NewsPress.com

July 26, 2007

River tributaries have quality tale to tell

http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070726/NEWS0105/70725071/1075

by Kevin Lollar

After a month in Tarpon Bay, the LOBO show went on the road Wednesday — or, more precisely, on Caloosahatchee tributaries.

LOBO is the Land/Ocean Biogeochemical Observatory, which collects and records water-quality in real time 24 hours a day. The instrument belongs to the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation Marine Laboratory.

In mid-June, lab researchers attached LOBO to a dock in Tarpon Bay. This week, they detached it, put it in a tank aboard the 22-foot Research Vessel Tucker and on Wednesday started using it to test water in Caloosahatchee River tributaries, including Daughtry’s Creek, Trout Creek, Telegraph Creek and the Orange River.

The goal is to determine what’s flowing from these tributaries into the Caloosahatchee.

“We’d like to do all the estuaries of the Caloosahatchee,” research scientist Eric Milbrandt said. “There are a number of larger ones we can get the boat into. We can troll around the mouths of the smaller ones during the wet season. We’re winging it, doing it in our spare time, which we don’t have a lot of.”

Although river watchers have said for years that the Caloosahatchee has been going downhill, water quality came into focus after the very wet rainy seasons of 2004 and 2005 when low salinity and high nutrient levels caused a series of problems in the river and estuary, including massive algal blooms and the collapse of freshwater aquatic grass populations.

Many people attributed these problems solely to nutrient-laden freshwater releases from Lake Okeechobee, ignoring the 70 miles of shoreline between the lake and San Carlos Bay.

“For me as a scientist, it’s an interesting problem,” Milbrandt said. “How is the downstream area of the estuary affected by lake discharges? Is that different from how they’re responding to water from the basin?

“Lake Okeechobee is managed on a schedule, based on public safety and agricultural interests. We don’t have a schedule for the basin.”

Determining what is happening along the river becomes more complicated when runoff comes from many areas, he said.

Within the next few months, the foundation will have nine LOBOs, collecting water-quality data and sending it to the marine lab’s Web site, where it will be available to anyone with Internet access. Eventually, the data will be available on news-press.com.

One LOBO will be in the Gulf of Mexico between the Sanibel Lighthouse and Fort Myers Beach; the rest will be in Pine Island Sound, as far north as Redfish Pass, and in the Caloosahatchee River, upstream as far as Moore Haven.

On the tributary trips, water from each location is pumped into LOBO’s tank. The instrument measures the water for nitrates (which fuel algal blooms), chlorophyll (which indicates the presence of algae), tannins, turbidity and salinity, (which affect seagrass growth).

These measurements will help researchers understand what’s going into the water from the land — excess nitrates might mean, for example, that septic tanks are putting nutrients in the system.

“The story is a technological improvement with which we can try to get a better handle on land use and water quality,” Milbrandt said. “To shed light on what the tributaries are doing will be valuable for resource management.”

Wednesday’s first-day data will provide no immediate answers. As more information comes in, though, it might help water managers with such issues as pollutant levels. The state sets the maximum amount of a pollutant that a water body can receive and still meet water quality standards.

“We have to turn landward and say, ‘All right, folks, we’re playing this game together,’” said Rae Ann Wessel, the foundation’s natural resources policy director. “We want to go from watching the river degrade to presenting science that contributes to the solution.”