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Tracking Nutrient Trends to Emerging Harmful Algal Blooms via the Estuary Data Mapper
Citation:
Detenbeck, N., S. Rego, AND T. Wolters. Tracking Nutrient Trends to Emerging Harmful Algal Blooms via the Estuary Data Mapper. EPA Tools and Resources Webinar Series: Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) in Freshwater Tidal and Coastal Systems, NA, VT, July 19, 2023.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation is part of EPA's Tools and Resources webinar series. It provides an overview of EPA's Estuary Data Mapper, focusing on data related to estuarine nutrient loading, sensitivity, and impacts. In addition, we provide a description of ongoing research on harmful algal blooms in coastal systems, an emerging issue.
Description:
Over half the U.S. population lives in coastal areas, including estuarine shorelines. Estuary Data Mapper (EDM; www.epa.gov/edm) continues to provide the infrastructure to support nationwide application of EPA data and tools for coastal environmental decision-making, including integration with other Federal, Tribal, regional, and state datasets. EDM provides convenient one-stop data discovery, access to, and visualization of distributed multi-media datasets (atmospheric, marine/freshwater hydrologic/tidal and water quality, sediment quality, biology) for U.S. coastal systems, with ~80,000 data downloads/month. Ongoing work is focused on four critical issues: prediction of harmful algal blooms, support for estuarine nutrient thresholds/criteria development, cost-effective watershed management to meet nutrient/sediment loading targets under changing climate, and access to stream/river thermal regime scenarios to meet temperature TMDL requirements and protect coldwater refuge areas for threatened/endangered anadromous salmonids for states and tribes. EPA will provide an overview of EDM and currently available data in the app to describe trends in estuarine condition, evaluate sensitivity of estuaries to nutrient loading and support applications to cost-effectively reduce nutrient loads to estuaries. Ongoing work to provide comprehensive datasets related to nutrient endpoints in estuaries and to evaluate emerging issues such as harmful algal blooms in tidal freshwater and estuarine habitats will be described. In addition, methods are being developed to facilitate use of Sentinel 2 satellite imagery to map chlorophyll and predict HABs presence in freshwater tidal and estuarine systems.