Save Our Indian River Lagoon on 2026-07-17 8:30 AM - Jul 17, 2026

start with the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge of Allegiance. Here. Rick Nipper. Here. Bruce Larson. Kimberly Newton. Deborah Harmon. Laura Lee Thompson. Here. Nicholas Sanzone. Here. Richard Bankhead. Here. Aaron Adams. Kurt Smith. Here. Fred Goldstein. Here. Barbara Wall-Scanlon. Eric Maness. Here. John Windsor. Here. Charles Venuto. All right, we have a quorum. Thank you. Thank you. Approval of minutes. I hope everybody's reviewed them. Do I have a motion? Motion approved. Do I have a second? Second. That was Rick and Dick Bankhead. Did you get those? Yes. Okay. Good. Good. The motion has been made and seconded. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Asked. Hopefully everybody reviewed the last minutes and do I have a motion to approve? Okay. Do I have a motion to approve those minutes or are there any changes to those minutes? Okay. The motion's been made. Second. Rick seconded it. It's been motion has been made and seconded. Is there all in favor? Aye. Opposed? Passes. Before we start the agenda, I did watch the May meeting on the video and it gave me insight to what the public views and I made some notes and observations on that meeting. These observations are come to the meeting prepared. Read the agenda and supplement material prior to coming to the meeting. Communicate with your track member before the meeting and reach agreement and discuss issues in the agenda and supplemental material. Develop your thoughts before you speak and hopefully before you attend the meeting. Some of the questions asked during the meeting can and should be discussed with staff outside the meeting. Be concise in your comments. Most listeners shut down after a few minutes of rambling on and on. Speak directly into the microphone. And the alternate, the microphones are on. They're hot. Turn them off or push them away when you're not speaking. That was very noticeable that people, particularly at the end of the meeting, were leaning back and continue to speak directly into the microphone. Now, I'm not much of a rules person. People know that of me. I'm more of a free spirit. However, we need to do better meeting order. And according to our bylaws, our meetings are conducted under the guidelines of Robert's rules of order as interpreted by the chair. I'm initiating stricter adherence to Robert's rules of order at future meetings. The following is a short summary of how those rules will be implemented. And I ask that you help me implement those rules. First, it'll start with each member is permitted to speak a minimum of two times for up to 10 minutes each motion at a meeting. And that's each motion at a meeting. Everyone must have the opportunity to speak before anyone can speak a second time. And the debate must be relative to the pending motion. Again, this applies to motions that have been made and seconded. Hopefully, after that period of time, we'll be able to vote. If not, we'll have to vote on extensions. The assembly can extend the change in meetings and the limits of time. And that's going to be from three to five minutes. Again, this applies to motions that have been made and seconded. And that's via two-thirds of a vote on a motion to limit and extend the limits of the debate. Public comments will still remain at three minutes per person. The exception to the rule is that you can briefly ask questions and make suggestions on issues other than motions that do not count as speech during the debate or debate on a motion. If a speaker exceeds these limits, the chair is expected to stop them or any member can raise point of order. Actually, Bruce was correct in requesting a point of order in the discussion and he was not recognized. We are all selected to be a part of this committee because we are considered experts in our tracks. This expertise is supposed to come together and expressed at our meetings. Being rude or offensive to members with differing opinions is not tolerable. Our meetings require a certain decorum. I ask you to assist me in maintaining that decorum. And then there are two issues that were voted upon at the meeting. One was the recommendation for the change in application. And that included two parts. And that was to enhance section 2.3 in the project plan. And I've gone ahead and done that. And that'll be, the draft of that will be sent out to you after the meeting by Terry. And you can comment on it or make changes and track changes at that time. Ultimately, we must remember that we are dependent upon project applications. If we place too many caveats on the application process, we won't receive applications. Finally, you voted to proceed forward with the pilot program on the HOA homeowner program. There's actually five items to consider for that program. Staff has enough to proceed with that pilot program. And if there are any comments on item five, they'll be considered along the way. And item five was what additional project types would the committee like to consider adding to adding to a green infrastructure grants program in the future? Thanks. Thanks all for listening to that. We'll proceed forward with with the reports. First, a monthly progress report. Can I ask a question real quick? Or ask maybe when we have a motion and second it give us a little reminder? I mean, so we're kind of getting that habit? I'm going to adhere to it. Yeah, I'm just going to say, because, you know, that's a good proposal. I liked what you said, a lot of it, and help keep the meeting in order. But let's remind us to do that before. No, that'll be my job. All right. Thank you. Oh, yeah. You want help with the clock, too? Don't forget that. Well, I'm not going to work the clock on it, but I have my watch on. I'm not going to set an alarm. All right. Sounds good. Depending on y'all to help me out on that, too. So thank you very much. All right, Virginia, I'm sorry. Thank you. All right. The July progress report. And you received the June one over the break. So we have now completed 136 community projects, 2,610 homeowner projects, and over 1,000 conversions to sewer, 1,020 conversions to sewer. 32 more of those connections to sewer were this month. 31 more of the septic upgrades were this month. We have a number of septic to sewer projects under construction right now. So the South Beaches Zone O septic to sewer project, the sewer pipe has been installed. So moving on to connections. For MICO, South Beaches O, South Beaches P, Sykes N, and Sykes T septic sewer projects, all five of those. We have mailed the letters to the property owners, giving them notice of what the timelines are for their connections. The Flamingo Road stormwater denitrification project was completed. We executed a state grant contract for $6.2 million for more septic sewer connections. And the Hub SeaWorld Living Shoreline project was connected, along with an assortment of task orders and change orders and amendments and things. We completed two videos this month. You'll see one of those later on the agenda. And at long last, the Facebook issue that was blocking our ability to boost posts has been resolved. So we're boosting posts now. Bev has been super busy with five derelict vessels removed in the last month. We are very pleased with our success with appropriations requests this year. So we received three from the Florida legislature, one and a half million for septic upgrades, two point, almost two million for the Sykes Creek muck dredging project, and 175,000 for a feasibility study that we will be working with the Army Corps to conduct to look at increasing circulation in the North Banana that's currently blocked by the 528 Causeway. Work underway this month. The Lucky Clover Mobile Home Park, they are decommissioning septic tanks and getting those homes connected to sewer now that the sewer is installed. Sykes T septic to sewer, the vacuum pits are installed. This says 25% complete with paving, but this was done almost two weeks ago, so the paving is probably pretty close to done for anybody who's driving down that section of roadway. And trusses on the vacuum pump station installed. For Sykes N, most of that work is also now on the vacuum pump station. The wet well is installed. They're preparing for the foundation and installing the force main within the right-of-way. They're trying to complete all of the work along North Banana, the mains along North Banana before school starts. So that's their focus at the moment. South Beaches Zone P, they've completed the pipe installation crossing Riverside Drive. They have been working along Riverside Drive, and with all of this rain, they're struggling with dewatering. And so there's going to be a mess there a bit longer than we anticipated, but you know, there's nothing we can do to control the weather. Merritt Island Zone G, I know this looks like a small comment closing for the land purchase, but this is the last of the major land purchases that we had to do for lift stations for all of the septic to Subaru projects in the current plan. So there may be an occasional little easement or a little, you know, thing here and there, shifting some stuff around, but in terms of finding willing sellers for the parcels that we needed for the lift stations that we needed to do these septic sewer projects, this is the last closing. MICCO Zone B is, we have the preliminary force main alignment. SHARPS Zone B, we're preparing bid documents. Then moving back to stormwater, this says that the Sand Dollar Canal, four of six Gabion keys have been installed. All six are actually completed now. And the Oak Galley muck dredging project, it says dredging to begin on July 10th. That's been pushed back to July 22nd due to timing of getting one of the booster pumps. The Cocoa Beach golf muck capping project, the sand capping began on June 22nd, and that's going incredibly well. And we look forward to getting you some photos and videos of those operations shortly. Sykes Creek muck dredging is currently out to bid. There was a pre-bid meeting yesterday, and we continue to work on preparing the dewatering site to be ready for that construction to proceed. And then the story map that you've talked about a number of times here, where the software that supported that was no longer supported, and we've had to change. So all of those map layers have been rebuilt and updated, and that will be presented to you later on today's agenda. On the back side, we had a community meeting with Sykes Creek. Thank you, Fred, for attending. And we heard a number of concerns from the community. We were able to make some adjustments in those bid documents before they went out to address some of those community concerns. Got to present to the Economic Development Council board of directors, a really great room full of people. And then this month, Terry and I, mostly Terry, have been incredibly busy attending city council meetings, getting the, answering their questions. All of the cities need to consider renewing the interlocal agreement that allows all of the dollars collected from the half cent tails tax to go into a single fund, um, managed by the county with the citizen oversight committee. So, um, as of Wednesday night, we had 10 or 11 cities have approved the interlocal agreement. The, the state requirement is that, um, cities representing over half of the incorporated population have to approve. We're at 52% right now. So, um, we've checked that box. We'll obviously continue to work with the remaining cities on, on their approvals too. Um, but that's been a, a heavy lift, um, for the last month. Question. Yes. The Sykes Creek, uh, is that totally taken care of now with these things or are we halfway through, uh, the dredging? No, uh, the septics? Uh, there are, well, Sykes, M, N, and T. Are there any other Sykes projects, Anthony? Yes. So, um, we are preparing, um, Merritt Island C, Merritt Island F, South Carolina B. That will also be on East Merritt Island. And those are, um, should go to bid any month now. Um, and then. But they're on the other sides, other areas. Yes. Yeah. And then those other three about to go to bid will all be on East Merritt Island, um, last side of Sykes Creek. And on the west side of Sykes Creek, we're working on, um, Sykes R and Merritt G that, um, would also influence that water body. But those are a little further off. Well, they're, they're starting to catch fish there. That's, that's the, that's the reason. And then, um. That would be the phase one Sykes Creek dredging. Yeah, that's a good one. The other, the other one that, uh, catching fish by, is, uh, is, uh, Thousand Island's picking up, too. So, another subject, a possibility. Yeah. Yeah. Question. Sure. Obviously, I mean, I mean, thanks for the Sykes Creek meeting, by the way. It was really interesting to attend and you did a really good job. Can you give us a sense of feedback you're getting? Obviously, 52 percent said, hey, we're already in with this. It's good. But are you getting any kind of information that we should be considering here from these groups? Um, so far, every council vote has been unanimously in support. So, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Uh, we've had a few questions. I don't know if anything comes to mind for you. Potential project types the cities can implement. Sorry. Potential project types. Yeah. There, there are some new ideas for project types that we'll be bringing to the committee, um, that we're working with the cities on. We'll, we'll know more when we actually see what applications they put in. You had mentioned that there were five vessels removed. Yeah. That's a lot. Do you have a number as to how many remain? There are typically 30 in the lagoon all the time. No matter how fast we pull them out, there, there's another 30 remaining. I was just wondering if you need me to take any more pictures of the ones I see. You, you know, you can always take pictures of them and they, it's FWC that needs to start the, the process, but we can make sure that they're on their list and they're going through the, the state process for notifying the owner and starting the clock on time for the owner to come get their boat. Follow up on that. Um, is there any way we can work with FWC to mark them? They're navigation hazards. Um, there's a couple, for example, that have sunk and the, the, the masks are visible, not as visible in one, not the other. Um, and then others are there, but if you do run in the dark, they're pretty bad navigation hazards. Yeah, that's a great. Excellent. Aaron, can, can I ask, since you know them well, do you see once they've sunk that they stay pretty much, you know, stationary? Because I know some of the ones that aren't completely under yet, you know, they move, they drift with the storms and such. No, once they're down, they're pretty much not down. They're stuck in the mud. Yeah. I'd just like to comment that it's good to see that the septic tank upgrade funds are being, being filled more. It's a really robust fund if everybody wants to know that. Yeah, it's, it's good to see. And also, it was nice to get the IRL NEP, the EPA work plan, uh, and what we got in June. It's really impressed, it should impress everybody as to what has been done and, and just, it was a phenomenal accumulation of what has been done with the program. So thank you very much. Thank you. Um, a couple more highlights. Uh, July 26th is Mangrove Day and I know the Marine Resources Council has been making the rounds with all the cities, um, and they're coming to the county on Tuesday, getting resolutions recognizing Mangrove Day. And, um, for future topics next month, we'll have our quarterly updates. Um, so we try to plan a lighter agenda. I know today's agenda is very full, but we'll, we're planning to bring back to you, um, the septic upgrade pilot, the $6,000 minimum, um, pilot results and hopefully the ultrasonic innovative study if we get the data back from the lab that we've been waiting for. Um, and then I know, um, uh, Dick Bankhead and Aaron Adams, you, you guys had said you'd be ready in this time frame. Are you ready for August or? You need an extension. Okay. Sorry to put you on the spot like that. But if there's anybody who is going to be ready, please let us know because, because I try, I try not to overload these meetings, but I have to know who's, who's ready to be able to do that. So that's my report, Chair. Thanks. Coming up for the, thanks, Lori. Good morning. Good morning. Um, since we did not have a meeting last month, so I do want to go over our collections that we received from March, which were 4.8 million. The quarterly discretionary we received was 4.4 million. Sorry. Okay. Okay. So I wanted to report for June since we did not have a meeting last month. So March sales tax received 4.8 million. The quarterly discretionary received 4.4 million. And then for April collections, we collected 4.2 million. Okay. The total revenue from conception is 535 million. For the monthly financial statement, the anticipated 572 million in revenue by the end of the fiscal year, the actual revenue received is 495 million. And for the expenditures this year, total assigned for the projects is 112 million and actual spent is 29.6 million. And is there any questions? Yes. Yes. Yes, we are. The staff is working very good at trying to get it down. So, so hopefully by the end of the fiscal quarter, we'll get some more reported in there. We're like this month, we're about a million and a half behind. It looks like when you add it up, it was a million the month before and a half a million this month. Is that sort of what we expect now as we roll this baby out? The ARPA? No, just in terms of the total funds received. We're looking, you know, compared to... Oh, yeah. We are about a million and a half below this year's projections and it's the sales tax holiday. So, you know, if we project that out, it'd probably be around two million short. So, yeah, I was thinking maybe four or five, but you're thinking about two. So, we will be probably around four million short of last year's projections, but six months ago when we did the 2026 plan update, we already reduced it by 2.3 million. So, I think we'll be another million and a half to two million below those projections. Thanks. Shifting baseline. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Now we have reports and special presentations. First coming up is the audit report. Michelle. Good morning. I'm Michelle Coppola. I'm with RSM, the county's outsourced internal audit firm, and I'm happy to present the FY2026 sorrel report for the half-censor tax. First of all, I'd like to thank the natural resources team. They've all been fantastic to work with, very responsive to our requests as we're going through the audit. So, we really appreciate all the hard work that you all do and the responsiveness that you have for us. As we present this year, please remember that the financials are going to be a little bit behind what you just heard. So, our scope period for this time period was June 2025 to the end of January 2026. We did present this to the county's audit committee back in May of 26. And just the overall information on this, I think you guys got a copy, a paper copy of our report. So, on our executive summary here on page three, you'll see at the very bottom left-hand corner, the county had no observations for this year, which is great. And I'll just kind of dive a little bit into the testing that we performed just to kind of give you guys an overview. So, on page five, we talk a little bit about the revenue decreasing, just as we were just discussing just a few minutes ago. So, you know, like I said, our report time frame was at the end of January 2026. And so, that was also when the county went through and updated their projections for their revenue. So, that overall 10-year projection that they did. And they reduced it about $3 million. So, that new projection for the overall 10-year revenue is the $583 million. And the main concern around that is that state's adoption of those expanded sales tax exemptions that took place in 2025. During our scope period, the county had collected about $518 million in total. And through our procedures, we did independently confirm all of those revenues. And so, we had no exceptions around the collections testing. Moving on to page seven on the expenditure testing that we performed. The county had about $16 million for expenditures that took place during that scope period. And these expenditures supported about 73 active projects. With those active projects, we have tested over the past three years about 39 of those projects. So, about 53% of the total projects that are active. And through our expenditure testing, we sampled 32 invoices that totaled about $9 million, which was about 58% of the total revenues for that scope period that we had. Again, no exceptions were noted in our testing. And then on page eight, for the procurement section of our testing, we had about five vendors that we focused on for our testing. With those five vendors, we reviewed new task orders, new purchase orders, and any new competitive solicitations that took place. We did have two new competitive solicitations, which were both invitation to bid, ITBs. Through all of that testing, we did not identify any exceptions. Are there any questions? I noticed when I was going through in the opening discussion section. Yeah, sorry about that. And so, anyhow, just some wording choices that didn't make sense to me. And it was really just one line here. If you go down to the three bullets on the right. Which page are you on? I'm on page three. Three. Thank you. When it said we were selected for expenditure testing, is that the project we're selected for expenditure testing? Yes, it's the selections that we performed. Right. And just some wording in that you may want to take a look at the next time the use of was and were, things like that. Sure. We appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you. Any other questions? All right. Thank you. Thank you for doing that. Good job on the staff. No exceptions is always a good thing in an audit. Thank you. Thank you. I would like to add that this is also already posted on our website. The audit report is posted on the website. All right. Next is the Indian River Lagoon seagrass update. And it's Laura Simpson. She's a supervising environmental scientist at St. Johns River Water Management District. So we get the supervisor at this time. Hi. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Laura Simpson. And I am excited to share some updates about our seagrass mapping and monitoring in the Indian River Lagoon. But before I do so, I would like to kind of just step back and set the stage as to why we monitor seagrass both globally and regionally. Right. So seagrass is an important foundation species. It connects many other habitats to one another. And it provides a lot of important ecosystem services. And so these ecosystem services is anything that either directly or indirectly benefits humans. There's a myriad of these services. There's carbon sequestration. There's shoreline protection. There's sediment protection. But one of the ones that you may be most familiar with is habitat for foraging and for nurseries. So about 75 percent of our either commercially important and recreationally important fish species spend some portion of their life cycle within seagrass habitat. So if you were to lose that structure of the habitat, you are eventually going to lose the function of that ecosystem service. And so because of their importance, as well as because healthy seagrass usually denotes good water quality, seagrass really underpins a lot of our regional management plans. And all of those regional management plans require the monitoring of seagrass to help inform our management decisions. So that's where the district stepped in back in the early 1990s. So 1994, we started a seagrass monitoring program. And there's a two tiered approach. And the first tier or one of the tiers, shall I say, is really looking at the fine scale changes of seagrass health in the Indian River Lagoon. And in order to do that, you really have to get in the water and put your face in the water and look at this resource. And so we do that at 100 different transects. And this is the figure you see on the far right. This is all throughout the entirety of IRL. So 156 miles of it. And this is done biannually. So we do it once in the wintertime and then once in the summertime, which is peak productivity within this region. And so when we get in the water at these times, we're taking measurements such as percent cover, percent occurrence, the height of the seagrass, all the different species of the seagrass, the different types of macroalgae that we see, the drift algae, and all of that goes back into our programming as well as shared open source to other organizations so they can use it to help inform their work and their decisions. This is a huge effort though, right? This is something that we cannot do alone. We have a great team at the district, but you know, this is 156 miles. And so we have multiple organizations whose logos you can see at the bottom of this screen that help us. They get out there, they volunteer their time and their resources to help really put their finger on the pulse of what's happening out there. And so while, as I mentioned, this goes into many different reporting mechanisms, one of the main things that you may see that comes from the district is this figure. So this figure right here is transect length and cover. We have the mean transect length is in blue, that's the top line. And what that essentially is telling you is how far out seagrass grows perpendicular to the shoreline. So our transects move from the shoreline out to the deeper water. And so if you have seagrass that goes out far, that's essentially saying that we have good water quality. As that line shortens or seagrass moves closer to the shoreline, that's indicative of a kind of a degradation of our water quality. And so you can see we've had some high highs and some low lows in the IRL, unfortunately. Most of them directly attributable to our harmful algal blooms, the super bloom especially. But we're definitely on an uptick right now, which is great news. The bottom line is mean transect cover. So if you were to put your head underwater and actually look at how much seagrass is in a quarter meter or a meter or whatever your actual numbers that you're looking at, this is kind of indicative of what the ecosystem service provisioning will be. So 25% seagrass cover is going to provide a lot more or a greater magnitude of ecosystem services than say zero or one or two or three percent. And so we're still low in our seagrass cover when we're looking back in our historical seagrass mean cover, but we are on an uptick right now. Now this is all very well and important and obviously is a great way to keep our finger on the pulse is what's happening. But this is really only a snapshot in time, right? This is only a hundred sites over the entirety of the IRL. It really, we're only showing one time point. This is the summer data. And so to really understand what's happening, we need to look at the landscape scale. And that's where our second tier of the process comes in or another tier. This is our biennial mapping. So every two years, we, in consultation with a contractor and with funding from South Florida Water Management District and Florida DEP, we take pictures of the Indian River Lagoon sediment floor, right? And so we do this in the springtime when the water is low, the water is clear. And this is so we can see where these seagrass patches are. Once those pictures are taken and everything looks good, they're stitched together, and then the contractor will actually photo interpret them. So where are these seagrass beds? This is done in consultation with our staff, a lot of ground truthing that goes on with these, a lot of quality assurance that happens. And so once everyone is happy with the product, and we think we have figured we've got our finger on exactly where everything is, then we produce our figures. We only do this every two years because this process literally takes two years. This is not an easy task. And so we're very grateful that we have the opportunity to do so. And so after that two years, this is what we get. We get this geo-referenced figure. This is the IRL 2025 seagrass. It's really hard to see. So here is Palm Bay North in the orange box, and then Palm Bay South in the gray box. And anywhere you see green, that's where we have seagrass. We have a lot in the Mosquito Lagoon and the Northern IRL, the Northern Banana River, and it peters out and picks back up again around the St. Lucie-Indian River County line where the Fort Pearson Inlet is. So, you know, a picture is great. It's a great visual representation of what we have, but it's really the data from this figure that is important. So from this, we're able to extract the amount of hectares of seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon. And we use that to produce this figure that you have probably seen before. I hope you've seen it before. This is our annual seagrass extent and transect length and cover figure. And so you've seen the transect length and cover a few slides ago. Now I've just swapped it over to the secondary axis, and now on the primary axis, you have that seagrass extent, and those are those gray bars. And so I'm excited to announce that in 2025, we had approximately 17,000 hectares of seagrass in the IRL. Question, and this is information, not a complaint. We're seeing, you mentioned Banana River, and it's a lot clearer than it was. And the grass is growing, but we're seeing no fish, say from 520 to 528. And you're seeing a bigger picture, you know. Do you have a correlation when you see it on fish? And then these guys, they've done great up, you know, up to the bridge and up to all the way north. That's a great question. I think there's a lot of anecdotal conversations happening right now is to, we're starting to see smaller fish, but the data isn't there yet. And so I'm sure Aaron can answer this question a lot better than I can. There's probably a lag, you know. The structure shows up, and then it takes a little bit of time for those fish to show up. And so I hopefully over the next few years we'll have some data that actually has that correlation to answer that. Yeah, and he and I talk, obviously. We're not specific on where we're catching fish, but it changes. And the reason I'm asking, if you pick Banana River and you went past 520, you know, towards the golf course and all, you know, we're seeing mullet, you know, this big. And other places and where we're catching trout on the Indian River, we're not seeing that particular kind of fish. So, you know, you see a little mullet, but a lot of fish. But okay, we'll look forward to that. Thank you. Well, that was actually in one of the reports, one of the three reports that were sent out in June, was using the HABS data to correlate fish. If you build it, they will come. So let's give it time. Thank you. You're very welcome. So 2025 data, 17,000 hectares. This is obviously very exciting because this is about a 72% increase from our 2023 hectareage in the Indian River Lagoon. So it's pointing to signs of water quality improvement in the IRL, but we also want to caution this tale because we are still about 47% behind out of our 2009-2007 historical coverage. And so just a reminder that while we're headed in that direction, we're seeing more seagrass, we really need to continue with our sustained progress and water quality improvements in the IRL. So the 17,000 hectares, this is not uniform throughout the entirety. So what we wanted to do was just to highlight the difference in the sub-lagoons. And we did this by breaking out that 17,000 hectares across them. So the IRL is broken up into six distinct sub-lagoons, and this is based on hydrology. You have the Mosquito Lagoon in the north, northern IRL in the blue, Banana River in orange, central IRL in red, south-central in yellow, and southern in the teal. The 17,000 hectares is now in those hash bars on the top. And then for comparison, we put the 2023 data, and those are those solid bars. And the main takeaway from this figure is that in five of the six sub-lagoons, we have seen increases in seagrass. We had large increases in the northern IRL and the Banana River, and then small to moderate increases in the Mosquito Lagoon, south-central, and central IRL. Unfortunately, we did see a decline in the central IRL, a small decline. There actually is seagrass in the central IRL. It's just so minuscule that you can't actually see it on this figure due to the scale. Yeah, just a quick comment on that, because this was some great information, but when you're seeing what people say in the community about this, somebody just posted flat out, well, the central dropped 2%. I'm sorry. The data's great, and somebody on the social media said, in response to the seagrass coming up, well, the central dropped 2%, and I think it's always important to say, well, five out of six went up, you know, and so it's people are cherry-picking some arguments, and just, you know, if you can respond and let people know what the actual data is, I think it's really helpful. There were no responses after that went up. Is that just strictly seagrass, or are you including Calerpa? That's a great question. This figure is just seagrass right now, and I'll talk a little bit about Calerpa at the end. And a quick one, second, is anyone else? Just a quick second question. On the small, on the, how small an area do you need to have, actually have seagrass on it to pick it up from the aerial? Because I see sections in the central, I'm finding stargrass, but it's inst among the Calerpa, or inst among the algae, etc., but it's starting to be there. That's a great question. I don't know that off the top of my head, but I will say, and we'll jump to this at the end, that we are mapping Calerpa, and so while, you know, there may be some seagrass facilitating in there, and we're probably not picking that up, per se. We are picking up that Calerpa bed. So we're trying to get that more holistic understanding of what we have as a total. Yeah, great question. And just to really piggyback off of what you said about how people are cherry picking and talking about the central area, but the other ones, you know, I think we really need to remember that each one of these sublagoons has really distinct drivers and constraints and management needs, and that when we're having this conversation, you know, we can't talk about it as a whole. We do need to break it up and talk about individual sections, because the adaptive management of those sections is really important. To piggyback off of this, I did have the in-water transect data broken up by lagoon as far as sublagoons as well. So we have mean cover on the primary access, and then mean transect lake on the secondary, and once again, the main takeaway is just that we have seen increases in five of the six sublagoons, and then the central IRL is still lagging behind, shall I say. But one of the things that, you know, these last two slides have really pointed out to us is that, I mean, obviously we're seeing seagrass recovery happening, but this seagrass recovery is mainly natural. You know, there's been a lot of seagrass restoration projects that have taken place, but nowhere near the footprint that we're seeing throughout the extent of the IRL. And so that brought up a lot of questions to us as scientists. You know, we're very excited to see this, but how is this happening? You know, we hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about the seed bank in previous years, which may be surprising to some. And so when we saw this recovery starting to take place, you know, it was time to jump on that line of research and look deeper into what was happening in the sediments. Seagrasses, just as a reminder, they are flowering plants, so they can reproduce vegetatively as well as sexually. So they'll flower, they'll produce seeds, and from those seeds, the plant will grow. While every different species has different forms of flowers and seeds, the one species that we have ubiquitously throughout the IRL is the shoalgrass. And the seeds of the shoalgrass are very tiny. They're about two millimeters in length, two to four millimeters in length. So if you're swimming over a seagrass bed, you're not picking that up with your naked eye. As well as the flowers, they're very tiny, a few millimeters in length, and they're found at the base of the seagrass. And so unless you're right on top of it and really looking for it, you probably won't see it. The best way to see it is essentially to pull the seagrass up, which we're not trying to do. And so the main way that we thought, well, it's time to look into this, is to start looking at the seed bank. And so we partnered with FIT, as well as Florida Hub, Flood Hub, with funding from the Department of Environmental Protection. And we documented, or we wanted to document the distribution and density of seeds across 68 of our 100 transects. So we did this in 2024. Staff went out, they took cores in the seagrass beds, sieved those in the field to get rid of the sediment, took them back into the lab and sieved them multiple times to get rid of some other size fractions and vegetation. And then we're able to enumerate the halafala, or I'm sorry, not halafala, haladuli seeds, the shoal grass, as well as the rupia seeds. The haladuli is to the left and the rupia is to the right. And so what did we find? Lo and behold, there are seeds in the Indian River Lagoon, which is not surprising, given the recovery we're seeing. So this is haladuli radii, our shoal grass, our y-axis is mean number of seeds per meter squared. And across the sub-lagoons, we have anywhere from 1 to 14 seeds per meter squared. And if you're looking at this figure and looking across the different sub-lagoons, you can see there's also a lot of areas where we didn't document any seeds. And so there's a lot of questions that have spun off of this. When looking at rupia, we have a ton of rupia seeds. The magnitude is so much greater. We have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of seeds in the IRL. And as you can see from the figure on the far right, there's pretty much nowhere, very limited areas where we're not seeing rupia seeds. So this is great news. And it, once again, just brought to light so many more questions that we had. And this was a very small study. It was a pilot study. And we were able to take these questions and take some of the findings that we had and then leverage this into another project. And so last year, we performed an expanded version of this. So that information will be forthcoming. One thing to also mention of this, when thinking about adaptive management in the Indian River Lagoon, is we've talked so much about water quality thresholds for seagrass growth, right? When the seagrass is already there. But what about the seagrass seeds? You know, what are the thresholds of salinity or temperature or light for these seeds to germinate or it be viable? You know, how do they move around the system? How do we get them to places where they're not? And so, you know, those are lines of research that we really need to start focusing on and thinking about if we're really looking into this adaptive management of the system. Now, I've spent a lot of time talking about seagrass. So we're going to jump into another really important submerged aquatic vegetation in the IRL, and that is colerpa. This is for the genus colerpa. It's a native green macroalgae. It's found throughout the entirety of the Indian River Lagoon. There's several different species. I mean, you probably know this one in the picture. This is colerpa prolifera. This is the main one in this region of the IRL. This is an important species to talk about because it lives in the same niche as seagrass. It provides many of the same ecosystem services. It lives in tandem with seagrass. And one of those main ecosystem services that provides is that of nutrient cycling. So it too, just like seagrass, can take nutrients out of the water column. It can store them or sequester them or transform them for utilization by another flora or fauna. And so when thinking about the nutrients in the system and the probability or the amount of nutrients that can be taken out of the system, we really need to be thinking about how much suburbic aquatic vegetation we have in total. And so in 2023, we did a pilot mapping project looking at colerpa extent in just Brevard County. And we found there was about 15,000 hectares of colerpa. And in this figure, that's the light green color that you can see. We have the seagrass data from 2023 and 2025 overlaid on this. And one of the main takeaways is that in a lot of areas where we didn't have seagrass, we had colerpa. And so while that area was devoid of that seagrass species, the colerpa was acting to provide some of those ecosystem services that wouldn't have been provisioning if it wasn't there. So this is great news. And also, you know, colerpa acts to stabilize the sediment. And so the hope is that over time, seagrass will be able to move into that area, facilitate into it, and then live together with the colerpa. So because of this importance, in 2025, we decided to map it again, or we were given the opportunity to map it again with more funding. We did it through the entirety of the IRL. But I'm just going to present on the footprint of the Brevard County, because we actually saw a decline of colerpa, almost an 11,000 hectare decline of colerpa in 2025. And this was obviously very concerning, you know, when thinking about the nutrients that go back into the system and what that means for the system as a whole. And one of the main questions is, where did it go? What happened to it? And it was actually herbivory, but maybe not a herbivore that you thought it was going to be. Meet the sea slug, Elysia subbornata. It is about five centimeters in length, and which is probably magnitude smaller than the manatee that you were thinking I was going to say. And it showed up in 2023, 2024, in massive numbers. This is the ruffled Elysia. It's a native species, but it has a planktonic larval face. So where it came from, we actually don't know. And the numbers that it came from, we don't understand yet. But when it showed up, its main food source is colerpa. That's all it likes to eat. And so it took its job very seriously, right? And it decimated the population. And what it does is it attaches to the leaf, it sucks the chloroplast out of it, the leaf will die, and then it leaves the mid-vein, which you can see in that red circle right there. And so we lost a lot of the colerpa prolifera back in 2024. A lot of questions that are spinning off of this. What does that mean for the system? You know, where did the colerpa go? Is it going to come back? How long does it take to come back? Also, where did the sea slug go? Is it coming back? Does it feed on other species? A lot of questions that we're trying to answer now, but we don't have the full story yet. But as this is happening in the southern region of the northern IRL and the central IRL, we also are seeing an increase in the northern IRL. So at the top of this figure, that large hashed blob, this is an increase in colerpa that we didn't have in 2023. And it's actually a fairly new species to the Indian River Lagoon. So this is colerpa ash mediae. This is a native species to Florida. You see it in the Keys, as well as in the Gulf of Mexico, maybe not to the same level of magnitude that we're starting to see now. It hasn't been seen since 1983. But in 2024, someone caught sight of it right around Hallover Canal. And so 2024, there was just a few spurts here and there. And by 2025, we have mats of it. So there is a ton of this colerpa ash mediae in this region. While we're not concerned about it, because it is a native species to Florida, there's a lot of questions that come along with this too. Is it here to stay? Where did it come from? Does it perform a lot of the same nutrient cycling that maybe polarifera did? So more research that we're looking into. But once again, you know, this is an area that didn't have any colerpa species in 2023, didn't have a lot of seagrass in 2023. So now it's acting to fill that niche for some of those ecosystem services. So as a whole, in 2025, we have mapped about 21,000 hectares of both seagrass and colerpa species throughout the entirety of the IRL. And just going back to Lori Lee's point about how this is, it's really understanding the system as a whole and all of these pieces together to help us guide our adaptive management moving forward. Now, I know that you sat down thinking you were just going to get a conversation about what we have in IRL. And I spun off into a lot of different ways. And I did that because, you know, just a reminder that science and adaptive management and the interaction between the both is not a linear process. You know, it would be great if we had a question, we got our answer, and then we led to recovery, and we can move on to the next thing or the next sub lagoon. But it's not like that, right? It looks something more like this. It's this tangled to curious web that takes a long time to move across this pathway. And there's a lot of different directions you can take. This pathway, though, is not only done by one individual or one entity, right? This is the work of so many different people. And so as I stand up here and I tell this story, this is not just a district story. This is a story of multiple partners and multiple agencies and individuals, as well as funding entities that are helping us to get to this final question of what is the improved ecosystem understanding and the resilience of an IRL. And so, you know, taken together, it's these long-term data sets that we're able to provide the shared experience and expertise of everybody, not only in this room, but in other organizations, and the collaboration that will not only help us understand where we were, but where we are today, and then hopefully where we're going to be in the future. So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions. And I also just really quickly want to mention that this QR code, this will take you to our Seagrass coverage and extent figure that the district produces annually. Every year it will be updated, so you can pull this and use this for your own reports and presentations moving forward. Now we'll take questions. Yeah, thanks. That was good. It's good to see the progress. So for the aerial surveys, in the past, I mean, it's still difficult to differentiate between Seagrass, Calerpa, but even drift algae. Are you guys getting better at that? Because we've had conversations in the past where there's big areas of drift algae that kind of look like Seagrass on those maps. Yeah, that's a great question. I am not entirely sure about what the contractors are able to do. I will say that, you know, the drift algae is also, depending on the sub-lagoon, it's ephemeral. So it shows up in big maps at some points, and then it disappears. And so when you're mapping once a year to map the drift algae, you may miss the drift algae that you're thinking about at a certain time, right? And so it's kind of this moving target. Right. We do the drift algae in our, in-water transects, though. Right. And so from running, talking to other people and running the good myself, drift algae seems to be more, have more coverage in the central IRL. Do you guys see that in the transects as well? That's a great question, Lauren. Short answer is it really depends on the year, and it depends on what's going on with the win. Just a second. Logan, we got a... There's something happening here. Feedback. He's replaying me. Yeah, it's replaying Lorette, but it's, um, it's the team's... It's very irritating. Michael. Thank you. Thank you. And this year in particular has been a pretty low year for drift algae overall, um, including the central IRL. But back to your question about how good the contractors are getting at being able to distinguish the difference, there's still a tremendous amount of ground truthing that has to happen in order to do that. Drift algae also tends to grow a lot more in deeper water. And the more water column we have to be able to see through, the harder it is to distinguish that. So, um, so yeah, so drift algae really isn't our target with the mapping. Um, but because Calerpa does grow in shallower water, like where the seagrass grows, we're able to distinguish that better. It looks, um, like almost like a, uh, almost black in the image. So it's a much darker green than seagrass. So just a different signature, but the ground truthing is substantial. Okay. The reason I ask is, you know, myself and other anglers, et cetera, going, that's the first thing we look at is if we see a lot of drift algae, we leave because there's not the fish diversity and everything else. And so I'm just trying to, in my mind, draw links between what you guys are seeing, what we're seeing on the water and, and, you know, what Dick was saying about, about the fish as well. Yeah. And the drift algae, we, we monitor drift algae a few different ways. So, um, so not only along our transects, but we also, uh, work closely with the fisheries independent monitoring groups because they do also record drift algae. And so one of our publications, um, incorporates, um, our hydroacoustic monitoring of drift algae, the transect monitoring of drift algae, as well as the FEM data. Um, so, you know, drift algaes is, uh, is really tough to get at because like Luray said, it moves around, um, and, you know, it's, it's ephemeral seasonal. Exactly. Which kind of leads me to the next question on that is, and maybe it's better for the, the, the, um, the next presentation about, um, HABs. Are you seeing any spatial correlation between drift algae abundance in a particular year and then it lag HABs in that same region? Because we've talked about this before, the central oil has this weird algae constant something, you know, with the plankton, planktonic algae. Right. It, that's a tough, it's a really tough question to answer, um, because there, it's just so dynamic and there's so many factors. So, you know, you're not only just talking about the presence of Calerpa, seagrass, drift macroalgae, but also salinity. Right. Uh, you know, there's, yeah, sediments, what's being contributed through the sediment. It's a really tough question to answer. Right. Because we're seeing the fish move around in response to this, all three of the things we're talking about in real time. So there's debt, some, something that they're seeing or feeling or whatnot that's driving a lot of stuff. Okay. Thanks. Before you step away, could you just, uh, define briefly what hydroacoustic monitoring, what, and where does that fall into these stats or is that included? So that's not included in any of the data that LaRae just showed, um, but the hydroacoustic monitoring was something that we did, um, with Bernard Regal, um, at Nova Southeastern University. And so the hydroacoustic is sort of like a sonar that, um, that can pick up drift algae. And he can tell the difference between the sediment, drift macroalgae, seagrasses, um, as well as muck. And so we did that, um, it through the two, through some of the two thousands, but it's very, very time consuming and very expensive. So it's not something that we do routinely like this other monitoring. Sure. I have another monitoring question. Sure. Uh, for the transit data, it's aerial from what we saw and it was done by plane. The extent of the transects. Yeah. The transects were actually in the water. In the water. Yeah. Okay. And does, would drone work help speed that along in any way? There's been a lot of conversation about that. Um, once again, it's a really dynamic system. So, you know, sometimes it's easiest just to get in the water. You know, you'd have to be perfect clarity conditions. You can't have chop in the water. Um, thinking about maybe doing underwater drones too. Like people will like use sleds. Um, you know, there's processing time that goes into that. So sometimes the good old fashioned boots on the ground is, um, the best resource for the larger extent when they do the flyovers. So it's such a large area that drones, it just the battery, like battery life. We're trying to do a little tiny pilot project right now. And it, I forgot the exact day, but it was going to take like three days to do like two miles or something. And so, you know, the amount of time and resource to go into that where the technology isn't, isn't there yet. And hopefully one day it will be great. Thank you so much. All right. Go ahead. Yeah, that was great presentation. Uh, I'm thinking you showed where the Calurpa died out sort of in, it's in that South Southern Sykes Creek by the Merritt Island airport and stuff. There was a bunch and I couldn't correlate, but I think that's where there were no seed banks. It looked like. So would that be an opportunity now to replace and try some seagrass plantings in that area? There has been. Potentially. Um, I will say that in the follow-up seed bank study, we did find some seeds in central IRL. So that was good news. Um, so more questions on that. I think that when talking about seagrass restoration, there's more to think about than just presence or absence, right? We really need to be cognizant of the sediments and what's in it as well as the water quality. But great question. Yeah. I have one. Um, Serangodium is the one that's most frustrating. Uh, and we're just, you know, we see it down near the inlet, uh, down near Sebastian Inlet. It's coming really strong by seed, I'm sure. Um, but you know, nothing in Northern and it used to be a major part of the community up there. So I think we're, we're missing a major parts there still up in the, up in the Northern Lagoon. Yeah. And we're very hopeful that it's kind of successional, right? We're having Halladulee show up and hopefully the Serangodium will follow in the areas that it's supposed to be. Um, anecdotally, I can say down by the Fort Pierce Inlet, we weren't seeing a lot of Serangodium two years ago. And now when I get out on the boat, like I'm freaking out and my husband is like, start fishing and stop looking at the Serangodium. So I know I'm the same way down at Sebastian Inlet. It's, but I, I, that makes me wonder about how long the seed stays in the sediment and lasts, you know? So yeah, it's incredible. The amount of questions that we don't have answers to, um, we kind of took it for granted, I think. Um, but there's a lot of people that are starting to look into it now. So hopefully we'll get the answers. Yeah, it's a, it's a heavy seed producer too. So, you know, it'd be a good one to, to experiment with seeds with. And so, yeah, thanks. Great. Chair, I got a couple more questions for our speaker. Again, great presentation. Thank you. Um, I'm just going to rattle off these three or four questions and then please answer them. Okay, speed round. Speed round. Uh, the QR code looks like it needs an update. Oh, thank you. Just on that. Perfect. Uh, the, the IFAS Eyes on Seagrass program, has that helped with collecting data for citizen science and community involvement? Yeah, we talk closely with, uh, UF-IFAS on the data that they get. They are able to, um, show us locations where seagrass has shown up that we haven't had our boots on the ground. So it's great. Fantastic. Uh, you mentioned the dominant seagrass types that we're seeing. Are we seeing all the other species in little abundance as well? Yeah. And the, you know, the species depend on the sub lagoon. And so we talk about shoal grass mostly because it's across all sub lagoons, whereas other species are only found in the south or the north or vice versa. And you were mentioning the pioneer species moving in and looking at how they hopefully will allow for the other ones to move in as well. Uh, you mentioned the impact of restoration. So percentage wise impact of restoration. Can you speak to that at all? Unfortunately, we don't have an actual number. Um, there's a lot of work that has been done. And, um, I think we'd have to start mining some actual technical reports to see, um, what that actual number is. Cause you can't discern from it when you're looking at that aerial extent, right? We're not like, oh, this is just this one little plot and this is something else. Perfect. Um, other than that, it sounds like you're already looking at the future of researching the impact of the environmental conditions on seed banks and what we have in our system. Um, is there anything that we know about the conditions needed for the seeds to come out and play a little bit or is that? We are speculating it's salinity and temperature driven. Um, also maybe some light driven, um, parameters as well. Um, but the actual thresholds we don't know right now. And I'll ask you an anecdotal question at the end. Um, is it the harsher conditions that cause the seeds to want to try to survive the most possibly? You don't have to answer. It's great. Resilience at its finest. So yeah. Thank you. Go ahead. That was a great presentation. Thank you. Um, the sea slugs, do they eat the ash media? So we don't have visual like, um, confirmation yet. Thank you. Um, but we have seen them on the ash media. So, and this was just a recent, um, observation. So we'll see what happens in probably the next few weeks to months. Cause it's really concerning to see how rapidly the ash media is just gobbling up the shoreline in the Northern Indian river lagoon. Because, you know, I do some seining up there with the boys and girls club kids. And we ended up in a bed of ash media one time and we didn't catch anything. I mean, zero, there were no minnows. There was the, we caught some, a few pipe fish that were looked like needles and, um, and some green shrimp that I'd never seen before. I mean like fluorescent, really pretty shrimp, but there were no fish. There was no life in that ash media at all. So that's concerning. Thank you. But thanks for the presentation. It was amazing. Thank you. And just anecdotally, I will say from last year, um, we, the team was out in, um, like Titusville area in, in an ash media bed and they said it went on for, you know, hundreds of meters. And so I went back out a month later and I couldn't find one shred of ash media. Oh, that's good. So there might be an ephemeral part of this. We don't know yet. Um, once again, you know, more research is necessary. I wish I had more answers, but thank you. Oh, one more. Okay, go ahead. Um, does, uh, Calerpost pave the way for seagrass? The thought is yes. Um, it does stabilize the sediment. It, um, potentially can help to alter the nutrients in the sediment that will allow for facilitation of seagrass over time. So then maybe the sea slugs come in and bulldoze everything so the seagrass can move in? Yeah. Who knows? Maybe that canopy opening is just enough to allow the seagrass, uh, seeds to start to grow. A great question. All right. Do the sea slugs eat the grass at all? No. Perfect. Actually, uh, Luciana, uh, Luciana's dissertation. Yeah. She, she did her master's thesis on CLERPA and seagrass and their relationship. Uh, so that was done last year and that's available. If you, it was at UCF. Yeah. And, and also ROS is doing a study on, on, uh, temperature and, and also particularly temperature and it's, it's, uh, whether or not low temperature produces, um, seed production, flowering and seed production. So those experiments are ongoing. We'll have some news soon. Yeah. We have, we have a lot going on. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for the opportunity. And I just want to say, Aaron and Dick, if you need me to check any of those fishing spots, you just like send them my way. Okay. I'll let you know what's happening. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Next is Geraldine, uh, with, um, harmful algal bloom influences and consequences. Oh, yes. So she was going to, sorry. Claudia Lissapad is going to introduce Geraldine. Yeah. Thank you very much. Oh, it's going to be a two, two for one. Um, thank you so much for having us. My name is Dr. Claudia Lissapad. Some of you know me, I've been here, uh, but some new faces as well. So, um, we at Applied Ecology have been working with Brevard County for since inception. So we have done a lot of monitoring and research as well as some engineering for restoration associated with projects. So we excited to be here to present and thank you so much for all your investment and dedication in understanding the system so you can provide better adaptive management strategies for it. And I did want to thank the prior speaker. Thank you so much for setting the stage for us. We're like, it's almost like we coordinated our presentations. So I want to set the stage to explain what this project is about. And then it's going to be a very brief, uh, summary of a lot of work that was done on hub research in the last two, three years. Um, so this whole, um, research on harmful algal bloom started with a FTP innovation grant where we developed and tested the math method to use remote sensing to be able to characterize hub activity across the lagoon. So the idea was instead of just having selected spots in time, discrete spots, was there a method out there that we could look at hub activity that crossed spatially and temporally the whole lagoon. So that was a big part of the effort that was a published effort. And we moved out from doing that from having now we have a strategy on where we can calculate estimated chlorophyll a basically data and provide weekly reports that you see across the lagoon. So in 2024, we realized what we started with, where we had all these super blooms and all these high concentrations of chlorophyll, we started to see much lower concentration, which is a great thing for the lagoon, but the original algorithm, the original effort no longer covered really focused on those higher numbers and not the lower numbers that we want to see. So there was an effort to add those low chlorophyll a value. So that's what the 2024. And then finally, once we had that, so now we can cover the lighter, the lower concentration range and the higher magnitudes of chlorophyll. We started focusing on questions to be answered. What can we do with this data? How we can correlate? And some of these questions just came up today about the fish, about, you know, presence or absence, or for example, sediment. And we could certainly look at seagrass as well. So what is the focus today that Dr. Klarenberg is going to come and present is going to be on those three questions. Two of them are drivers. So what does HAB activity relate to weather conditions? Specifically, we're going to focus on wind, mud presence, so presence, absence of mud, and then impacts of the HAB presence on fish. So that's the focus. We are very lucky to have Dr. Klarenberg join AEI about eight months, nine months ago. She comes with an extensive background, a PhD from UF in agricultural and biological engineering, and over 20 years of experience in water management, hydrology, applications of statistics to fisheries and wildlife. So she can kind of cover a lot of the things you're looking here. She'll cover the hard topics in 15 minutes, hopefully. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for having us and presenting this research. As Claudia said, we're going to cover these three topics, and I'm going to do it very quickly because I was told there was a time limit. The reports, I think, as Mr. Days mentioned, have also been sent out. So there's a lot of detail in the reports in terms of statistical approaches, the types of data that we used, et cetera. So forgive me if some things seem a little simplistic, but I wanted to make sure that I could convey the most important messages that we got out of this research. So one of the first things we looked at was HAB and weather, and very specifically wind. And this question came up because wind can resuspend sediments and the organic matter can re-release large amounts of nutrients into the lagoon. So the questions that we answered were, does wind energy influence these chlorophyll A concentrations? And are areas of bloom activity significantly influenced by this wind wave activity? The data that we had for this was wind energy and feet, which was essentially calculated from a number of data sources. As you can see, some information from St. John's, from NOAA, some in-house calculations. Secondly, we had chlorophyll A fluorescence data from St. John's, and we had the HAB data. That is the product that Claudia mentioned, which is the chlorophyll A concentrations over time derived from satellite imagery. Now, because the chlorophyll A fluorescence data was associated with all of this, we focused on three specific areas where the stations are located. So in the northern area, in the Banana River Lagoon. So the northern area, I'm going to refer to this Titusville because that's what the station is called, and then the more central area where the Malabar station is located. So for the very first question, very straightforward, we found that wind had a negative relationship with chlorophyll A concentration, a minor negative relationship. So what that means is as the wind speeds go up, our chlorophyll concentrations go down in terms of a general relationship. So we built a model, a multivariate model, but what I'm presenting here is just the results for the effect of wind energy in that equation to try and predict algae, cyanobacteria, or a mix of those algae. And those three categories came from that fluorescence data. And you can see that all these coefficients that are in the model are negative. So that implies that negative relationship. And we can especially see that for the Indian River Lagoon, there was a stronger negative relationship, more significance on cyanobacteria and mixed algae. And for Banana River, it was for regular algae and mixed. And I must also note, by the way, that this was obviously, as a previous speaker also mentioned, this was a big initiative. We worked with a number of people. Our team was larger than just me. So if there are any specific questions, I'm going to try and answer them as well as possible, but the report should also be in your hands. So then for those three locations, we took a closer look at actual HAB areas. So where chlorophyll A concentrations were higher. We separated the data into calm wind conditions and breezy wind conditions. And you can see from left to right, we have Banana River Lagoon, then we have the northern Indian River Lagoon area, and then the central Indian River Lagoon area. And after separating those data sets, we did a hotspot analysis, which essentially clusters lower and higher values together, where in which areas they are consistently higher or lower. The red is the higher concentrations, and the blue is the lower concentrations, so the cold spots. And as you can see on, in every picture on the left-hand side, you have the calm wind conditions, and you can see that the hotspots increased with proximity to developed shorelines. And they're also fairly large, especially in comparison with the breezy wind conditions, because as I said on the previous slide, there is that negative relationship. So under the breezy wind conditions, we see those hotspot locations smaller, but closer to, or they remain close to barriers, such as causeways or particular types of shorelines. So what we concluded from that is that causeways and shorelines most likely block winds and present lee conditions where HAB activity persists. So those were the main two findings, that the wind doesn't necessarily worsen HAB. It actually has a bit of a mediating effect, but definitely the locations that are more protected, so where there is less wind, where the wind does not disperse the algae and lowers the concentration, we see these hotspots. Oh, and I had some arrows showing up to point out the causeways, but I'm sure everybody here in the room knows where they are. The second research project looked at muck. So that accumulated mass of organic matter, and very similar to the previous research objective, these muck fluxes contribute a lot of nitrogen and phosphorus internally to the system. So our questions here were, for a number of discrete muck sites, do we find patterns over time from 2016 to 2025 in terms of chlorophyll A? Then between these sites, do we see patterns? And then finally, and this is an important one because these patterns could also just be an effect of the spatial location of these sites. Do we see a difference between these discrete sites and the surrounding adjacent, what we assume are muck-free areas? And the data sets for this was, again, these HAB time series that we collected as a product from satellite information, and we adjusted that for SAV, for submerged aquatic vegetation to make sure that we were not mixing up algae with vegetation, which resulted in 412 data points. And then we had that muck deposit distribution map that you see on the right from doctors Fox and Trefry. You can see the yellow areas are our discrete sites, and the purple is what is referred to as continuous muck. So that's mostly the shipping channel. And I'm highlighting the continuous muck also just to indicate that when we created these areas that were supposedly muck-free, we also took those continuous muck areas out. So those were areas where the discrete sites were removed and the continuous muck was removed. And the five locations here are Titusville Railway Bridge all the way up north, then in the Banana River Lagoon, Cocoa Beach, and Pineda Causeway East, then just across in the Indian River Lagoon, Pineda Causeway West, and O'Galley Causeway. And you can see in those small pictures what those sites looked like. So first looking at the sites themselves. So we looked at patterns and differences, and we did this by creating a model called a generalized additive model, which is essentially a model to estimate trends. So the dots that you see on these charts are the actual measurements. And you'll notice that there is still quite a bit of variation around the lines. And that's normal, because this approach really looks at trends. It doesn't try to explain very specific peaks or lows caused by temperature spikes or anything like that. So this is more of a general trend over time. So the line is what the model created for us, or what was predicted. Now when we look at the median chlorophyll A concentration values, we see that there's a bit of a pattern. It goes from high concentrations to much lower, more or less north to south, which is how this is ordered. So Cocoa Beach and Pineda Causeway East are obviously a different lagoon, but they're still more or less ordered north to south. Now let's dig a little bit into how these lines are created, because that will tell us more about these patterns that we see between sites and allows us to compare them. So what happens first is that we get an estimated shared trend. So this is what happens more or less regionally. This is not site-specific. This is just what is going on across the whole lagoon, across all areas. Then it adds on a site-specific trend, which essentially alters or adjusts that shared trend. And as you can see, if you look very closely, it's actually not that easy to see on this screen. Pineda Causeway West and Ogallee Causeway are both blue, and you can see on the site-specific trend that those are actually a straight line, which means that they basically just follow the shared overall trends. But you can see that for Titusville Railway Bridge, for Cocoa Beach, and for Pineda Causeway East, there's a lot more variation. So that site-specific trend then adjusts the shared trends. So we see a lot more variation, very site-specific dynamics for those three sites. And when those get put together, you get your final trends. So basically that last plot is exactly the same as the one on the left. It's just a little bit more squeezed together. So we conclude here that in terms of patterns, there's definitely a shared pattern across all sites. But then we also see very site-specific dynamics. And that is probably influenced by freshwater inputs, winds, etc. But as we go further south, those influences become less, as we see for Pineda Causeway West and Ogallee Causeway, which are very similar. Now the second question, because now we wanted to know, is this just due to spatial variation, or is there also an actual difference with the surrounding area? So we took these models that we created, these time series, the trends, and we did a similar exercise for what we call the reference site, which is in purple here. So the reference site is the surrounding area with all the muck areas removed in terms of data. And we see that for, again, the top three locations, Titusville, Cocoa Beach, and Pineda Causeway East, we see a big difference between the sites and the reference area. Less so for Pineda Causeway West and Ogallee Causeway. And of course, it's difficult to see things in a graph like this because they kind of overlap. So when we look at the numbers, we see that also from a statistical perspective, the top four sites are all significantly different, even though Pineda Causeway West has a much lower difference. So the average difference is for every observation, we took our site measurement, or our site value, the orange line, we subtracted the purple line, the reference, and that difference. So we can see that the average difference, for instance, at Titusville Railway Bridge is 12.5 micrograms per liter in terms of chlorophyll A concentrations. Now, it's very hard to see, but around the purple line, you see a bit of a shaded area, which is what we refer to as the reference envelope. So it's a statistical approach to basically estimate it's similar to a confidence interval. So about 80% of the value should fall in that shaded area, statistically speaking. So then we looked at how the site values compared to that. And we found that because if you say 80% should be inside, you would expect about 20% to be outside, which is what we see for Pineda Causeway West and Ogallee Causeway. So that looks pretty decent. However, we see that for Titusville Railway Bridge, Cocoa Beach, and Pineda Causeway East, a lot of values are outside that reference envelope. So that is more proof that there are very important differences between those muck sites and the surrounding areas in terms of chlorophyll A concentrations. Now, just to stress one more thing, this is a long-term sort of analysis. We're looking at trends. We're not looking at instantaneous occurrences of algal blooms. And I just want to highlight that because those are two different things also from management perspective, from a management perspective. A sudden event can be catastrophic, but a long-term negative influence can be detrimental as well, just in a different way. Because, for instance, what we see when we look at the mean exceedance, so we only look at the days where the site values are higher than the reference values. We see, for instance, that, again, for those top three sites in general, it's higher. But when we look at the maximum exceedance, so that would be just one observation, like the worst day, basically. We do see that even though Ogallee Causeway for the rest doesn't show many differences, it's not statistically significant, that is where the worst difference occurred on one particular occasion. So a difference of 96 micrograms per liter. Whereas, for instance, for Pineda Causeway East, even though 61% of those values are outside that reference envelope, on average, the concentration is 10.58 micrograms per liter higher. The extreme event is on the lower side out of all those five options. So that's just to highlight that there is a difference between looking at long-term impacts and sudden impacts. And this was more a long-term impact. So those were two drivers. Now we go to fish. So what we looked at was if there were differences in species population across a baseline period, bloom periods, and recovery periods. And I will tell you in a minute what those periods were, how we defined them. Then also, aside from the species themselves, did the species composition change. So species composition tells you a bit more about what are the dominant species in a particular system. And then finally, we also looked at seagrass-dependent and non-seagrass-dependent species if they were differently affected by blooms. So these were the periods that we looked at. So we established a baseline period from 2005 to 2011. Then three super bloom events, 2011, 2016, 2020, and three recovery phases, with the last one being 2021 until the end of 2024. So I just want to highlight that because we are hearing that the seagrass is doing better. But this ended, this study, we limited it to the end of 2024. So the species that we looked at, upon request, were these species, Atlantic thread herring, bay anchovy, black drum, gray snapper, gulf pipefish, pinfish, red drum, sheep's head spots, spotted sea trout, striped mullet, and tidewater mohara. The ones with the asterisk were the ones that we considered as being seagrass-dependents. And I know there's a lot of discussion about those things. And as a previous speaker also said, I think all the fish like seagrass, but these were deemed to be more seagrass-dependent in terms of their life cycle. So the data that we used was from FWC's fisheries-independent monitoring. And you can see there's a whole bunch of dots on this map here, which is all the FIM data. Just to note that there was no data after 2005 for these northern areas. So the way this data collected is it's based on a very specific statistical sampling scheme. So we adhere to the calculations that go with that. And I should also stress that FIM is set up in such a way that it targets juvenile and sub-adult species in order to create a time series that represents the natural sort of dynamics for fish. So that mostly fisheries impacts are removed, are not part of this time series. So it mostly represents natural conditions, natural mortality, etc. So again, this was obviously, this was a very big report. And there are lots of details in the report also about specific fish. But again, we need to be cognizant of time here. So I tried to condense things a bit because we did look at the changes for every single period. So baseline, bloom, recovery, bloom, recovery. We looked at the changes in all the fish species. Now for both lagoons, the FIM data can be separated in shallow habitat and deep habitat, where also different net sizes are used. So in the shallow habitat, the mesh size is a lot smaller. So they mostly target juvenile sub-adult fish. Whereas in the deeper habitats, the mesh size is a lot larger. So they target more adult fish. So what we found that comparatively, and now I'm just talking about the baseline and the final recovery period. And again, the report has much more detail about what happened during every period, because we do also see certain species doing well during bloom periods. Overall, we see pinfish and spots are really the ones that suffered across all habitats, shallow, deep Indian River, and Banana River. To such an extent that worst recovery, it's actually reduction. So what you can see in the numbers, it's reduction. And in the deeper habitats, also sheep's head, both lagoons. And the note at the bottom, I must note, because this is just a data analysis exercise, reduction can also indicate movement to a different site. But unfortunately, since we don't see an increase in pinfish, for instance, in other sites, this is more across the board. It wasn't all negative. So actually, in the shallow habitat in Indian River Lagoon, there were a number of species that did better. Although it wasn't, from a statistical perspective, always significant. Whereas in the deeper habitats and the Banana River Lagoon habitats, those were more significantly different. The main thing that we noted was Tidewater Mohara. They do better everywhere. Black drum also did better in both shallow habitats and also in the deep habitats in Banana River Lagoon. And yeah, there's some of these interesting things where, for instance, Gulf pipefish did somewhat better in shallow habitats in Indian River Lagoon, but worse in Banana River Lagoon. And again, this is comparing baseline to the final recovery periods 2021 to 2024. So those were the species separately. Then we also looked at species composition. So what sort of drives the system? What drives the composition of species? We actually found that for the shallow habitats in Indian River Lagoon, there wasn't a significant change. However, for the deeper habitats, but also for both habitats in Banana River Lagoon, everything has shifted to a strongly Tidewater Mohara dominated system. So while initially the deeper habitats were more pinfish dominated and spot dominated, they all switched to Tidewater Mohara. And I must say, we applied a method that also deals with the fact that in terms of numbers, there are just more Bay Anchovies and more Tidewater Mohara than, for instance, there are Black Drum. So that was taken into account. And again, all the details are in the report because we also looked at these species composition trajectories. So we looked at how the species composition changed for every period. Again, baseline, bloom, recovery. And the interesting thing was that not one trajectory was exactly the same. So some areas would switch to a spotted sea trout dominated system after a bloom, but then back to Tidewater Mohara, where another system didn't do that at all. So definitely some interesting changes. But as I said, this is up to 2024. So with that seagrass coming back, there is hope. Now finally, we looked at that seagrass dependent, those seagrass dependent species. And that's why I'm saying there's hope. Because what we found with this data up to 2024 was not that great. So we grouped all. So this is, again, very much a high level analysis. We grouped all our seagrass dependent species together, all our non-seagrass dependent species. Then we grouped all the bloom period observations together, all the baseline and all the recovery. So we had three groups of data. And we compared how similar or how different they were with statistical tests. And what we see here is that for seagrass dependent species, we found significant differences between baseline conditions and bloom conditions, meaning that these species change, their numbers change. Then we also found significant differences for baseline and recovery for seagrass dependent species, basically meaning that they did not go back to baseline conditions, and that bloom and recovery conditions kept those species similar. So limited recovery is the message here. So that was Indian River Lagoon, but we actually see the same thing for Banana River Lagoon. So what this tells us is that from that original baseline conditions, species were reduced during blooms. And at least in the time that we looked at this data, we did not see much recovery. But also keep in mind, these timeframes between the blooms were short, right? So recovery takes time. So the overall outcomes, we found that wind is more of a mediator than a driver, since it disperses algae and lowers these concentrations. We currently did not find any direct evidence that it worsens HABs. But this is also because we looked at the direct effect. It is possible that over time, it is possible that over time, there is an effect, but that is not something that we looked at. And we did see from that hotspot analysis that the causeways and shorelines probably block winds, which gives conditions for HAB activity to persist. We did also confirm or we found that the chlorophyll A patterns at MUX sites differed over time in terms of levels going from higher to lower, but also with different trends and variability, which is an indication that each site does have to be evaluated separately, because it seems like they have very different conditions that affect the chlorophyll A concentrations there. But also that generally, the MUX sites have higher chlorophyll A levels than the surrounding MUX-free areas. And finally, fish species most negatively affected across all habitats were pinfish followed by spots. In deeper habitat, sheep's heads comparatively more affected. Tidewater mohar and black drum fared comparatively better, so comparatively baseline final recovery periods. But except for shallow habitats in Indian River Lagoon, all habitats shifted to a tidewater mohar dominated system. That was a very strong signal. And it seems right now with this data that the seagrass dependent species appeared quite irreversibly affected with little recovery in the time periods that we looked at. But again, I want to say the seagrass is on the rise. So I don't want to make it all negative. So this is where we looked at a couple of drivers and then the final effects on fish. And I want to thank you for this opportunity. This was also great research for us to do. Yes. Thank you. Just a couple of questions. What were the depths from skinny to deep? I'm sorry, what were the depths? So it's based on the gear types. So the seine sampling for the shallow areas is anything that is 1.8 meters or less deep. And the deeper areas, some of them are about three meters. It goes up to a maximum of seven meters just as a gear specification, but we don't really make that everywhere here. And how did you collect the data on the fish? The fish data, you said? Yes, ma'am. So that came from the fisheries independent monitoring project from FWC. So they have a database available where all that data can be downloaded. And we actually also have that available now, which actually contains so much more information than what we used. Thank you very much. You're welcome. For your information, you got all three reports in June. So you have those reports and you can review them. And now you can review them in detail. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And feel free to contact us if you have any questions about what we did or what we found. Was the wind all year long? Excuse me? The wind. I was looking at it and it looked like it was, it changes obviously. We go north to south winds. So how did you handle that? So we did look at the difference between wet and dry season. So for instance, during the dry season, the wind was more easterly, whereas during the wet season, it was more uniformly distributed across like the wind rows. So essentially, we didn't necessarily look at the direction. So for the wind energy, we looked at the fetch, we looked at the depth, we looked at, there were a couple of other components that really looked, that sort of estimate that wave height. But there we did not take the actual direction into account. So that probably is more visible in that hotspot analysis where you can see that some of the higher, the hotspots, the higher chlorophyll A levels, the clusters, are really in certain areas where the wind probably pushes it against the causeways. Yeah. Go ahead, John, and then we'll go to Laura Lee. Yeah. Good presentation. The reports are very well written. They're highly technical. I'm wondering whether there might be a simple one-page summary for each of the reports put together. I don't know whether the staff wants to do that or whether the contractor could do that. But I think the general public might have some difficulty trying to – you did a great job here. I like the way you started off with up-down. And I think the committee appreciates that, too. But, you know, I think the public needs to see this kind of information. And maybe, you know, I'm not sure the best way to approach it. And I'm not sure who should do it. You know, if these are going to be on the website, maybe just a simple document. This is itself right here, the overall outcome. Yeah. Again, up-down. You know, not a lot of words. Okay? Thank you. That's a great suggestion. We can actually think about creating our executive summaries with some of those pointers. Yeah. Go ahead, Laura Lee. So my question is about the weekly have reports that are fantastic. I look forward to them every week. But there's a consistent – what appears to be a hot spot, you know, where there's a lot of red and yellow colors across from Hollover Canal and a little bit north where that cluster of islands is in the eastern side of Mesquita Lagoon? I have to look at Claudia for that because that's a colleague of mine that puts those reports together. Right. And around – on the east side of the Indian River Lagoon, around Hollover Canal and a little bit north of Hollover Canal, and those areas seem to stay there. Are they – and we were wondering, could it be from rotting seagrass that's blown up against the shoreline? Or why do those areas seem to stay there all the time, like every week they're always there? That is an excellent observation, but I have to hand it over. That's an excellent – great question. So there can be a lot of causes for that, and we haven't gone in the field in validation. You know, back to boots on the ground would be helpful. There is obviously always other factors that can influence chlorophyll A. We remove seagrass when we know where there's seagrass there. What if there's drift algae that happens to be frequently there, and that would impact chlorophyll A? Because one thing that we are trying to distinguish is chlorophyll A that's in the water column versus we are seeing the signature when it's relatively shallow from something else within the water column or, you know, see some caulerpa or something else. So that – we'll look at that now that you pointed that out and see is this persistence. I know the new seagrass maps are out, so maybe we're looking at some of that. And we'd love to have some more results if you have additional information on where you can see caulerpa or your drift algae results would help because we could correlate it. Is there another influence that's causing it? But there are certainly areas that are persistently higher, and those – the causeways do appear to be, you know, some of those corners are some of those. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, a great presentation. Thanks. There's been the comment made, or at least that I've heard since I've moved here, that the wind is causing the suspension, and obviously you're showing that that suspension gets dispersed by the wind, and so you're not seeing the blooms. But post-wind, do you then see an issue because now it's probably been degraded some in the ground and up comes more flux locally? That's an excellent comment, and that is exactly the thing that we did not evaluate in this study. So that's why it also says that we don't see the direct evidence. So we see the dispersion from the breezy wind conditions, but any sediment suspension probably has more of a delayed effect, and in that sense we didn't do a time series analysis looking at those delayed effects, but that would be, yeah, additional research that would be useful, because that is not something that came out of this research right now. Thank you. Melanie, we have an update on the Brevard County in-ground nitrogen reducing biofilter study. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. So we're going to kind of zoom out from the lagoon now and zoom into a residential property septic drain field, so just to get everyone on the same page, shifting gears a little bit here. But I'll be presenting an update on the Brevard County INRB study. To start with, INRB stands for in-ground nitrogen reducing biofilter, and for context, this is a different approach. We're familiar with the advanced treatment units as part of our septic upgrade grant program. A homeowner with an INRB is still trying to reduce the nutrient pollution coming from that septic effluent, but it's a different approach. So the homeowner has a conventional septic system, which we know are not very good at removing significant amounts of nitrogen. So instead, that nitrogen removal enhancement is done through an enhanced drain field, in particular this in-ground nitrogen reducing biofilter, which I'll explain more on how that works on the next slide. But I want to point out this picture here. This is when, this is showing the installation of one of these INRBs in Titusville as part of this project. And since it's opened up there, you can see the structures in there are the pan lysimeters. That's what were used to collect the septic effluent samples that were then analyzed for nitrogen. Also, you may not recognize them, but that's Anthony inside that hole there. And that was a hot day. You may or may not be able to tell from the picture. So these were installed, I think, 2020. The sampling was done in 2021 to 2022. What I'll be talking about in my time here with Sorrel, we've been working through the data analysis and evaluation interpretation process through a series of meetings with the state over the course of those two years. So I'm going to try to tell that story so you can see what those results were and how we've, the conclusions we've come to in the next steps. So again, an INRB is a more passive approach to increasing nitrogen removal from septic effluent. And it achieves that by adding this special denitrification media layer. So I think this graphic here kind of shows you a cross section of the INRB. You have the drain field area on top in black. Below that is the unsaturated nitrification layer. And then below that, this is that denitrification media layer we're talking about. So the way an INRB works is you can imagine the septic effluent coming out of the septic tank and then percolating down through these various layers. And as that's happening, you hope to have optimal conditions for all the bacteria that are helping to transform that nitrogen from one form to the next through these series of progressive steps. Until once that septic effluent reaches that bottom orange layer there shown the denitrification media layer, you hope that you have optimal conditions. So substrate, a food source, anaerobic conditions for those really good bacteria that are completing that final transformation of nitrogen removal, converting that nitrogen from inorganic forms to nitrogen gas, which is released. So that's at the heart of it, that denitrification. We're talking about that final removal step so that hopefully when that groundwater base flows to the lagoon, it has a lower amount of nitrogen in it than it would without that special extra treatment. So currently, the state of Florida only approves wood chips for use in this denitrification layer. The objective for this study was to test and evaluate the effectiveness of an alternative media, bold and gold. You can see on the first bullet, I include the proportions of clay, tire crumb, pine sawdust, and mason sand that made up the bold and gold. And one of the advantages we wanted, what we wanted to evaluate, we anticipate it's a longer lasting material than wood chips. One of the concerns was that wood chips would degrade and decompose over time, causing slumping and compromise the integrity of the drain field. We have a history of using bold and gold for stormwater projects to increase nutrient removal. UCF studies of the bold and gold had reported removal rates as high as 85 percent. For this study, you'll see the 65 percent TN removal number. That's our max, our kind of magic number. We were looking to see if the bold and gold could achieve at least 65 percent removal of total nitrogen from the septic effluent. Now, before the state of Florida will approve a new media, they have to have evidence that it's been installed in Florida systems and evaluated to see if it hits that 65 percent TN removal target. So that was what we were doing as part of this project. So five INRBs were installed at residential properties in Titusville and were sampled quarterly from 2021 to 2022. The two diagrams here are kind of two ways of looking at the drain field for this study. The one on the left that shows you that similar cross-section we were looking at before, where you have the drain field on top. Below that, the unset or the aerobic nitrification layer. And then in yellow, that's where the bold and gold was installed as part of the denitrification layer. On the right-hand side, you can see an overview of the drain field. The kind of purplish pink circles are the shallow pan lysimeters. So pan lysimeters were what was used, what were used to collect the effluent samples that were then tested for primarily nitrogen and chloride. And I'll explain why we were collecting chloride data. The red circles are showing the location of the deep lysimeters. These were located at the bottom of the bold and gold denitrification layer. So for the data that I'll be presenting today, we were really looking at the difference in the total nitrogen coming out of that septic effluent and comparing it to what was in those deep lysimeters, because presumably that sample had then percolated through the bold and gold denitrification layer. On that right-hand side, you can see the box at the bottom is where the effluent's coming out of the septic tank. We had three shallow and three deep lysimeters in a row closer to that header, and then a second row behind that of, again, three shallow and three deep lysimeters. I wanted to point out, if you can make out those tiny green triangles on the right side, that's the site. Those were the locations of the groundwater monitoring wells, and we wanted to make sure that groundwater wasn't getting into those samples, and we did not find that to be the case over the course of the study. There was, I think, one instance where there might have been one occasion where there was some groundwater, but overall it was not significant. And then the final thing I want to mention about these pan lysimeters, you can see the design figure on the bottom left of the slide. This was the approved design for these that the state was also using for their INRB studies, and a challenge we had and a challenge they have had with this pan lysimeter is challenging to collect sufficient water volume to analyze all the analytes that we wanted to. So this was a persistent challenge we encountered, they encountered. They have since moved to using suction lysimeters and have had better luck with collecting enough sample volume with those. But again, that was a challenge here, so we prioritize getting those nitrogen measurements and chloride. So all of this project, the blueprint, is approved by the state in advance of the project beginning, and we call it the Quality Assurance Project Plan, or QUAP for short, so I'll be referring to that a few times. But at the top here, you can see now we get into analyzing the data. And again, on the right, you can see, I just wanted to illustrate again, what we're looking at is that TN value total nitrogen measured coming out of the septic tank effluent, and then what is that TN value down in that deep lysimeter after it's had a chance to percolate through the bold and gold media. And our raw data from all five systems, you can see in the graph below, on the x-axis, we have the five sites in Titusville, four on Dolphin Road, one on Gregory Avenue. On the y-axis, we have the annual median percent TN reduction, and I've shown the red line representing that 65% TN removal target. You can see when we evaluated the raw data, or sometimes you'll see it on here as the actual measured TN data, all five systems exceeded that 65% TN removal, so those were promising results. Things got a little more muddy when we adjusted for dilution. So this was a requirement in the QAP. The state wanted reassurance that the TN removal reductions we were seeing were due to the effect of the bold and gold media reducing nitrogen, not just the, not the effect of water getting in there and diluting the sample. So to do this, the only approved kind of dilution factor is chloride. That's why we were measuring it in the septic effluent and also in the deep lysimeters. So just to briefly explain, if you see chloride values staying the same from the effluent down to that deep lysimeter, you can assume probably no dilution is happening. If you see a big drop, then maybe dilution's a factor. Again, as I mentioned, we knew that groundwater was not a significant influence on the samples, so the other possibilities would have to be rainfall or irrigation or something like that. So anyway, long and short of it, I'm not going to make you calculate these, but we looked at those chloride values, calculated a chloride ratio, and then we used that to calculate an adjusted total nitrogen concentration based on the actual measured TN. And this is where things kind of became more confusing when we were looking through the analysis. And this is really where we've been with the state over the last two years. We saw highly valuable or variable chloride values. We were seeing kind of outlier values that we weren't sure, you know, which of these outliers should be excluded, which should be included in the data set for analysis. So we had a series, probably over two years of discussions with DEP about this, how to analyze the data. They were looking at it as well. And we finally came to the consensus that the data points that should be included for analysis were within this chloride ratio range of 0.5 to 1.5 because these were data points that we would assume were reflected treated effluent. So those are the ones we included in this analysis. The consequence was that, you know, we ended up throwing out 54 data points, these outliers, and only including 66 in the analysis, which dramatically reduced the size of the data set. So here you can see the new results when we are only looking at those data points for, that reflect treated effluent. Now again, we have the five Titusville sites on the x-axis, the annual median percent TN reduction on the y. The blue bars represent the actual measured data or the raw data, and the orange represents the adjusted data that was adjusted TN adjusted for chloride dilution. So you can see that when we run the analysis here, we have that 65 percent TN reduction design target. Two of the actual raw data sites TN reductions pass or meet that threshold, but only one if we look at adjusted TN. So it did dramatically change the results. There were two, back to the QAP, there were kind of two tables in the QAP that we needed to assess our data against to evaluate effectiveness of the media, and that essentially the state could use as a way to determine if the bold and gold passed. QAP table two, this is looking at the data I just presented, this annual median TN reduction. And based on QAP table two, since we tested five systems, four of the five needed to meet or exceed that 65 percent TN removal. And you can see that the data set didn't reach that, meet that target. QAP table three, we looked at the data a little bit differently. I mentioned those 66 data points. So that's across all five sites, every sample date, and every deep lysimeter. We calculated individual TN reductions. So for this test, we had to go through and count how many of those TN reductions exceeded, met or exceeded 50 percent TN reduction. So this was a way to test overall effectiveness of the media. Based on the table provided by DEP, of 66 data points of these individual reductions, 55 had to meet that 50 percent or higher TN removal. And you can see with the numbers in red that we didn't hit that target, looking at either the actual measured data or the adjusted TN data. So in conclusion, this was, again, the culmination of multiple discussions with the state. The decision was made that there was not enough, that we needed additional data, more research, a larger and more robust data set to be able to effectively evaluate the effectiveness of the bold and gold. DEP was not able to make a determination about effectiveness based on kind of the noise we had with this data set. And they have approved us to move forward with a phase two of study to gather additional data. This phase two study would be truncated six months, sampling more frequently every other week. Because so much time has passed, the media itself has kind of become newer and improved. So the manufacturer is working on column testing to get new estimates of the removal rates. And we've been told that it may have the capabilities of removing phosphorus as well. I failed to mention, but prior to the first study, and this will be the case for this phase two as well, third-party monitoring will need to be done to test the safety of the media. And that gets approved by the state before the project moves forward. The next steps, these are some of our administrative and logistical steps, would be to amend the memorandum of understanding with DEP. And they will need to also approve a new QAP for the phase two testing. In addition to site selection and homeowner agreements and all these logistical things before the new phase of testing could begin. We have received confirmation from DEP that they will make a final determination regarding either approval or disapproval of the media at the end of this additional set of series of testing. So, and finally, lessons learned. I think one of the things for the new phase two testing, we would move to using the suction lysimeters because they have a higher chance of being better at collecting a sufficient volume of water to sample. And then I think we've learned a lot from our series of discussions with DEP about how to analyze and interpret these data. So I think that process will go much more quickly with a phase two. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions. Thanks. That's super interesting. I'm curious about, you may be doing this in the next step, is looking at toxins coming off the tire crumbs. There's been work on salmon in the Pacific Northwest that tire toxins are causing population declines. Yes. And so I kind of briefly alluded to, there was, again, third-party monitoring did evaluate the safety of the media prior to this original study. And that is a prerequisite that the state has to look at those data and evaluate that prior to the start of the study. And the same will be true for this next phase of study. Okay. So is that monitoring done in the same conditions, right? Because like if I do it in a lab, there's different chemistry, there's different everything that's occurring in that media layer. I mean, you know, atmospheric pressure, everything kind of changes that. Absolutely. And I might defer, that occurred prior to my involvement in the study. I don't know if Anthony or Virginia have additional information about that initial testing that was done, whether it was in an experimental setting. I believe probably experimental setting. Yes. And we weren't involved in the testing. We were relying on the state, you know, because various forms of bold and gold are used in different kinds of circumstances, whether it's stormwater or for ribs, other uses that DEP and DOT have used. So they've done the, they've required them to do this testing and shown that they have no concerns. Yeah, I'd suggest looking much deeper into that. Yeah, just because of previous research on other fisheries, it's a major concern. And if we're putting this into our groundwater, and what, 30% of the water, freshwater and our outcomes from groundwater, from the fisheries perspective, that's a pretty big concern. So if there's funds, perhaps we can add our own component of that testing, all the actual effluent to look at control sites, and then these other sites to see if there's different levels of toxins. I have a few kind of questions. To begin with, what was the determination to choose bold and gold? Were you just seeking out another media? I mean, I know our projects that we've tried different things. Was that the motivation for that? Or did bold and gold solicit us to participate in their approval process for the new media? How did that work? I was not here at that initial phase. So kind of a little of each. So bold and gold had been approved and used successfully in multiple stormwater applications. We are open to testing other media, but they were the ones that had the most approvals so far, and they were interested in working with us on this application. So, you know, if there are other media providers out there that have sufficient testing to demonstrate that there's a good chance of success, we'd be happy to work with them too. Okay, good to know. And I know that that whole group, I mean, they're very forward in innovation and excellence, so I definitely think that's great. My other question, you said, and I'm not sure if I just didn't get it, the EP state of Florida has to approve these processes. Is that because they're funding it or just because they have to have a vested interest? Why does that work that way? Well, so initially when we started this project, it was the Florida Department of Health, and then that team transitioned over to Florida Department of Environmental Protection. But they're the ones responsible for permitting septic systems, septic drain fields, and all that. So they're the authority, the regulatory authority for the state. So yet they have the say in approving what is or what is not allowed to be installed in these drain fields. So other than just the final designation of approval or not, to approve phase two, did they have a mandatory approval process just to test? Or is that because of a continuation with, is that because of funding, or is that because of they're just putting this media even in a test site, they have to know that that's happening? Is that the reason why they have to approve or not? So that's very thorough. Yes, and again, we had a memorandum of understanding with DOH, again now DEP at the beginning. So this is really amending that original memorandum of understanding, and it really has been an open two-way communication with DOH DEP across this whole several years now for this project. So it's just a continuation. They made it clear that this would be amending that original MOU for just additional testing. Does that answer your question? Absolutely. Thank you. And with the exception of the conclusion of approval or not, they just have to monitor the test where any of this is being used. So it's not funding. So funding is coming from where for this research? So the cost to install these systems was comparable to the cost of installing an advanced nitrogen-reducing septic system. But the long-term O&M costs for the homeowner are lower for for an INRB. So what we were hoping to do was come up with a media that wouldn't rot in 10 to 15 years and be a big maintenance disaster for homeowners, and come up with a lower-term, a lower-cost, long-term ownership option with a similar installation cost. So for this project itself, who funded this? We funded the installation because we would have funded the installation of advanced systems. We as in sorrel funds? Yes. So it was a comparable, instead of the traditional, this particular homeowner got to do the experimental pilot program of the same type of system, but could be something we implement into additional homes in the future? Correct. Awesome. Thank you. Anything else? Thank you. Thank you very much. Next, we have a review of the new tools for the Saver Indian River Lagoon. All right. So I'm going to talk, well, we are going to talk about some of the new interactive tools that are available now. If you think you know what's on the website, you don't, unless you've really recently poked around, because there's all kinds of new things they've been putting up. The takeaway is it really is a remarkable collection of resources that we have available now. I think you could say that pretty much any reasonable question somebody's going to ask about the lagoon, about this program, about the restoration and mitigation activities, it's all there. So that's great. I think personally, and probably most of us, if I get questions from people, I live in a septic area, so there's lots of questions about septic and what people are eligible for and those sorts of things. That's there. Lots of questions about spending, projects, all of those things, motivations, how the projects are decided. All of that's there. We're going to cover some of that, but I'm going to I'm going to highlight briefly a couple of other pieces first. So this, of course, there we go. This is not, it's a reverse scroller. Okay, so we're going to jump in. So we're just, this is just starting at the, this is all easily accessible and easy to find. We're going to, we're starting at the Brevard site. So we click into the lagoon and we're going to go to maps here. Okay, so obviously a great place to start is just the overview. So I'm just going to read this through all the way. I'm not going to read it through. Amazing stats, all kinds of information. Like I said, this is, you know, it's a great starting place. That's why it's the overview. One of these. Okay, so I won't go into, we've got algae bloom maps. We've got information on the baffle box, seagrass mapping tools, lots of information like in, in easier to digest forms of what we've been seeing now. Some of the maps for, for seagrass and all of that. But there's also some things, I don't know, maybe you might not have expected. There's recreation information. Here we go. Pretty much everything you're going to want to do around the lagoon. Uh, there's maps. Almost all of this is interactive. So places to go birding, places to launch your kayak, places to launch your boat, walking trails, biking trails, et cetera. There's also this great manatee field guide, allergy of the manatees, how to properly view them, all sorts of stats. Who knows how much a manatee can eat in one day? I don't know where it is on here. 150 pounds. Hungry little buggers. Top speed. Anybody? 20. Yeah. 20 miles an hour. Pretty impressive. Yeah. Um, so, you know, obviously we can't go over all of this now. We should all be digging into this. We should all be pointing people to this information, uh, using it for ourselves so that we're up to speed on all of it. Uh, but those are, I mean, obviously those are, those are great, uh, tools as well, but I know what you're thinking. Manatees are great. Kayaks are great, but when can we talk about sewage and nitrogen loading? So for that, I'm going to hand it off to, I think Joel's going to start with the fun stuff. All right. Good morning. I know we're all so excited to talk about septic tanks. Um, so this is on that main map, uh, page. If you go to the Save Our Lagoon septic mapper, this is the most commonly used map, um, used by homeowners, septic contractors, and then me every day. Uh, so it, it, um, looks like this. A few new things since the last time we showed you this map. We've added in, um, the watershed boundary so that homeowners can more easily see whether or not they fall into an area that is funded. And then we've also added this dancing question mark that you have to try to catch. There it goes. Um, so that is our, our reference to that $6,000 minimum that we'll speak more on next month. Um, but just because the map does not account for that minimum, it'll still show $400, $2,000. Um, that's where this information is telling homeowners they should still reach out. They are eligible for that $6,000 minimum. So these shaded in areas here, these are the septic to sewer project areas. So anyone inside, um, any of these areas that are, um, I believe now the colors are purple and yellow are the ones that have not been completed yet. If you're in that shaded area, you're not eligible for septic upgrade funding because the county has allocated money to go to sewer. So we will reach out when that time becomes more pertinent for you. If you are outside of any of those shaded areas, you are eligible for septic upgrade funding. Uh, the colors represent the actual, uh, amounts of funding. So going back to an area we showed you last time we spoke about the minimum, uh, the red and orange, those are higher loading properties. They correlate to somewhere closer to the $20,000 maximum. Whereas the lighter green colors, some of these kind of yellowish colors, they're less dark green is typically someone who's going to be impacted by that $6,000 minimum. Uh, homeowners are more than welcome to come out here. They can zoom in or they can type in their address. Um, I can't show you what that'll look like because this map only shows single family homes and I don't want to out anyone's address like that. So, um, I'll show you the, uh, courthouse in Melbourne if it loads up here shortly. Um, but it'll pop up, zoom into that area. Um, if that ever does load, what it will also show you is that there are areas, typically those are new properties that were built after 2018 or commercial properties. They're in the watershed, but they don't have a color on them. If you are on, a septic tank in an area that doesn't have color on you, still reach out to us. You're likely eligible. Um, we just have to check internally because for whatever reason, this initial run on this map, the data skipped over that parcel. So if you're on septic and you're in the watershed, give us a call. We'll double check everything. So that is the basic gist on how to use this. This also includes, um, the sewer service areas on this tab. Julia is going to go a little bit more into how to use that. Um, but both of these maps are available here and also on the project mapper that Julia is going to speak about. So that is the very quick way to use this. Uh, most of the septic contractors in the area have this map. They use this map with customers. So, um, give us a call and the septic contractors can also give a lot of details on how this map works and what that eligibility is. So with that, um, any other information you need on septic upgrades, there is a tab on the website. That's a good, um, other resource that you may need. Um, and so now I'll invite Julia up to speak about the project mapper. Hello everyone. Julia, so, um, this is our project mapper and it includes, uh, different sections of, uh, our plan. It starts with, uh, the several projects, which are all the projects that we have, uh, in the plan. The projects are color coded based on progress and you can see it, uh, on the legend, uh, right here on the right. And then the size of the circle is, um, uh, based on how much TN, um, the project, uh, reduces. Um, this is also interactive. So, uh, you can click on the dots, you can zoom in and it gives you information on the projects, um, how much TN and TP is removed, um, the status as well as a link to our website. Um, we also have the dancing, uh, question mark. Um, it will be found in each tab and it gives information on the specific tab or, um, why we have that tab there, uh, or any information related to the tab specifically. We also have our, a link to our website here if needed, um, and also, um, the watershed boundary here and it's gonna be in each tab as well. The second tab is our completed projects with beautiful stars and it's also color coded with, um, our reduce, remove, and restore projects. Um, same idea here. You can look up, uh, your address if needed and you can see if the, your property is next to a completed projects and you can also, uh, get information on the project by clicking on the star. Same idea with the dancing question mark and, um, the link up here will take you to the website if needed. Then right here, um, you can change the tabs but you'll see this is the septic mapper, um, that Joel went over. Um, and then, um, here we have the, uh, sewer service areas. For homeowners that want to connect to sewer, the, uh, first step is to contact their local utilities and this map can help with that, um, because it highlights the different service areas and then when you click on a service area, it will give you their phone number, the website, um, specifically to that service area, as well as our, uh, website, uh, specifically our page on sewer projects and it can give, uh, updates on that and, um, future timelines. You can also find the website up here again. Um, we have the reclaimed water tab. Um, we decided to highlight, uh, the water treatment facilities, um, as well as, um, the area in which the reclaimed water reaches. This is also a helpful tool for people that want to know, um, what's going on with that and, um, see if they're in a, um, reclaimed water service area. Oh, yes. Um, as well if you click on the, um, shaded areas, it can give you a suggestion on, um, how, or how much fertilizer to use in your area since there is a lot of nutrients already in the reclaimed water and some more information can be found in the little question mark, um, which gives you information on the reclaimed water, the nutrients in it and, um, all that you might want to know. We also highlighted our Lagoon Loyal, uh, fertilizer webpage for extra information. Um, then we have a tab on sewer lateral repairs. Um, we highlighted the shaded areas or the smoke tested areas, um, as well as, um, if you click on the question mark, it will, um, give you information on our, uh, homeowner grant program, uh, of, uh, that we help repair sewer laterals, um, providing grant money for it. And we also have, um, our website, uh, that specifically will take you to that specific page. We also have our storm water projects. Um, these are all, all the dots are all our storm water projects and they're also color coded with, uh, um, by progress. So completed in progress and funded. Um, we also decided to highlight, uh, our priority basins that are current as well as the previous, uh, priority basins. And you can see the projects that we, uh, have completed or are in progress or in progress on, uh, the priority basins. We also have this tab on, uh, muck management. Um, we highlighted our muck projects. They're also color coded. And, um, if you zoom in, you can see the extent of the polygon of the area that was worked on. Um, and then if you click on the splat icon, um, you can, uh, have more information on the, um, muck project or, uh, the interstitial water treatment project in different cases. And the areas that are highlighted are in different colors because you can also see which entity, uh, completed the, the work is working on it. And then our last but not least tab is, um, our restoration projects tab. And it highlights, uh, planet shoreline, oysters, and clams. You can click on it and it will give you, um, information on how much, um, the, the reef or the project removes, as well as, uh, the use of it, which I think is very interesting. And you can find, um, links to our websites or the overview map, uh, also here. And that's it. You guys have any questions? Yes. Go ahead. Um, did I hear you say that on the, just a couple of slides ago, there's actually in the data that comes out on that pop-up, the vendor who, the, or the contractor who completed the project? Um, is that? It's the municipality. The municipal. Oh, the location. Okay, great. Thank you. Yes. Well, Fred, you can point people to this on Facebook now and, and educate themselves. I've shot screenshots as well for the month. So yeah, it's good. It's nice. It's really well done. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you guys. So our last agenda item is the video, um, for the Grand Canal, uh, dredge material management area restoration. So I think Honda's going to get that for us. So we're standing here today at the dredge material management area that was used for dewatering muck from the county's Grand Canal muck removal project. The project removed over 548,000 cubic yards of muck that was contributing to harmful algal blooms, high turbidity and overall poor water quality. The muck came from all these houses and canals located around us. We are restoring approximately 6.5 acres of the former dewatering site located off of Pineda Causeway in unincorporated Bevard County, just south of Patrick Space Force Base. Restoration includes removing invasive species like Brazilian pepper, but also planting nearly 800 native plants around the perimeter of the site. The perimeter of plantings will provide a visual buffer, help promote natural propagation, and also provide habitat for wildlife. These plants are under a one-year warranty, and we will initially be using a water tank to water the plants until we can establish an irrigation system using soaker hoses around the plant areas. And for the next year, until the plants are established, we will be monitoring them and watering them weekly. The planting of native species will also benefit and encourage wildlife to return to the site. For example, Simpson stopper and wax myrtle, they produce berries that birds like catbirds and cardinals like to eat, and flowers on site promote pollinators like bees and our zebra longling butterflies. In addition to all of our plantings, we're also installing stormwater swales to capture and treat stormwater because previously it had flowed across the site untreated into the lagoon. This county-owned site was used for dewatering muck because it was approved by the Board of County Commissioners through a temporary use agreement. The restoration is required because the project permits required it, the temporary use agreement, and we also are doing it in response to residential concerns. Since dredging is complete, residents have reported seeing more manatees, bottlenose dolphins, and fish in areas where they were previously absent. This is showcasing the improvements to the ecological conditions. Since this project is a restoration site, it's going to be prohibited to public access and use. And this is so that we can preserve all the beautiful restoration that we're doing. There are no plans to use this site for any future muck projects. You can achieve similar benefits to what's seen here with the plants around your home. If you put wetland plants in low spots around your yard or where your gutters are directed, you can create a rain garden that helps to filter nutrients before it gets down into the groundwater. Another way you can use them is around stormwater ponds or edges of canals to create buffer zones. These help to prevent grass clippings and other debris from washing down into the waterways. Visit lagoonloyal.com to learn more tips and tricks you can do around your home to help reduce pollution and help us all get to a healthier lagoon faster. Thank you. Now we have old business. And you can really consider some of my previous comments on where those motions went last time in the May meeting as old business and things that we have to clean up along the way. You'll be getting a draft of that 2.3, section 2.3 coming at your way. So review it, please. And also comments on item five from the homeowner and HOA pilot project. No new business now. And so we're on to public comments. I have one comment from the public, Ryan Smith. Hello. My name is Ryan Smith. Good morning. First of all, I'd like to thank all of you for allowing me to speak today. My name is Ryan Smith. I'm a resident of South Merritt Island. My neighborhood is Egert's Cove. Egert's Cove is a waterfront community built between 1987 and the end of the late 90s. With that, we have a small marina that is on the eastern side of the ICW that has become heavily impacted with muck accumulation. This accumulation has reduced water quality and overall health of the marina. Unfortunately, removal of this muck, as you all know, comes at a cost. Going forward, Egert's Cove will be applying for grant funds to help restore the lagoon's healthy natural ecosystem for future generations to come. Our overarching objective is to have a healthy marina and to do our part to help save our lagoon. That's pretty much it. But I would just like to say this is super interesting. This is my first meeting ever. Thank you. And I have more neighbors and residents that are also interested in this. I didn't realize how big this was. So this is pretty awesome. We treat it as very important. What was that? We treat it as very important. No, no. It's like really cool. And then seeing the whole removal project was right there on Pineda that's very close to us. And to actually seeing that in action and to research it and to see these things, you know, growing up here as a kid, you know, seeing things back in the 80s and the 90s and then change. And then now here we are and we're trying to make things better. This is just really cool. So we'll work with Terry. We have some examples of those types of projects already. So work with Terry on that and your application, and we'll see what we can do. Okay. All right. I yield my time. I have a question. I'm sorry. Where is it? Eagert's Cove, South Marin Island, Tropical Trail. It's in between the Banana River and Indy River. You have Tequesta Harbor. You know where that's. And then you have Eagert's Cove, which is the next one north of that. We have a private, we have a marina within there. And it's on the eastern side, and the muck has accumulated tremendously in there. I also have another neighbor with me, Brock Roper. Also a local subject contractor. And we're trying to get everybody in the neighborhood on board and to do our part as well. You know, we're all, we're all boaters. And, you know, we, you know, I love the Indian River. I love the Banana River. I love the ocean. I love Sebastian Inlet. You know, you talked about that. You know, so, um, well, I got 55 seconds left, but it's not moving. I stopped at 55. And also, also, I can also tell you, um, sorry, keep going here. But, you know, I'm sitting there Googling things like what to say, like how to Google a speech that didn't work out too well, you know, like, you know, for the Indian River Lagoon. But, uh, I've become, after today, I've become like enamored. And, uh, with this in very, very, I want to be more involved. Uh, so I want to take time off of work to come here just to sit here and just, just watch this. So it's also done in video. So you can see the videos on it, on our website too. Right. Okay. And I, and I would like to do my part as a community, uh, citizen to get more people involved and advertise and how important this is for us. And not only that for, but for, you know, my, my, my child and, and Brock's children, because, you know, our, our kids are going to grow up on boats, you know, and on the, on the Indian River and on the Banana River. So thank you. Ryan, thank you for coming. I have a question. I'm over here. Hey, um, what, what is the name of your neighborhood again? Eagert's Cove. And you said it's a private marina? Yes. Right there on the east side? Uh, well, it's on, it's on both sides, but it's on the east side of the ICW. Okay. And is that a homeowners or are y'all just privately? We're homeowners. You do have a homeowners association. That'd be a great place to start, um, especially with getting your own neighborhood involved. And I'm sure Terry can direct you to other resources as well, or reach out to any of us. We're listed on the website, um, just to how to connect to get your homeowners association educated. Right. Um, after today and with your enthusiasm after you throw some lines, because I'm guessing you're pretty stoked at the moment, go to your homeowners association and talk to them, get them involved, see what that management looks like. And, uh, that way you can implement larger scale, uh, ideas and, and education to your whole area. Speaking of that, is there a way, if we were to have a HOA meeting, is there somebody that can come? So many people from here that will come give us like a 30 minute presentation on that. Cause we do have manatees and dolphins and the ecosystem and mullet and everything we saw, you know, just like on the Lansing Island, the grand canals we saw, we're, we're right down, we're right down. Absolutely. Right down the, not down the road, down the, down the rivers. Yep. Yep. You know, up the river, whatever you want to say. Again, uh, everyone said Terry. I said, Terry, I don't know if that's your point of contact for, uh, everything, but definitely she will direct you to the other resources to get that worked out. And it would be a great idea. Thank you. Right. All right. Well, thanks. We have the meeting here. I don't know about that part, but that's a, it's not a me question, but thank you. Not, not in this per se, in this, in this venue, but like at the building, like we have it. And then, you know, we come in, they have the PowerPoint and everything set up that, would that be feasible? No. We can come up with that location. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you both. All right. Final comments from, uh, uh, chair and committee members. I made my comments, so I'm done. So anybody else? Go ahead. All right. Hearing none. Uh, I just want to highlight the, uh, St. John's video that we got to see. I think we got an email, but for the community out there, if you haven't seen the video and go check it out on their Facebook, on their pages, St. John's put together a fantastic video about the lagoon that stars some of our own folks that were in it. And I want to tip my hat to Laura Lee for being such a great speaker in that video as well as Virginia as well. Of course. Thank you, Virginia. It does. It does correlate with black drum. We heard that black drum has come, has come back better than before. So. Oh, that's okay. One more. I'm sorry. I just saw again. I didn't fill the car out. Okay. Go ahead. Thank you. Um, good morning. My name's Mel Fishburn. We recently moved within the last two years to, uh, Rockledge. We live on Rockledge Drive. And I just want to share this story because we're going through a process right now that's concerning to the lagoon. Um, north of our property, we have a canal that feeds into the lagoon. Um, it's kind of large, probably 30 feet wide and our property goes back 300 feet. Well, over the last two years, we watched all this growth come up through the canal. So we started to reach out and contact people. We started with Rockledge, not their responsibility. We came to Brevard, um, Brevard owns the property, but they are not tasked with maintaining it. The Department of Transportation for the state of Florida is. So we did get contacts there. They came out, they said, yes, this needs maintenance. They funded a project to maintain this now. So a contractor just recently came out. He came with equipment. He cut, we had growth six, eight feet high and it, and it's got to the point that you couldn't really see the water anymore where two years ago we had, we'd watch fish come up through and, and, you know, other animals all around. So we came and he cut the grass down and he left it lay and he said, he's not required to remove it, but he was going to come and spray herbicides 30 feet by 300 feet to kill whatever growth was still there. It exits under Rockledge drive through a tunnel. Well, this tunnel has sediment over the years, maybe at the most, a two foot opening for this to go out through, which that's probably not going to, but my concern was on the herbicides. So I asked the contractor, what are you going to spray? Um, well, I can't tell you that, but it's approved by the state. Okay. So we called the state back and we talked to someone there and they are saying that this person is required to remove the debris. The contractor, I spoke to him again. He said, I'm not removing the debris. I'm spraying herbicide. I asked if the, uh, as we were talking with the state again, if they have an inspector that would come out and inspect this project, they said, no, they don't, which I think that's kind of, I was in construction all my life. That's kind of dumb. You're contract something out. You're going to make sure it's done right. Um, so where we are with this is it's in limbo. This guy could come back next week and spray something in this canal and we're not going to know what it is. Do you have any advice on what our next step should be? That's my real question. Uh, well, we started with Rockledge, but they said it's not their responsibility. So we didn't, uh, we never went back to Rockledge again. No, we never reached out to the County. This is the first time and timing's everything. You know, this all happened just last week. Bam, your meetings this week. Well, let's go to the meeting. My wife and I are, let's go see what, uh, what we can stir up or whatever. Do you, is there any advice? So I'd like to thank you first of all, for bringing this to our attention. Um, the County staff, they can definitely help coordinate you much better with the entities than I can on the expertise. Um, you said the state is the one who is managing the project and they contracted that vendor to take care of that location. Yes. But they are not giving you any answers on how to follow up with the seemingly inappropriate carrying out of that contract. Uh, yes. Okay. Well, Virginia. Yeah. So we, we can follow up with DOT if you'll give me your contact information. Okay. That'd be great. We'll see if we can get more information. Great. Thank you. Different response. Continuing on with, uh, with, with any comments from, um, from committee members. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you all. We're, you got 20 minutes of your life left back. Thank you very much. And we're returned. Thank you, Chair. 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. The Board of County Commissioners of Brevard County, Florida, Space Coast Government Television, and the program sponsor hereby expressly disclaim any and all responsibility or liability for any defamatory or slanderous statements expressed by any member of the public during any such period. I was in hours in 364 days of the year to support the FWC mission. We had five exceptional volunteers who were nominated by FWC staff for their remarkable service and their commitment. And I would like to recognize and thank my colleagues, Julian, Claire, Jennifer, Christina, and Joshua for the time that they took to nominate these volunteers. Uh, our volunteer standing team comprises of nine FWC staff across several sections and divisions, and they carefully review our nominations and they selected this year's recipient. So this year, the Sonia Rude Volunteer of the Year Award goes to Gibson Gibb Boyer, whose commitment to the hunter safety program has proved to be one of lasting impact. Gibb has demonstrated his dedication to conservation through his focus on leadership and his community. And as such has become a pillar of success.