to quantify the risk associated with seagrass restoration through a site suitability mapping project. So with this, sites were scored based on seagrass presence, water quality indices, and a number of other factors, water depth, to create what you see in the upper two panels there with grid boxes from a GIS model that gave us a total score on how risky it might be to plant seagrass. So the upper, or the left in this case is the site in Titusville and the right is in Hogpoint. And on the left there, you see that there are green boxes, which indicates maybe a lower risk, and we did actually have some seagrass already naturally growing at this site at a fairly low overall percent coverage. So it's only about two to five percent, but there was existing grass, which can be a good indicator that it's there, so it could do well there. And then at, but you know, do we need to restore or not? So that's a big question the restoration community is facing. On the other side, you see that there is potentially suitable habitat or areas on either side, but not right directly in the middle of that cove. As we went back into the historical record though, because this only incorporated recent seagrass presence, at both of those locations on the lower panels, this is older, it's from the mid-20 teens that this map, that those maps were generated, but it looks at the historical record from the St. Johns River Water Management District's long-term monitoring to see how often seagrass had been present all the way back to the 1940s, and over the record of time that that was collected, you see the orange indicates somewhere around 12 to 14 years probably of seagrass showing up on seagrass maps. So both sites had a historic potential presence, but one still had seagrass and one definitely did not. So that kind of adds a layer to the comparisons that we're making, and they're very different sites. They're in different areas of the lagoon and they're on different sides of the lagoon, both which can play into results. So to get into some of the specifics of what we wanted to look at when we talk about those methods, we chose five treatments. This ended up giving us a stepwise comparison between them. What I'd like to draw attention to in this picture that I have up is if you look at the very bottom across all five treatments, we had a consistent number of shoots placed in an eight by eight square meter test area, which was replicated five times at each site. So we have internal replication within a location, and on that 64 square meter area, we kept our density of shoots deployed the same for four of the treatments. Treatment five is a standard that you may see a couple different restoration groups trying that disperses larger clumps with smaller clumps at a overall lower density, and so we wanted to kind of compare to that. So five kind of stands alone as its own thing. When we drilled down into treatments one through four, we started to look at things related to what anchoring material was used and how the clustering of the seagrass may affect what we found. So the mosaic that was laid out and the excluder device type. So in the upper portion, you see that there's all these different materials listed, but they did maintain three of the treatments one through three had the same number of shoots planted within a square meter. The other one, we had smaller little clusters of seagrass, but much more of them placed to keep our overall density the same. So the specific questions we could address with this in our restoration plots were looking at do different herbivory exclusion devices, so fenced enclosures like you saw in the video versus the cages that have the tops and a smaller mesh size. Does that have an effect? And so we kept our material type, the staples the same, and that way we could compare between treatments one and treatments two. The next question would be, how does the anchoring method change? So we went from staples to peat pots that allows us to compare between treatment two and treatment three. And then what is the effect of the planting mosaic? So again, that size of the clump, which by keeping caging and peat pots the same, we were able to compare treatment three to treatment four. And finally, overall, does having that 1900 shoots per square or 64 square meters make a difference compared to a lower number? Best laid intentions, as you'll see as we continue. The science is messy. So we planted, as you saw again in the video, I don't have to go too much into here. At these two locations, we've got a picture of the seagrass looking through those fences, and then some that did not have an excluder over them whatsoever. And we are monitoring continuously for a number of environmental parameters, which you can see on the left, and also calibrating our sensors and collecting some additional information on things like the total dissolved solids, the nutrient concentrations. We have some sediment plates out for accretion erosion that we check when we go out on our monitoring. We did with a contractor at Ecological Associates. They have been doing the biological monitoring for this following protocols developed that St. Johns River Water Management District uses in their long-term transects. They went monthly for six months and then switched to a quarterly schedule. And we are now in the second year. So they have three more events to go before the conclusion of this project. I think that's where we are. So to cover three-quarters of an acre in a semi-efficient way, we looked at taking six random samples from each of these eight by eight plot sizes, which left us with three that were targeted inside an excluder device. Again, best laid plans. I'll get into what happened. And three additional randomized plots so that we could get a look at kind of the overall recovery. And then we set aside outside of our project area where we planted completely off to the side, they run transects to collect an additional 171 quadrats for background. So as you start to do this scale up, six plots, five plots per site, two sites, five treatments, it gets, we're talking hundreds of samples that are taken every time they go out, at least a hundred, over a hundred. And they look for things like epiphyte cover, the percent occurrence of seagrass, which was how many squares, I'll get that in a second, and percent cover, shoe density and canopy height. I forgot that I had this. So how they monitor, we have a quad, that's a grade on the bottom shows you our hundred square grid quadrat. So they lay a PVC down with a hundred squares in it, each 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter. And percent occurrence is the number of those plots that have a seagrass shoot within them. Percent cover is a push of the overall coverage. And then they pick specific locations to measure the number of shoots present within a small cell. So what I wanted to highlight in this is that methods can inform, but also need to be thought about as we look at our results. Orange boxes show how treatments one through three would have been laid out as specific individual seagrass plantings. And the blue shows how treatment four would lay out within a quad. So if you were to go and actually lay your quadrat down specifically where things were planted, you can already see that you're going to have a different starting density. You're going to potentially have a different overall than percent cover because there's only four squares that had something planted in it on one, and there's 14 for the other. And how that lays out will affect something like our percent occurrence. There's already obviously more there. So as we try to look at the data, this all becomes things we have to consider. Additionally, when we look at a shoot count, the red is where they count shoots within a quadrat. All four of the four planting units could theoretically be counted. However, only one of the orange actually would be looked at. This is not necessarily an issue though, because over time, seagrass is going to hopefully grow in and even itself out. So this is just something like early on when we're monitoring, we have to keep this in mind. But over time, when we start to look across the whole area, we've taken random samples from all over. You lay a quad down and it may or may not be exactly specifically where something was planted. We start to just get more of an upper scale view of how these things may compare to each other. But I just, I just kind of wanted to bring this up as it gets really complicated and really messy. And that's something we're going to continue to work through as we go through this next year. Um, so what we found, a hog point, um, I tried to keep little pictures above those and keep our color codes the same. We only had three events shown here out of the year. And that is because, unfortunately, it was not a successful project at that location. Um, within the first month, we had lost, either lost or by random chance of where they monitored, did not have a presence in our, one of our treatments. Um, and at the other sites, after three months, there was nothing left. Um, it, on the bottom panel, it shows our cell counts by whether it was cage drawn cage. And you can see that they were consistently only finding seagrass within the excluders at that site. Um, but again, after three months, it was, it was not, uh, nothing was left. So we've now closed that out a year early. Nothing has recovered, unfortunately, through this continued, continued through this growing season. Um, so going on to some that actually, uh, is maybe exciting for a different reason. We had seagrass growth at the Titusville site. So this shows the percent occurrence, the number of cells that had shoots in them, sort of the spread of seagrass over the site by the different treatments in the upper panel. So the different color represents those different methods. Um, a number of statistical analysis we're on, I don't want to go too deep into all of it because it's something that we're going to continue to develop. There were, there definitely was a difference over time, both in the control area, which is the dark blue, and over our planting region. Um, there's also some differences between treatments, but it changes sort of periodically over time. A couple of things I would really like to know, we had three hurricanes hit our project as soon as it was deployed. So it was a rough start. And that also really complicated our exclusion device, um, question. So when we look below it, herbivory by, uh, herbivory exclusion only at different months, you see kind of a shift between the red and the blue bar where the uncaged did better than the caged. That could be things like fouling destruction of cages as they sort of deteriorated over time. But also those hurricanes, they kind of did a number on moving things around. So what we thought was when they did the data, uh, collection, they would look at where the cage was at that moment and if it was there or not there. But that means that there's sort of an uneven number of samples that cage might've been here one time and here another time. So it wasn't evenly caged as over the whole period. Um, so really trying to address any questions related to the caging has become very complicated and we'll see if we can tease anything out over the next year. Also to note, um, after one year, all herbivory exclusion is removed. So at this point, now we're going to look at another year's worth of data without any sort of exclusion being present and see how the seagrass continues to do, which I'm excited for. And lastly, as just kind of an aside here, um, we looked specifically at these caging materials in a different way to see how they might impact light. And with that, um, you see a control plot on the left, the middle, the one right next to it is the area where seagrass would be planted but didn't have any sort of exclusion over it. Um, basically it's the same as the control in this case because our canopy heights didn't overtop the, um, probably didn't really overtop the sensors. Uh, the fence, um, the, the next bar is the fencing material. And then the last one is the caging material. This data was pulled from the verb, like very, very early on June to July, right after deployment of our project. And, um, this trend does change a bit depending on as time goes on cages, foul things move. We did start to see some differences in comparing, but as a take home, when things are newly put out, you do get an initial decline. So the bars represent the, what we predicted light to be based on just natural attenuation in the water at the site versus what they actually were being measured at with the sensor deployed within the cage. And, uh, we did see that there was a decline, uh, there's a increased percent reduction in light. It doesn't mean there's not enough light reaching the seagrass. In fact, PAR sensors were deployed, the photosynthetic active radiation, whenever the, um, monitoring team goes out and they said there really were only a few events that they were there and there was where light was truly limiting. So this doesn't mean that light becomes limited. It's just something to factor in when you're thinking about your site selection and which sort of material you may use. It's also important that this is specific to these cages with the, um, smaller mesh size. So finally, some early lessons, um, with sufficient light, it does seem like from our project, uh, the Titusville site, we had an initial increase in seagrass over control and it continued. Um, in fact, by percent cover, we started at less than 5%. We ended up at, uh, this new growing season, we had 20 or 15% cover in the, um, control area. So just natural recovery, but a couple of the treatments are over 20% cover in the, um, planted area. So I can't say if it's statistically significant, but at least we see a little bit of a bump happening. Um, but something like hog point that didn't do as well, there's probably some other site specific stressors at play. Also, um, there was, uh, improved, um, anchoring would be needed for deploying some of these cages. That was a big take home for us. If we could have kept them in place a little bit more readily, that could have helped us answer that question a lot easier. Um, it's also very hard to maintain them. They're, they're big and, and it's a big challenge, um, for any, anybody who's going out and maintaining cages. It's time consuming. Um, it's, it's a massive effort. And, uh, finally that we have a lot of continued, um, analysis to do. So this is very preliminary, um, answer, but we're excited to see what the next year brings. So with that, I would like to just acknowledge that it was a massive effort with a lot of partners and, um, a lot of funding sources to get this project in the water. And I'm excited to see where it continues to go. Questions? Uh, Laura Lee, still thinking. So that's, um, really outstanding. I mean, I, I knew you guys were doing that work there. We had like a resurgence of seagrass all along the west shore of, of the river along the Titusville shoreline that started in May and June. So, um, I'm looking at the really outstanding, um, results that you had at event eight in June, 2025. Um, do you attribute some of that to the natural recruitment of seagrass that happened in that area? So that's the dark blue bar. So this is the percent occurrence. So the spread of the seagrass, and you can see it did massively increase even in the area that wasn't planted. So there was recovery happening nearby, um, even outside of definitely outside of the restoration that was done. Yeah. Yeah. At least in this region of Titusville. It seemed miraculous. Let's hope it holds. Yeah. Any other questions? Uh, uh, Hog Point, the loss of seagrass there, do you attribute it to anything? I've got some ideas. You know, the water does tend to be a lot more turbid at that site. Um, I've even, um, so I think that could be part of it. I have a lot of analysis to do of light sensor data to see if that might show up. Um, like I said, this is preliminary. So we still have a long way to go. We have a lot of data to sort through. Um, this, this, this, what I presented today was what came out of the first annual report from the biological monitoring with our contractor. Um, the other part at Hog Point, we did notice some fine material being deposited a lot more than I'd noticed at the other site. I don't know what exactly is driving that. If it was seasonal, just rapid, the sediments in the lagoon can change quite rapidly at some sites. We have the sediment plates as another data set that I need to try to look into to see if we can actually capture if that might be part of it. And, um, we took some nutrient sampling. Um, we did not look at things like poor water sulfides, grain size, poor water salinities. Like we started doing that a little later. So I may have something in terms of salinity. So we have some other places we can start to look to see if we can tease out what might have happened there. It's just for a year. And so we've got a long way to go. But yeah, it's a very different site. Herbivory was not, um, there's nothing, we have no data to indicate herbivory or not because we don't have, you know, there's no cameras out there. We don't have any herbivory monitoring. We didn't do any fish monitoring. So I, I couldn't say one way or another if herbivory played a point because remember they moved, the cages moved less at the Hog Point site, but we did have those three hurricanes pop through. So it'd be hard to say one way or the other on that site. And sediment movement is, um, um, like, um, onshore, offshore or down, down lagoon, up down lagoon? No, I don't know at that spot specifically. We, we've seen a lot of different sites where the, I think there's an alongshore transport potentially happening. That one's right up against a big mangrove, mangrove fringe as well. So I don't know if it was wave action coming in, um, or if we had some attenuation of wave action coming in, or if it was even coming out of, um, I, I really, I probably shouldn't even try to guess. Yeah. That, that, that eastern side of the lagoon down in that area, there seems to be a lot of longshore transport. At other sites. Yeah. I definitely seen that. Yeah. Any other questions? Yeah. Sorry. Any thoughts on, um, and we see, you know, we see places that Titusville and Cocoa where it's growing back. Um, any coral correlation may be a bad word, but some of it, and we aren't seeing any fish come back there. And then we're seeing fish maybe somewhere else. Uh, but, uh, any thoughts on that? I'm not a fish expert. I don't know if I should wade into those waters. I mean, I think it's with any other organism, there's recruitment patterns. I will see stock that could be missing. Yeah. You know, I'm not, I'm not going everywhere every week or something, you know, you know, like all fishermen trying to fish a lot, but, uh, Banana River would be an example. I'm seeing, I'm seeing, uh, I spent a day there and saw, you know, grass coming back and it was clear and whatever, and, uh, basically no fish. And I, I just any, do y'all have any thoughts on that? Yeah. A lot of it's, a lot of it's, it's the strange retention time of the, of the lagoon. You know, the fact that we have only one inlet on the southern end and very little, and, and very little turnover in those northern parts. And we're seeing recovery almost the same direction as we saw loss. And so I think a lot of it has to do with flushing of the lagoon and, and how it, how it reacts. You might want to try a different mate. Different, different beer and different bait, right? Well, if anybody has, if anybody has any other thoughts in it, because, uh, it is important to a lot of, a lot of, a lot of us. I think one thing I will say, I guess, is that these are foundation species, seagrass, oysters. They, they matter not just to themselves, but to the fish community, to the invertebrate community without that structure, without those food sources, the whole cascade occurs. So it will take, it took time to lose it. It's going to take time for it to come back. Even restoration, it's a, it's, it's one piece of a much larger puzzle that Sorrell's, you know, it knows well, that's what we're trying to, we have to address the upstream problems like the nutrient reductions. This is not something we're going to plant our way out of. We're not going to, you know, the restoration is meant to augment, but the system has to also recover. So as one thing recovers, hopefully we'll start to see other things come in as well. And we'll continue to target like the fish habitat work that's going on, additional structures that are different to these different species to, to bring them back. I have, have some thoughts on your fish, fish, um, question. The, um, fish, you're going to find fish where the fish have find something to eat, you know, they're like meat. They're going to go where they can get something to eat. They're not going to hang out where there's nothing to eat. And, and the Calerpa that is all over the place really doesn't provide a good, as good of a habitat as like regular natural seagrass does for the other species that live in it. And up on the north end, we're seeing a different kind of Calerpa, Calerpa ashmediae. And I made the mistake of, um, taking some kids seining. I had a really nice spot of Hallidui at Beacon 42. That was real. I mean, it would, it would produce so much stuff and the kids would have so much fun. And then that got blanketed by, um, a lot of seagrass blades and they smothered it. So I had to go look for another place. So, um, one of the refuge biologists said, hey, there's a big spot at the northwest side of Hallover Canal and seagrass everywhere up there. Go try there. So here came the busload of kids and we had the tent all set up. And I sent the people out, you know, with the, with the sane nets and they came back and they, they put the sane net on the table and there was nothing in it. I mean, nothing, zero. There was like some little teeny half inch long fluorescent green shrimp. And that was it. And I said, well, you guys didn't hit the seagrass. That's impossible. But it ends up that this Calerpa ashmediae has four different toxins in it that are toxic to fish. And so if you're, if you're fishing in that kind of a habitat, the fish aren't going to be there. You got to look for the haloduli and rupia and the true seagrasses rather than something, you know, a big patch of green may not necessarily be a good place to look for fish. Which you can't see now because you can't see the bottom. Well, there's a good example. You know, fishing was good this week. You know, I hold up my hands. I apologize. Thank you, Laura. I'm going to jump off of Laura Lee's comment about the Calerpa. At the sites, did you see any recruitment of other seagrasses, rupia? Because you planted haloduli, correct? Was, was there Calerpa moving in? Was there drift algae on site as well? Or what did you see? There was some drift algae. I will, there was also some star grass present at the site before we started in Titusville. So when they did the, when we did baseline surveys, low, low overall coverage, two to five percent cover of haloduli, but there were a few small patches of star grass. And you can actually see in the third panel there on my title slide, that was from one of the, that was from the Titusville site. I don't remember which monitoring event, but you can see there's, there's red algae, there's star grass. So, and I think there's even some Calerpa in that picture. So yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of submerged vegetation that was all mixed in. But the monitoring, they separate all of the score, all of the data they collect by species. So. I guess my question is, is, is there Calerpa an impediment to the growth of the haloduli in those locations or? It's interesting. Oh, it's just funny you asked because in my other role, we just completed one year of a two-year study looking specifically at competition between Calerpa and seagrass. And this last year, this season, yes, there's a lot of Calerpa in the lagoon, but we also had an explosion of the Alesia slug, and it has eaten a lot of our Calerpa. So in trying to look at competition between our two species in the field, we actually lost most of the Calerpa we were trying to study. So like I said, science is messy. But the laboratory and mesocosm work, I'm happy to talk about it on the side, because I don't know how pertinent it is overall. There's different degrees of competition, could be through many different pathways, changes of sediment, changes to the phytotoxins that are produced by Calerpa potentially, and also the abundance of that Calerpa, like how much is actually present in the mesocosm study. That's specifically what a grad student in the C-Lab at UCF was looking at. And in repeated trials, the highest amount of Calerpa was the one that repeatedly had the impact, and the lower levels did not. So complicated, probably, reaction, inner reaction happening between them. Well, great presentation. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Yeah. All right. That's the end of presentation. So any old business. We do have one new business to look at it. And that's the calendar. And that's the end. That's the last page of your calendar for next year. And it is the same as as this year. So it hasn't changed at all. Any comments on that at all? Yeah, we do need a motion to approve. Okay. All in favor. All right. Any opposed? It passes. And then I just wanted to bring up next month, as Terry said, we'll be looking at projects, the 15 projects that we received, and selecting for the project plan for next year. So it's an important meeting to make. And that's when your business really starts. So, you know, just make sure you free up some time in December when the project plan comes together and we have a chance to review it. So those are really important times coming up. Any general public comments? I have a question. Yes. Go ahead. You want to go ahead, Kim? I was going to ask. I believe in the past we go through those projects together in the meeting next month. Is that correct? We'll go through those 15 submitted as a group here? You'll see them before the meeting. You'll get a copy of them before the meeting. And then you'll see the ones that are recommended by staff. And then we'll discuss them. They'll be presented and discussed. Yes. Okay. And then do the people who have put in those proposals, are they in attendance or is it just staff that talks to us? They are asked to come in case the committee has any questions. They can address, you can address the applicant. Okay, great. Thank you. Terry, for new business, kind of to Charlie's point that he brought up earlier with the fertilizer ban and the timing of it, is that something that we can discuss as part of this board, the like adjustment of that or the recommendation of adjusting that to fit more in line with natural systems and avoiding impacts from that? I think Brandon can help us out with that. Thanks, Brandon. That's a good point. Yeah. I'm actually not sure where the state stands right now. There was a stop. They stopped anyone from any counties from actually amending their fertilizer ordinance while they looked into literature and other things. They came out with a report, but I didn't hear what their regulations are right now if we can do any amendments at a county level or not. So I have not heard any progress on that. It just seems like a viable conversation to have. Yeah. At the right time, of course. There were one county that did implement a year-long ban, and then another one was thinking of doing a winter ban, and that's what sort of implemented the state to put a halt to any changes. Okay. In regards to making a recommendation, Nick, we've discussed that some in the past, and I think there was—I mean, it was very brief, and I can't speak to anything specific off the top of my head. But as a committee, we are able to make a motion to make a recommendation. I don't think we've talked about that procedure in quite some time. I may have missed it. But we can come together. There was also some talk at the end of last year about subcommittees and how that might tie into making recommendations. Excuse me. The subcommittee was from our feedback that we gave and then coalition gave a little presentation on that. But that's definitely something that I would love to hear someone bring up in doing advocacy in the outreach component. It's at least as important to do that with our elected officials and the people that are monitoring that legislation as it is with our community. So definitely circle back to that and anyone else that might have something they want to make a recommendation, like extending the ban through November or forever. But that's just me. Everybody knows how I feel about that. So yeah, that would be something to bring up, again, for a new business to make that proposal. I personally don't know who we even would make that recommendation to or the logistics on a committee recommendation, you know, coming from us. Of course, as an individual citizen, you can do that pretty easily. But it would carry a lot of weight, I believe. It's a very respected committee in the state and, you know, in my other circles. And I know whenever we've had the privilege of having state people come in, you know, they always say that. So I would love to see something like that come to conversation. Thank you. Maybe a little insight on logistics and legalities and what we're allowed to do and what we can't do. So if that's something that you want to explore, then just let me know when I can, you know, see how we can, when and if you can, and how you can get it done. Well, no, there's specific guidelines on specific guidelines on when we represent ourselves or another organization that may be with over the committee. So it would have to be collective. But yeah, I'd love to know more about how we could do something like that. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Thank you, Nick. Thank you, team. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Any, yeah. Did we get any public comments? No, but I'll open it up for public comments. Yeah, you can come up. You've got three minutes. I'll be brief. My name is Joe. I'm a local contractor. I'm state certified. I just specialize in marine construction here in Brevard County. First, I'd like to thank you guys. This is my first meeting. It's impressive. Appreciate everything the board members here are doing for the river. I hope to attend some more of these. Today I'm here because I bumped into a small community on Merritt Island. It's Tequesta Harbor. Just a great group of people. I've worked for some of the homeowners individually, and I've worked for some of the homeowners as a group. They have a shared small harbor. Really, I think they're the type of people that, based on what I heard today, that a group like this should get behind. I work for probably a hundred different job sites for homeowners throughout Brevard County a year. You know, these guys have hit all the high marks. They've got baffle boxes currently. They're telling me they're looking for ways to upgrade that, that they've got an early generation, and they're trying to get it upgraded so it catches more stuff individually when given the option to install a new hard plastic vinyl seawall or natural coquina or living shoreline. They've all done coquina seawalls, and they've come to me with an issue. They're looking to get some funding. Right now they've got a small harbor, and it's kind of a dead zone. It's got muck in it. It's probably three to five foot thick, and they're looking to get that muck removed, get the sea life back in there, and I think that's pretty much what I had to say. Like, I understand that this board has grants and ability to help them out, and if you're going to award that to somebody, I would strongly recommend looking at the Tequesta Harbor Group as somebody to get behind. I think they could benefit the river and the estuary as a whole by getting that area cleaned up. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, she did. A woman came in and talked about, a resident came in and talked about that previously. Yeah. They submitted an application, so you'll be seeing it next month. Okay. Anyone else? Any other comments? Now we're looking at comments from the committee. Any comments from the committee? We're ending early. Go ahead. Hope to see you all tomorrow as it was on the agenda for the Inera Lagoon Day at Front Street Park. It's going to be a good one. Food trucks, the stage this year, live music, and always fun as always, and that's that. Yeah, I hope you can be there. Oh, 92. 92. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Anyone else? We're giving you a half an hour here. So that's it. Use it wisely. Yeah, use it wisely. We're adjourned. The opinions expressed by any member of the public during any period of public comment do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Board of County Commissioners of Brevard County, Florida, Space Coast Government Television, or the program sponsor and are solely those of the presenter. 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