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Environmental Quality of the Pensacola Bay System: Retrospective Review for Future Resource Management and Rehabilitation
Citation:
Lewis, M., J. Kirschenfeld, AND T. Goodhart. Environmental Quality of the Pensacola Bay System: Retrospective Review for Future Resource Management and Rehabilitation. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-16/169, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
The report summarizes the environmental condition of the Pensacola Bay System and reports recommendations for its improvement. It is intended as the technical support document for future research in the PBS. The audience is the public and scientific and regulatory communities.
Description:
The objective of this report is to summarize the scattered environmental information for the PBS which is essential for understanding its current environmental condition and trend and needed for future cost-effective and science-based resource management. The management and regulatory response to the on-going influx of anthropogenic contaminants, the effects of episodic events (hurricanes, oil spills) and the effects of climate change depend upon technically-based information such as that contained in a current state-of-the-science synthesis report. Many environmental reviews are available for the PBS (examples, Pratt et al. 1990; Thorpe et al. 1997; BARC et al. 1998; WFRPC et al. 2005) but many are limited in scope, most are outdated, and none have been published in the peer-reviewed literature. This review provides an updated and critical appraisal of the environmental condition of the PBS based on consolidation and integration of historical, recently published, and unpublished information reflective of current chemical and biological assessment methodologies. The review also includes summaries for ecological information lacking or under-reported in previous reviews. This includes information for biodiversity, non-nutrient contaminant concentrations in surface water and sediment, sediment phytotoxicity and genotoxicity, bioaccumulation, use of colonized periphyton as bioindicators, organism and wildlife health, economic value for ecological services, climate change, and temporal variability of environmental measurements.