 I'm Jim Sears, I'm a hydrologist at Yale University and I'm a member of the committee on independent scientific review of Everglades restoration progress. Looking out in the crowd now it's a bit of a crowd. It's a pleasure seeing a lot of you here in person. It's been a long haul since we've gathered together. In reality, the last time the last round of the sister committee we did all this virtually. So it's good to have everyone in the room. So we're working now on the 10th biennial review of scissors. And today's assembly is the second of five meetings in this cycle. The committee intends to complete its review in fall 2024. So we have a lot to do and a lot to learn from all of you. Within that vein of learning, I'd like to extend a special thanks to the Mikosuki tribe. And in particular, Chairman Cyprus and Michael Frank for leading a small group of our committee on a tour of water conservation area three a yesterday and meeting with a number of seminal staff. Before I introduce today's first session. I like to give the committee an opportunity to introduce themselves. Most of us are here in person. I think we have a few join virtually. And so maybe map will start with you and go around the room. Good morning, everybody. My name is Matt are well I'm a landscape ecologist. Good morning, everybody. I'm Margaret guitar and professor of cultural and biological engineering at Purdue University for water resources. Good morning, everyone. My name is Bill Hopkins. I'm a professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation at Virginia Tech. And my expertise is in ecotoxicology and wildlife physiology. Good morning. My name is Tracy quirk and I'm an associate professor in the Department of Oceanography and coastal sciences at LSU, and I'm a coastal wetland ecologist. Morning, my name's Wendy Graham. I'm director of the University of Florida water and I'm a hydraulic John Callaway. Wetland plant and soily calls. Good morning. I'm Stephanie Johnson study director with the National Academy of Sciences. Good morning. I'm Jeff Walters. I'm in the Department of biological sciences at Virginia Tech. I'm a behavioral ecologist. And I've worked a lot with endangered birds. Hi there my name is Helen Regan. I'm a professor in the Evolution Ecology and Organism or biology department at University of California Riverside, and I'm an ecological model. Good morning. I'm Charlie Driscoll. I'm an environmental engineer in the Department of Civil and environmental engineering at Circus University. Good morning. My name is Dave Wagner. I work with Wolpert engineering my expertise. I guess if I have one. It's working on complex ecosystem management and particularly through adaptive management. Good morning. My name is Marla Emery and I am a retired research geographer for the United States Forest Service currently a scientific advisor to the Norwegian Institute for nature research and I'm a specialist in human environment interactions. I'm Emily Bermudez in the senior program assistant at the National Academy of Sciences. I think we have a few people virtually. Hello Simon research professor at the Anaswater Resources Institute at Grand Valley State University. Philip Dixon I'm an ecological statistician in the statistics department at Iowa State University. And for those associated with Norway by son and daughter and we are now in Oslo. Good morning everyone. I'm Casey Brown and I'm a professor of hydrology and water resources systems analysis at the University of Massachusetts. Okay, thanks everyone. So today we have three sessions. The first session. We're going to learn more about combined operations plan and the status of his performance. Then we're going to talk about SERP related and SERP adjacent climate change science. And we'll finish up with SERP adaptive management and science to inform decision making. We'll start off with at least one speaker. Sometimes will be virtual, sometimes will be here. And then we'll end with each session with a committee Q&A. I will close the day with public comments. If there are members of the public out there who would like to address the committee in three minutes or less. There's a sign up sheet I think outside that you should sign up for. And Stephanie, there's something about free parking. Well, there's discounted parking so instead of $24 it's $5 but you have to bring your ticket to the front desk and tell them you're with the meeting and I think you pay for it there and they can get that. But make sure you do that. Sometimes there's a very long line of checkup. Okay, so we'll get started now and to lead off the first session. Malus and Masudi will provide an overview of combined operations plan. And I think this is virtual. Good morning, everybody. Can you hear me? Yes. Thank you. Just want to do a sound check. We'll be running the slides from down there. Maybe there's a delay on my part because I'm virtual. So she's pulling that up. Good morning, everybody. My name's Malus and Masudi. I'm a biologist with the Army Corps of Engineers in the Jacksonville district. I'm just going to provide a brief overview of the combined operational plan or COP and then the remaining presenters in our session today will provide an overview of monitoring results to address hydrological ecological and water quality performance of the current water control plan for the water conservation area 3 Everglades National Park and the South Day Conveyance System. Next slide, please. So some project background first. So the Central and Southern Florida project or CNSF project was authorized to function as a multi-purpose water management system. Subsequently authorized purposes include flood control, water supply, regional groundwater control, prevention of saltwater intrusion, enhancement of fish and wildlife and recreation. However, to improve hydrologic conditions in Everglades National Park, the southern portion of that project was subsequently altered through the authorization of the Modified Water Deliveries Project and the C-111 South Day project. The Modified Water Deliveries Project was designed to provide a system of water deliveries to the park through Shark River Slough and the C-111 South Day project was designed to control seepage out of the park and to reduce damaging freshwater discharges to Manatee Bay and Barn Sound while also maintaining flood protection for agricultural lands located east of the C-111 canal. Next slide, please. So the purpose of the combined operational plan was basically to define operations for the constructed features of the Modified Water Deliveries and C-111 South Day projects, which are foundation projects for the comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. And a map of the project features is shown on the right-hand side of the slide. So what COP does is it redistributes the existing water budget and water conservation Area 3 and Everglades National Park to meet the project's objectives and constraints. Development of COP was informed by a series of incremental field tests that incrementally raised the maximum operating limit in the L-29 canal along TAMI-ME trail, which allows you to move more water south. And environmental impact statement was written to support COP and COP was implemented in 2020. And it serves as the current water control plan for the project area and it replaced the prior water control plan that was developed in 2012. Next slide, please. So objectives considered during the development of COP are listed on this slide. But just very briefly, the objectives include taking steps to restore natural hydrologic conditions in the park, maximizing progress toward restoring hydrologic conditions in Taylor Slough, the Rocky Glades, and the eastern panhandle of the park, protecting the ecological values associated with those areas, minimizing damaging freshwater flows to Manatee Bay and Barn Sound through S197, which is a water management control structure at the bottom of the system. And then it also included consideration of cultural value and tribal interests within the project area. Next slide. Several operational constraints were also considered during the development of COP, which included the project purposes of the CNSF project. We also had to maintain the upper limit of the regulation schedule for water conservation area three, known as zone A. And zone A basically defines the stage at which releases are made from water conservation area three for the purpose of flood control. And then we couldn't raise the maximum operating limit in the L29 canal, more than 8.5 feet, given that that was the limit identified in the original project authorization for which really COP was developed. And then lastly, we also had to maintain authorized levels of flood mitigation for 8.5 square mile area and flood damage reduction for the C111 South Day Basin, which are shown as insets on the right hand side of the slide. These areas are often affected based on the amount of water within the park. Next slide. So several of the presenters today will be going over performance results. So I have two slides in this presentation, just to sort of give you an overview of what was expected. So this slide describes the expected benefits of COP as documented in the final environmental impact statement. So the two graphics on the lower right hand of the screen show the difference in average annual hydro period and average annual stage as a result of implementing the water control plan relative to the baseline conditions that were assumed during planning. And really the coloration on the graphics just shows areas that were expected to be a little bit wetter and areas that were expected to be a little bit drier with gray representing relatively no change. But the takeaway from this slide is that the modeling produced to support COP showed an expected increase of inflow to the park, as well as an increase in the proportion of water that enters the park east of S333, which is a water control structure and Tammy me trail. So an increase in the proportion of water that enters northeast shark river slew, in particular, within the park. Next slide. And then also, as I said early in the presentation to align with the project objectives. We wanted to reduce discharges to Manatee Bay and barn sound, as well as increase flows to Taylor slew. Next slide please. So the final environmental impact statement that supported that supports the current water control plan includes an adaptive management monitoring plan. And that identifies monitoring information needed to document progress towards the projects goals and objectives as well as uncertainties. And there are four components of the adaptive management and monitoring plan which are listed on the slide. And one thing that the adaptive management monitoring plan also does is that outlines a structure for which feedback can be provided and the number of forums that we use to gain feedback from various members of the public as well as interagency staff are listed there. So we largely try to utilize existing forms for discussions related to water management operations and gain feedback on a day to day basis or weekly basis. Next slide please. And then the adaptive management and monitoring plan also committed that the core, the water management district and the Everglades National Park would produce a biennial report. And that biennial report was just released in early 2023 with the poster presentation presented here. And the intent of that report is to provide a summary of operations monitoring results and the status of the system to basically try and ask the question is COP achieving its project objectives and are adjustments recommended. Next slide. So the presenters today are going to touch base on some of the information that's seen within the report. And you'll see this slide through some of their presentations as well but just to basically it's included in the introduction for this session, because it sort of provides the framework for how the biennial report was written. So we started by trying to understand currently what the context of the system was. Was it above average below average in terms of rainfall. We then evaluated hydrologic metrics and then how those hydrologic metrics could have potential ecological effects on the system. Next slide. And then I said that the intent of the COP biennial report was to basically ask that fundamental question is COP working as expected and are there recommendations. I think in short, the poster and the report states that yes, COP is working in terms of improving the volume of water sent to Everglades National Park, but we did have some recommendations from this first report. Those are listed here on this slide is sort of a bottom line up front, but three that I want to touch base on are that operations should continue to be flexible to accommodate ongoing construction contracts, as well as coordination should continue to occur with water managers to inform how to operate the system based on current system conditions. What came out of the report also was that there was some potential concerns about Northern Water Conservation Area 3A and in particular stages in supporting the Alligator Alley North Colony, which is a large waiting bird colony in Northern Water Conservation Area 3A, what the potential effects of COP are on waiting birds in particular in that area. And then we should continue to have discussions on how you prioritize flow to the park or the east-west spatial distribution, meaning how much of that flow should be prioritized to Northeast Sharp River Slough, east of the L-67 extension canal, and how much should be prioritized west when system conditions need it. So with that, I'll hand it over to Dan to go over hydrologic effects. Good morning, Mike and Emily, can you confirm my audience coming through clear? Yes, just coming through. Thank you. Next slide, please. Good morning. I'm Dan Crawford. I am Everglades team lead and senior water resources engineer for our hydrology and hydrologic engineering branch in Jacksonville for the Corps of Engineers. Next slide. Melissa alluded to the development of the combined operational plan was developed over multiple years and we took adaptive management approach in terms of kind of phase implementation. Our goal was trying to, as construction components of the modified water deliveries and C-111 projects were completed, we wanted to accrue interim benefits along the way. And so that was the goal of our incremental field tests between 2015 and 2020. I just include this slide as one of the challenges that we realized with our biennial report. As you can see, we had phase increments, increment one, increment 1.1, 1.2, and increment two that were on the order of 12 to 18 months each in duration. But you'll see intermittently with those planned normal operations. We also had curve balls thrown to us through a mother nature, through tropical events and hurricanes that led us to have unseasonal high water and have to take emergency operations within the system. So the inclusion of those atypical events and abnormal operations within the pre-cop period of record makes it more of a challenge to isolate the effects of implementation of the cop in 2020 from some of the anesthetic conditions prior to that, because we moved, we would move a lot more water under these emergencies we would have under our quote unquote normal operation. And then as part for the course, of course, after we implemented top, we promptly experienced tropical storm, which set record and high water levels in our water conservation areas and Everglades National Park, which of course had nothing to do with our underlying top operation. Next slide, please. Now, just kind of the big picture Melissa touched on it, but the key changes with the combined operating plan you can see in the top left panel was the change to the conservation area 3A regulation schedule where we implemented the TMEM trail flow formula. So when water levels are below the seasonal range of nine and a half to 10 and a half feet and DVD. We have a formula that aims to deliver water to Everglades National Park based on upstream consideration of water levels, rainfall, evapotranspiration and recent flow time series in order to kind of mimic a pre-drainage condition to Everglades National Park based on the water budget that we have at this point in time prior to implementing all of the CERT projects. So just along, orient yourself along TME trail that 20 mile section from F-12 alpha over to the 356 pump station. That's what I'll, that's the area of inflows Everglades National Park that I'll touch on on the next couple of slides. Just highlighting that the big, big arrow indicating the inflows into the eastern side of Shark River flue in Everglades National Park that as we put more and more water into the eastern side of Shark River flue we have to be cognizant of our flood risk management obligations along the eastern flank of Everglades National Park which includes the eight and a half four mile area Las Palmas community as well as the southern C-111 project system. Our goal in COP and to be superseded in future CERT implementation is to maximize deliveries into Everglades National Park so that the water can spill over the rocky glades and have an overland flow connection to Taylor flue. So as COP is a stepping stone to CERT, one of the things COP is able to do is increase the surface water flow deliveries to Taylor flue and have intermittent periods of connectivity between Shark River flue and Taylor flue across that rocky glades area. Next slide please. So just to orient you to this table, this is total water deliveries into Everglades National Park going back to the prior regulation schedule prior to COP, so the ERTP schedule in 2012. Everything is color coded by the governing operational regime from the core water control plan and the items that are not black that are highlighted indicate the conditions where we were operating under the temporary or emergency deviations. I'll just highlight, we do see the long term trend of increasing deliveries to Everglades National Park as we went through the progression of the mod waters incremental field tests and implementation of COP in 2020, which is the pink rose at the bottom of the table. Again, it's hard to isolate the effect due to the significant hydrologic variability and the emergency deviations we had prior to COP. But you can see the long term trend that we are achieving the benefits that we expected in COP, which is, you know, more than 30% of the increase in total flow volumes Everglades National Park on an average annual basis. Of this period of records, the three of the highest four years have been experienced since we implemented COP and the one year back in 2017, where we also had similar high magnitude flows to the park. That was a byproduct of very extreme wet season and hurricane Irma hitting in September. So we were operating under flood fighting mode from the majority of that year. And so those operations are more representative of COP than they are of what the incremental current 1.2 field tests that was in place at that point in time. One of the key things with COP that's different from those earlier years is, is we also have been able to while delivering all this water to Everglades National Park we're able to keep it in Everglades National Park and we haven't had to open the structure on the east side of Sarkova flue to have emergency bypass of that water down to South Bay and out to barn sound through the S197 structure at the bottom of the system. Next slide, zooming in only and looking at the same graphic same format, but only looking at the eastern side of Sarkova flue you again you see the much the marked increase in annual deliveries to North East Sarkova flue as we've been able to gradually remove the canal L29 canal constraints at the northern end of North East Sarkova flue. I will highlight the little carrot stick carrot symbols that are indicated under the the COP period those are periods where because of the direct connectivity of groundwater between North East Sarkova flue and the adjacent eight and a half per mile area. Federal flood mitigation projects those are periods where we actually had to scale back inflows into Northeast Sarkova flue because of downstream flooding concerns. You can see those are very prevalent in 2020 and 2021. Touch on it in a couple slides, one of the major changes that we've seen is working with our state partners at the South Florida Water Management District. We've been able to effectively alleviate that constraint through working them on the first increment and in partnership under SERP for a second increment to build a steeped cut off wall around the perimeter of eight and a half per mile area. And since that wall was effectively completed in about July of 2022 that we have not had any reasons to have to dial back those inflows to the park. And so we expect to continue to set maximum annual amounts of delivery into the northeastern side of Sarkova flue as we continue to move forward. Next slide please. So these graphics just indicate our tracking of the Tami-Mimi trail flow formula. Again, when we're above the top of our regulation schedule, we maximize deliveries out of Conservation A3 to Everglades National Park subject to only the downstream constraints. Either seasonal closures of the F12 Alpha Bravo, the L29 to now constraint of 8.5 that Melissa alluded to or the eight and a half per mile area. And at times when we've been below schedule we have the blue line which tracks the weekly Tami-Mimi trail flow targets. And what you see here is this nice seasonal variability wet season, dry season patterning consistent with the pre drainage Everglades that we've realized the one challenge and I know Raj will touch on it. And what we see later on is that we have seen that when we get to lower water levels and Conservation Area 3A at the nators of these cracker diagrams you'll see we've had challenges with being able to deliver the full volume that the Tami-Mimi trail flow formula would estimate. And that's strictly because of limitations with with gravity and the resistance of the downstream march in Everglades National Park. And the graphic on the right again, it's difficult to account for the effects of some of these deviations, but one, one way we included it in the COP biennial report is looked at the unit, the unit equivalency of how much water went to shark over slew as a function of rainfall. So rainfall is on the X axis total volume to Everglades National Park on the vertical axis. And what you see is that per unit rainfall we've consistently been able to deliver on the order of 300 to 400,000 acre feet of additional 300 to 400,000 acre feet of additional flow to Everglades National Park on an annual basis for the three years since we implemented the COP in 2020. Next slide please. One of the key uncertainties that we identified in the development of a COP water control plan was the effect of raising water levels in the L29 canal and how that would affect both the stability of the Tami-Mimi trail roadway and the downstream flood mitigation requirement for the 8.5 per mile area. Next slide please. And in what I would characterize as a very highly effective partnership between the core of the Florida Water Management District, the National Park Service and the Florida Department of Transportation, we developed a monitoring plan along this section of roadway, which if you've been out there for some of the prior returning panelists, that section of roadway is being reconstructed to accommodate roadway standards for FDOT and to allow full maximum water levels that we want in Everglades National Park under the comprehensive Everglades restoration plan. But in the interim, before those roadway modifications are completed, the existing roadway has limitations only allowing up to eight and a half feet. Our water control plan for COP only allowed us to maintain those water levels above 8.3 for 90 days per year because of concerns about the integrity of the roadway and the capillary action effects of the groundwater from the adjacent canal. So we had an extensive monitoring plan that's been worked in partnership with the Park Service. The Park Service actually installed soil moisture probes and piezometers along the roadway at four different transects. The park is collecting that data for us and we're actively communicating that data with Florida Department of Transportation. And in the bottom right is the success story, is how many days per year for water year from May to April that we've been able to maintain the L29 canal above that 8.3 to 8.5 range. And so since we implemented COP in water year 21, you see we almost experienced 150 days and in all years we've exceeded 120 days. We actually were able through this monitoring program to get written concurrent from the Florida Department of Transportation to permanently change the COP water control plan to allow to hold these water levels at these higher end of the range for up to four months per year. Again, when the completion of the roadway is done, implementation of the SERP will allow us to raise those water levels above 8.5 feet all the way up to 9.7. Next slide, please. And the other piece is the 8.5 per mile area. And again, I highlight that as we put more water into the eastern side of Stark River Flu, we have a perimeter levee and internal pump station and canal for the 8.5 per mile area. As we increase water levels in the park, we get more groundwater seepage under that levee because the regional groundwater flow direction in this area is easterly. And so in the Water Management District, seeing some of those limitations on flows into Everglades National Park under COP, they proactively embarked on constructing a 60 foot deep perimeter cutoff wall around that southwest quadrant of 8.5 per mile area, which was our highest vulnerable area with respect to flood mitigation. So that wall 2.3 miles was constructed between April 2021 and December of 2022 was functionally complete in July of 2022. Again, since that time, we've not had any need to dial back our inflows to the northeastern side of Stark River Flu. And then in a continuing partnership under SERP, the step-new water phase is actually going to extend that wall. An additional 5 miles of black portion of the line will complete the perimeter cutoff wall within that levee all the way to the L31 north levee. And that work started in December of last year and is expected to be completed in November of 2024. And that completion of that work will facilitate further increase in flows and water levels under the comprehensive Everglades restoration plan. Next slide. One of the things we want to be very clear on is what's next. So COP was implemented in 2020. We plan the core in the Water Management District and plan to continue our paradigm shift of trying to maximize ecosystem benefits as we continue construction of the Everglades restoration plan components, notably the Central Everglades Planning Project. So we've actually embarked on our next operational planning study to look at step operations, increment one. We expect that work to be completed in late 2025 or early 2026. Our goal is to go from the system you see at the left, which is what was represented in the COP in 2020 to the system at the right, which is full completion of the Central Everglades Planning Project, including the Blue Shandy Flowway and the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir in 2030. The first increment of that is the step increment one effort starting this year continuing through 2025. It's different from COP. It's not COP 2.0. It is indeed step 1.0 because we are working with a different set of infrastructure that is being completed under the state federal partnership to implement SERP. Whereas the COP project represents infrastructure that was completed under the pre-SERP foundational projects for modified water deliveries and C-111s to update. Next slide. And this is our current plan for progression of those operations under step. Our first increment again started this year. That's an opportunity to immediately raise water levels in Northeastern Shark River Slough when the National Park Services Roadway Modification Project is completed in 2025. It's an opportunity to incorporate the new inflows to the system from the LACO system operating manual that the core expects to implement at the end of this year or very early in 2024. And to incorporate all of the lessons we've learned from the COP implementation as Melissa alluded to. To immediately follow, we'll have completion of the step north features that will redistribute water into the northern northwest corner of Conservation Area 3A and the Blue Shanty Flowway will be completed. That's another stepping stone opportunity to relook at the water control plan and realize more benefits. And then enter around 2030 with completion of the EA reservoir. We'll plan to do another relook at system-wide operations to include linkages between Lake Okeechobee and the greater Everglades all the way down to Florida Bay. And with that, I would like to pass it on to my colleague Raj Padel at Everglades National Park to provide some of their observations immediately downstream of our COP water control plan. The microphone's on the floor. So good morning. I'm Rajendra Padel. I'm hydrologist, model, South Florida Natural Resource Center, National Park Service. So I'm going to continue today the hydrologic performance of combined operation plan and then already touched on volume and distribution of the flows. So I will pretty much focus on the performance measures today. Next slide please. So, Melissa, let me talk about the strategy for accessing the COP performance, but I'll go quickly here. So we are looking at the different timeframe and evaluating the observation data. The COP implemented in September 2020. So we look at the three, you know, water years data, water years when it starts from May 1 and instant April 30. So we have a three years data and the COP biennial report doesn't have that because we recently updated water year 2023. So we also compare with the real world baseline that includes water year data from 2002 to 2015, and also separately compares with modified water deliveries the incremental testing period 16 to 20, and also compare with COP paper alternative. There was our expectation that was modeled during the planning process. So we compare with that too. Next slide please. So we have several performance measures. So I'm going to focus on these four highlighted those are related to hydrology and at the end I will talk a little bit about the near cost forecasting as well. Next slide. So the first one is inundation duration. So inundation duration was expressed as a discontinuous hydro period. So the hydro period means so number of days water labels above ground in a year. So here we use water year. So this map shows this continuous hydro period developed using Eden observed data. And the left hand side figure shows the median hydro period for the baseline and breaks trees for individual water year after COP implementation. In general, what we saw is so there is a, you know, increased hydro period in North East South River Slough and Taylor Slough of Everglades National Park. It's been mentioned, like there is increased flow volume in that area that raised the hydro period in Everglades National Park. So this is pretty much consistent with our COP expectation. And we also see some reduction in hydro period in water conservation area. So we can look at more, more closely in a difference map. Next slide please. So these are the hydro period difference in each water year after COP implementation that's compared to the baseline. You can see the red color, which is drier than the baseline and blue, which is wider than the baseline. In the E&P there, you can see North East South River Slough, it's more blue color there. And you see some red color there in the water conservation area at 3A. So we see there are reduction in hydro period there. So there is also inter-annual boreability in these three years. In water year 2022, we saw no reduction in hydro period, particularly in western Malpari, Everglades National Park, and also North Eastern region of water conservation at 3A. You cannot see much change in southern and southeastern area of water conservation at 3A. North East South River Slough and some part of the water conservation area at 3B as well. Because these areas were characterized by longer hydro period even before the implementation of COP. You can see a little bit, you know, blue color there in the northern boundary of the water conservation area at 3A. So in that area, some supportive flows that directed to water conservation at 3A from north that helped to make this area a little bit wider than the baseline. Next slide please. So this figure compares the hydro period for different time frame. This also includes the comparison with the model output data, that's the odd key we're on, and also incremental testing period in multiple locations of the water conservation area at 3A. So I would like to point few things here. First of all, in northwest water conservation area at 3A, we saw longer hydro periods there compared to the baseline. But in the eastern side of the water conservation at 3A and north eastern side, we see very short hydro period there in water year 2022, but those are pretty much in line with the baseline in water year 2021 and 2023. And we didn't see big impacts in all the restations. As I mentioned before, those areas were already have a longer hydro period. So we see very much in that effect there. Next slide please. So we also look at the frequency of duration of dry down events. So this is a station, north east south river slope, and we compare this dry down events for all these different time periods. So dry down events mean this is a distinct events when the water levels are below ground and for a day or a more consecutive days. So I would like to focus on those two columns there. So look at the dry down events per year and also the duration. So if you compare with the baseline in the COP we could see it's, you know, decreased right on events and also the duration but we have just three years of data. So may not be very meaningful for this comparison, but yeah, just one dry down events. We saw that some improvement in COP period. Next slide please. So cumulative drought intensity was used to evaluate the soil oxidation potential and it was expressed using an index and that index was calculated at the sum of the below ground water depths during each day of dry down over water years so the unit is four days. You can see in the upper panel you can see soil oxidation index. The left, the most left one is the median index for the baseline period and for individual water year. And these regions are, we see the very similar pattern with like a higher period here. You see the changes in the Everglades National Park compared to the baseline. So let's read there. So the bottom panel shows the difference between individual water year and the baseline so we can clearly see the differences. The blue color is lower than the baseline period and the red is higher values than the baseline. So we can see there is a reduction in oxidation potential mostly in Everglades National Park, but we also saw some increase in oxidation potential in water conservation area 3A. Next slide please. So this figure compares soil oxidation potential in some of the gazes of Everglades National Park. And so I would like to point few things here. So what we saw generally in this COP water years, the results are very consistent with our expectation when you compare with this model output. We also saw a large reduction in areas where there was already high oxidation potential during the baseline. And we also saw some very small or very marginal changes in areas where there was oxidation potential was low. Next slide please. So tree island conditions was represented also by the discontinuous hydro period. So this figure shows the distributions of the hydro period for tree islands in water conservation area 3A and Everglades National Park. So you can see at the bottom of the figure that's the metric we use a percent of island that is greater than 10% of the period of record we use at Everglades or 36.5 days. So that compares the you know the inundation of these three islands. So when you look at these results. Water year 22 and 23, they're pretty much compare with with our queue and also very close to baseline. But we see the big difference here in water year 2021. And so there was a longer hydro period in a more proportion of the three islands there so that's because of the eight are tropical is strong. You could see the difference between not water conservation area three and E and P as well E and P they have a sort of hydro period tree islands compared to the water conservation area three. Next slide please. All the three islands have the same level of inundation. So we categorize these three islands in three different groups using 1992 to 2020 data we use a cluster analysis and separated them in dry intermediate and wet islands in three different compartments and water conservation at 383 B and Everglades National Park. What do you observe here is really the impacts is a higher in particularly in intermediate and wet island relative to to dry island. So you barely see any changes there in in Everglades National Park tree islands only we see some impacts there in water year 2021. Next slide please. So, so the near cost modeling. So we, we use near cost modeling output is input in in ecosystem based management calls. It's conducted weekly and bi-weekly for water management recommendations and those recommendations are not binding but we have found very useful and to look at these conditions and the chances where we will remain in coming coming months so we use ever forecast tool and it's a hydro logic and multi species management tool. And this simulates near term water level using the precipitation forecast. So this is a very versatile tool and can be initialized with absorbed EDN data or output from the regional simulation model. Next slide please. So here is an example of the near cost modeling we use. So, so here we use AltQ that's a COP for alternative water levels and forecasted for six months using NOAA's climate prediction centers precipitation forecast data. And this data are regularly updated we update at the beginning of every month. So in the left hand side figure you can see the water conservation at three and we have a three gauge Everest here. The black line represents the observed data, the dashed line which is a regulation schedule, and those five color line, the water level of shantiles. So there is a criteria. EVM recommends like a tree island that criteria which is a 10.3 feet. So that labels should remain below 10.8 feet at the peak of the wet season to reduce for the degradation of the tree island vegetation by flooding. So we look at our position currently we are at 50 percentile there. We look at the position and so look at the chances of meeting that target and that has been helpful for the water managers to understand and and the chances what's what's happened in the future. So, so the second is a another example of the water conservation area too. So we look at in the multiple compartment and multiple stations. So that's the way we we have been utilizing the near cost modeling output. So this is my last slide. So I would like to turn it over to Andrea Atkinson for the ecological pms. Thanks Raj. My name is Andrea Atkinson. I'm a quantitative ecologist with the National Park Service South Florida Natural Resources Center. I worked on the COP adaptive management and monitoring plan as well as the recovery executive committee and team lead for BBCR. The slides should just continue from Raj's slides. I'm going to be talking about the ecological performance measures for COP as a big picture understanding. Basically, we have less than two years of COP implementation so expecting to see an ecological response is really, really, really early. But that being said, we decided to give it a try. So we're looking at, you know, Raj covered what was happening in terms of hydrology effects in the marshes. And I'm going to be looking at what effects we're starting to see with the birds, the fish and the vegetation. Next slide. So we have 12 performance measures and the three I'm going to be focusing on with actual ecological data is the slew vegetation suitability with storks and waiting birds and freshwater fish. Next slide. So we have a project basically conducted by FIU Florida International University, where there's vegetation monitoring at 65 sites in northeast shark river slew. And what they did at each of these sites while they were collecting the vegetation data is they also collected water depths and then you can use Eden to calculate what the hydro period and water depth should history should be at that site by using, you know, writing it up with Eden. And extracting and using that to extract the hydrology with really in order to be able to see the differences you have to go back into the incremental testing period so you saw in Dan Crawford's talks where we were actually increasing the water volume and turning it on and turning it off and so we were during the incremental testing period from 2015 on through 2020. And so if you look back through that time period and into the early cop years we are seeing an increase in average water depth at these sites. And we're also seeing an increase in the time since dry down at these sites. Again, these are all just sites in northeast shark river slew. Next slide. So we're seeing vegetation data and 2015, 2018 and 2021 at the same 65 sites, and we are actually starting to see a increase in longer hydro period species such as sawgrass bike rush and cat tails, and a decrease in the shorter hydro period sites species sorry if you look all the way back since the beginning of the incremental testing period. Next slide. Thanks. There we go. Waiting birds, what everybody wants to see. So, we had super colony events that happened in 2018 and 2021 but it's important to understand these were tied to storm events so post Hurricane Irma post tropical storm, which basically really filled up the system and is this does show that we are able to have these super colony events occur again when the water is right. And so the lower left hand graph shows white ibis which was the main bird that was happening in these super colony events. And we had a spike that went all the way up to about 90,000 deaths in 2018 and over 60,000 deaths in 2021. But the flip side of this is that in those other years we had repeated concerns express about over drying in northern water conservation area 3a. So let's next slide. So looking at freshwater fish. Again, we have fortunately these long data sets funded by modified water deliveries funding, going all the way back actually into the 1990s is really too early to say what is an effective cop and what isn't. What we can say is that looking in that top left graph which is those those small fish that the birds love to eat. We might be seeing an uptick in fish density in shark river slew and Taylor slew if you look all the way back to the beginning of the incremental testing, but some might we really need to look at this longer term to really try and look at the trends. Big picture though you can see we are still well depressed below the densities that we're seeing in the late 1990s. On the flip side though in D, which is non native fish we have the emergence of the Asian swamp eel that is start made a big splash in Taylor slew and the Everglades panhandle at this time. And so, at the same time we're seeing a crash and the crayfish populations that's showing up in those same areas that is the the B plot up above in Taylor slew and the Everglades panhandle so this is a case of an invasive species coming in and really interfering with our ability to see if the hydro changing the hydrology is having our desired effect. Next slide. Some of our big picture lessons learned using the hydrologic performance measures that were developed during the modeling. A lot of them could be translated over into real world monitoring in order to be able to report on results. Not all of them though because some of the metrics like frequency of occurrence with only two years of compliment implementation is really hard to make a comparison. The next thing about it is allows very quick reporting and so the report feels current so we actually finished up, you know, data collection in April of 2022 and by February of 2023 the report was out the door. Using the real world baseline and incremental testing years for comparison purposes worked, but comparison with the whole 41 years of the period of record of the modeling. What's kind of clunky it, you really couldn't tell whether you know, so that that whole aspect of it needs further work. Next slide. The ecological side of the picture. First of all, we did not directly compare indicators to the gem model results. We just decided was it was too hard we had too little data to really be able to do it. We just looked at our things trending in the direction that we want. And some of the challenges that we had is that the baselines, you know, differ from project to project. And you'll notice both the, the fish data and the vegetation data we're lagging a year behind in terms of the reporting so we didn't even get to 2022 in the reporting. It takes multiple years for you before you can see an ecological response and so that's just the reality. And new species like invasive species coming in may, you know, disrupt your ability to detect a response. So it's much more variable and approach, but ultimately this is what people care about. Are we getting more birds are we getting more fish are is the vegetation improving so we have to show a benefit with these endpoint indicators in order to show the benefits of the project. Next slide. So looking at this overall connect the dots concept. It basically seemed to work very well for our report. We probably could have been clear in the report we're very aware the report is long needed more bottom line up front. You know, it was a good, you know, first attempt. The target was members of our PDT plus this is the involved agencies the non governmental organizations the tribes the area scientists, and we welcome feedback we didn't get a lot of feedback on this report so we would welcome feedback. So you asked the question about near casting we did not use our ecological models for near term forecasting. Instead we use near real time monitoring for the waiting bird nesting and foraging. You know, basically throughout especially throughout the breeding season the dry season we also use hydrologic surrogates water depths recession rates, sentient rates, and specific hydrological needs for species such as the sparrow the snail kites Apple snails alligators. And these are reported weekly to bi weekly in the ecosystem based management calls these are inter agency calls that bring agency researchers and water managers together to discuss the state of the system. They are not decision making this is just making recommendations and and helping understanding. This is also reported to the periodic scientists call on approximately a monthly basis. Next slide. So this is I'm going to give you some examples of what's reported in these calls so our wonderful waiting bird people. This is actually Mark Cook from South Florida water management district brings reports of location of colonies has has nesting initiated or is this abandonment occurring how many nests are there. Where are the waiting birds foraging approximate numbers throughout the system this is a nice figure from our banner year of 2021. So this looks really good. Next slide. And what this ends up doing is, this is an example of the adaptive management feedback loop concerns were raised during these calls that about over drying in northern water conservation area 3a, which is one of the largest colonies. The alley north colonies when the largest in the US. It was identified as a potential issue in the cop modeling. So the measures heard, they flex their operations within what they could to try and bring in additional water from northern water conservation area 3a during the dry season. It definitely helped but it's still not quite it's still not enough to resolve the issue so we're going to monitor and watch. And this issue is then can communicated forward into the stuff water control plant update team. We really need more water coming in from the north so implementation of low some implementation of stuff, bringing in water from the ea reservoir will be critical for ultimately resolving this problem. Next slide. Very quickly we have additional tools such as the capes able seaside Sparrow viewer which gives hydrological target statistics and you can do this on a daily basis this is used every, every, during each of the EBM calls to show the status of these sub population areas. Next slide. And then we've got additional tools that are in development so we're looking at trying to develop a tool for Apple snails and one for alligator nest flooding risk. And with that, I'm going to hand it off. I am Bonnie Irving. I'm the Everglades supervisor. Oh, you could keep that up and actually if you could go back to the last slide I thought that was really good. The slide before last, I'm Bonnie Irving with the official wildlife service and the Everglades program supervisor, and I'm just going to speak on the question that was asked specifically towards capes able seaside Sparrow. So if you could bring up the last slide. And then the one before that. I like to have a visual. Thank you. So, as Andrea said, this is, you know, really showing the Eden viewer and it, it shows the capes able seaside Sparrow habitats. So the question was asked, does this system responses and moral prairie raised concerns about the viability of populations in capes able seaside Sparrow in responses to cop. Really, the overarching question is, are we concerned about the Sparrow and yes we're concerned about the populations of the Sparrow because they have been declining over time. However, it's not as a result of cop it's just as a result of the altered system and so we're trying to bring about a restored ecosystem so we're still in the process and as Andrea and others have said this is really early for us to be able to make those kind of determinations. So we're really focused on the vegetation and the vegetation transitioning to a to a wetter system takes a lot less time than it does to transition back towards a dryer system. So, as it's been said before, it's, it's really too early to expect to see the changes based on cop itself. And over the last series of operational plans including ERTP and cop, we've seen wetter conditions and shark rivers Lou. And as a result we have seen some declines and moral prairie habitat along the western edge of E Southern and Western B and F, and those are indicated on this slide. Additionally, modeling of sea level rise scenarios indicates that many capes able seaside Sparrow populations will be adversely impacted over the next 50 years. So that's something that we're taking into consideration. I will say that the service supports conditions based operations, and that's what we're looking as we're moving into set and the other incremental conditions projects. Well, we're also encouraging projects and operations which promote a flow through system, and that would mimic a restored hydrologic regime regime. A flow through system would reduce impacts due to impounding water in areas such as southern WCA 3a, and it would support tree islands, marsh and moral prairie. So that's what we're, we're really looking for. In addition, the services evaluating the habitat changes to determine where suitable habitat for capes able seaside Sparrow may exist in the future, and evaluating the potential for translocation. And with that, I'm going to hand it off to, I think Melissa. If she. Oh, okay. Thank you. Good morning everyone. My name is Christina got here. I'm with the National Park Service. And I want to thank you for the opportunity of presenting here today. I'll be going over the implementation of water management options that address cost adaptive management uncertainty 16 B. And before we jump head first into that, I want to give a you can go to the next slide. I want to give a quick overlook of what preceded cop, which is the Everglades frustration transition plan and I want to specifically talk about the water regulation schedule changes that happened in 2012 because they some of them carried over to cop the modification of water conservation area 3a zone a ranging from nine point feet to 10.5 feet, which we see here in the figure. I think this pointer works. Yes. Maybe not. At the very top. All right, here we see that the bottom of that zone is 9.5 feet. Changes also included dropping zone B and C. And these changes resulted in approximately a quarter foot water level reduction in water conservation area 3a over the year. That's forward to the implementation of a cop in September of 2020 and it cop retains the ERTP zone a parameters 9.5 to 10.5 feet. That range it adds an extreme high water line for flood control that we can see here the dashed line above zone a. It simplifies all zones below a and we see zone C here. The bottom line at 7.5 feet. At this time we there's also adoption of the Tamiami trail full formula which maximizes flows to the northeast shark river slew, and it keeps the same prioritization order as before from east to west going from S333, S333N, and then the S12, S12B, C, B, and A. And the water deliveries are made according to rainfall, able transpiration upstream and downstream water levels. So it develops adaptive management options for uncertainty 16B and these aim to improve water quality that's delivered to the park. Now, how did the adaptive management options come to be and we can go to the next slide. The historic data, well, a historic data set was used from 1998 to 2017 to do some analysis that revealed that a 9.2 feet stage at S333 is the threshold for TV concentrations because below that stage TV concentrations delivered to the park rarely decline to the park's protective target, which is eight parts per billion. The data also revealed that one flowing the S12C concentrations for TV were generally lower than S12D. And that water conservation area water levels below 10 feet occurring in December 1st were linked to higher TV concentrations to the park in the upcoming wet season. So based on these observations management measures were developed and an interagency or multi-agency team meets when these conditions are triggered to then determine what adaptive management strategy will be. So, next slide. So these are the management options. The first bullet here is to maintain this charges that are combined between S12D and S333. Below 150 cubic feet per second when the head water at S333 state with the stage of the S333 head water is below 9.2, which as I mentioned before is associated with elevated phosphorus concentrations. The slow restriction stops when the S333 head water stage increases above 9.2 feet or increases one foot above the May 15th stage. The second management option is to shift a portion or fraction of the S12 discharges through S12C. So reducing recession rates by reducing outflow in water conservation area 3A through the S12 and S333 between December and May when the stage is lower than 10 feet. To maintain the higher stages in the canal coming out of the dry season and then reduce the frequency of low stage conditions which are associated with the total phosphorus, higher phosphorus concentrations. You can go on to the next slide. You can go on to the next slide. So for our evaluation, we determined flow volumes when the stage was less than 9.2 feet at the S333 head water, we saw how flow splits between S12C and S12D when they were made. And we looked at the frequency of water conservation area 3A stage being below 10 feet on December 1st. So a change point analysis was conducted and two change points were observed in 2016 and 2018. And as you can see here in the top figure, we're looking at mean water year percentage for the flows and 12.5% of the mean flow for the period between 2010 through 2015 was discharged when S333 stage was less than 9.2 feet. For the period between 2016 and 2017, that's 11.1% of the flows being discharged at lower than that stage. And for the mean water year flows for the period of 2018 to 2022, 24.7% of the flows are discharged below the 9.2 feet stage level. Now as for volume, we're seeing in the bottom figure in the bar chart, we're seeing that 76,000 acre feet were delivered between the period of 2010 to 2015, 155 between the period of 2016 and 2017. And for the period of 2018 to 2022, that's 216,000 acre feet. So we see that more water is being delivered at lower stages. Next slide please. Now, the second point in our evaluation is to look at the flow splits between S12C and S12D. And we looked at TP concentrations between October 2009 and June of 2023, that's our data set. And over that historical period, we see that S12C concentrations are slower than S12D for 10 micrograms per liter and 12 micrograms per liter at S12D when the stage is lower than 9.2. However, we see that these are similar but statistically different. So they yielded a p-value that was 10 to the negative 6 at a magnitude of 10 to the negative 6, which makes them significantly different from each other. So they're close, but they're significantly different. And next slide. Now in March of 2023 and we did get low stage triggers. So in response to that, flow source split between these two structures to deliver lower TP concentrations. And we saw three sampling events over the month of March and there was no statistical difference in TP concentrations between S12C and S12D for March for that event in 2023. So we did see that S12C TP concentrations were one to six micrograms per liter higher than S12D for the sample events that occurred during that month. And flow weighted mean differences range from one to three micrograms per liter. Next slide. However, we observed that that was not a significant change in concentrations for this event in March where we did split some of the flows. Next slide please. Now for the last one in our evaluation is that what frequency have we seen the water conservation area 3A stage go below 10 feet on December 1 on we saw three events since 2009. All of them were prior to COP. So we're seeing the last event in 2019 with this black box over the two figures. What we see here in the top figure, we see a dashed green line that represents the 150 cubic feet per second flow. And we see that when the flow, which is the blue line, and the average stage both drop which is yellow, sorry, orange line. We see that there is an increase in concentrations in the bottom. However, we see that there is a cyclical pattern. And I really say that that's what triggered. So we do have a cyclical pattern that when there's a declining stage, there's an increase in concentrations. However, under COP we haven't seen this happen. So the COP adaptive management uncertainty 16b aims to reduce the TP concentrations of the waters being delivered to the park and under its operations. There have been very few hydraulic conditions that have triggered the implementation of the adaptive management options. So since we didn't get to implement these adaptive management options, we weren't able to really see system responses that indicated a need for adaptive management changes. Now interagency deliberations and data sharing have been happening under COP and they've proven very valuable for water quality considerations. During real time, continuing data collection through the multiple agencies that are involved and collaborative evaluation are necessary to continue to further implement AM strategies adaptive management strategies and work is underway to inform potential solutions that may reduce high TP coming out of the dry seasons into the park. And one example is a sediment characterization study that was carried out to understand how floc and sediment affect TP concentrations at the shark river slew and flow. So there is continuing work being performed to further improve concentrations at the park. And with that that is my presentation today I will pass it on to the next presenter. Well, good morning everybody. My name is Kevin Kniff. I am the chief sustainability officer for the microsoft tribe of Indians of Florida, and I'm extremely pleased to be here today to meet speak with you. And I do want to acknowledge that we did have a great time out in the field on microsoft tribal lands yesterday with Marla and Stephanie. I'd also like to further acknowledge that Reverend Houston Cyprus is here today in the audience. He is a tribal member, and he is also a member of the Everglades advisory committee, which is a committee of four tribal elders. I don't know that Reverend Cyprus yet quite qualifies as a tribal elder but nevertheless who seek to work with the microsoft environmental protection agency that I helped to bring leadership to. And together we work to be facilitators of knowledge and information and data, both from the tribal community, as well as the science community. To help the microsoft business council formulate policy and make informed decisions that are data driven and information based. That all being said, I don't have a particular slide presentation which I hope you'll all find refreshing. And I'm also doing this in a way that it's much more culturally relevant to actually speak to each other and look each other in the eyes to be able to have these conversations about very, very important topics here that we're talking about. I'm going to ask you a question first. You got it all. Do you understand exactly everything that went through here do you see how a and B and C and B and E and F all relate and how it's all simple and clean. I don't think so. We have a very, very complicated system. We have a very, very complicated set of challenges and constraints and needs within the greater Everglades system all throughout South Florida. This is a veritable army of engineers and scientists policymakers, not for profits, the general public, all you all who are an extremely important body here that have a stake in Everglades restoration for one reason or another, and who are all in their own ways, very well intentioned and genuine in wanting to see good things done. I want to take the opportunity of course to remind everybody that amongst these stakeholders are to indigenous tribes that have inhabited the Everglades for millennia, who have been instrumental in the evolution of the Everglades as a wetland system. Over the last 6000 years or so, since we had the ocean rise up enough to make that hydrostatic pressure to create wetlands that we now see today and that have taken shape over this time. And so, as I serve the Mikasuki tribe, I'm going to be speaking from the perspective of the Mikasuki interests with respect to Everglades restoration. And while we're here talking about cop. I guess there were two maybe particular questions that were posed for me to maybe give some input on here is how has cop implementation affected the tribe, and how has the cop by annual report been received as a good thing or not by the tribe. I'll start with the easy one first and that's the cop by annual report, which is replete with as much data as you'd ever want to see and to consider. That's great. I think we can all agree that as a water control plan and strategy. It represents a very, very small snapshot of time. It is contingent upon baseline conditions of a system that were already highly impacted and compartmentalized to begin with. A lot of the figures you saw here today, looking at various periods of of inundation. Hydro periods, etc, etc. I'm going to make the suggestion here that we are considerate of the fact that what cop is seeking to do here is to compare to an already altered baseline. And to be fair, it's not attempting to try and compare to a natural baseline. Nevertheless, the Mikosuki try for all of you who may not be aware makes its home in the Florida Everglades, and has done so for a lot longer than any of us have been here or our families have been here. And it has been the place where the tribes culture has continued to thrive. And for which the tribe has endured quite a lot here in particular over the last 150 years in particular. The Everglades were a place that the tribe took refuge from the United States Army in its campaign to eradicate indigenous peoples from Florida in order to make way for Everglades drainage and for farming. To be sure Everglades drainage was actually a key strategy with which and how to accomplish this as military campaigns continue to prove unable to eradicate indigenous peoples. The Mikosuki tribe took refuge in the tree islands throughout the Everglades, and for which are an important manner with which to assess how well Everglades restoration is being planned and implemented. Everglades tree islands are of primary importance and their health to of those tree islands are primary importance to the Mikosuki tribe, because this is where the tribe lived. This is where the tribe raised their families. This is where culture and medicine were shared and taught. This is where food was gathered cultivated hunted. And this is where the tribal members were laid to rest in order to return to the next place that they go to. We use Miss Betty Osciola who is another Mikosuki tribal member. She is another member of the Everglades advisor committee and she's an extremely active woman within the community here of Everglades restoration. And when she says that her DNA and that of her people are intertwined explicitly and intricately within the Everglades. That's 100% true. Those tribal members who lived on the islands who died on the islands and who were resorbed back into the islands come up as trees. And they live as trees. And the members of the tribe view them as such. Where we've seen in particular degradation of tree islands. Degradation that is caused by a number of factors. Most importantly, the Tamiami trail as being such a dam and impediment to North South flow of water. While Everglades National Park has been prioritized in cop. The trade off has been water conservation area three where water is stacked up. Unnaturally, which has high inundation periods, which are very deleterious to tree islands. We have seen a precipitous decline in the diversity of tree islands we've seen soil loss through constant inundation. We've seen outright death outright death of trees within tree islands throughout conservation area three. As a result of water management. The idea that cop is a good step forward. I would agree. And I think the tribe is happy to see that there are strides being made, and there are thoughtful ways on how we can better have water moving across the landscape. In a complicated web of many different search projects, all of which have different timelines of when they expect to come online. There's a tremendous amount of engineering to unengineer a highly engineered system. Let that sit for a second on the logic. We have a compartmentalized system. Everglades restoration at its most basic seeks to decompartmentalize the system. Through more construction of hard engineering features, pump stations, levees, seepage walls, so on and so on. The tribe has seen a lot of changes through the Everglades in its time in the Everglades. And here over the last 100 or so years since drainage has really proceeded and earnest has seen a tremendous amount of change. It's not been a positive experience, but it is one that the tribe is seeking to take in stride, because it has been their lives spent understanding changes and adapting to those changes. And these man made changes are one more in that in that long litany of impact and change that the tribe is seeking to adapt to. What I'd like to put forward here is that while we are going to be very considerate as we watch caught move forward. And as we engage on set south planning and a new water control plan. There are a couple of things that I think the Mikosuki tribe would like to see better focused attention being given to. In particular, the health of tree islands throughout the conservation area. You saw a couple of figures there that showed some snapshots of tree island health data that I think Raj had presented. And you'll note that the islands in Everglades National Park. We're all red, but that's actually a pretty good thing, because they're receiving the proper hydrology, they receive their proper wet season hydrology heights of water levels, and then those water levels come down appropriately through the dry season. What we're seeing in the conservation area is very different. We're seeing overly high water levels that are overtopping and drowning tree islands for way too long. And we're seeing the death of those islands we're seeing the continued erosion of those islands, and we're seeing drastic changes in the communities of those tree islands, and the wetland fauna and flora that are dependent upon these tree islands. And for which are important resources to the Mikosuki tribe. How do we do this, how can we, how can we kind of resolve this issue of making sure we get the right amount of water at the right time into Everglades National Park, and not sacrifice the rest of the system. Well, you're going to hear later, some discussion about adaptive management. Dr Craig van der Heiden from the Mikosuki tribe fisheries and wildlife director will be part of that panel to help address these issues. I put forward here that we need a better degree of flexibility. We need a better degree of thoughtfulness on some of the novel approaches we might take that are more conditions and stage based rather than strict schedules of constraints. I'm going to point to the s 12 a and B structures in particular, a long time a me trail that have a specific operational schedule in order to be accommodating of US Fish and Wildlife Services biological opinion on the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, and for which the Army Corps of 20 years is now compelled to uphold the tribe for decades has been advocating to have these gates open, open throughout the year in a way that is conditions based to allow for flow. The population a of the sparrow has been devoid of birds for quite a long time, and the habitat that these birds are are that we're seeking to protect by way of this operational schedule is really not at all good habitat to begin with for the birds is degraded. Well, in large part because much of the Everglades is degraded. And we've seen negative changes because of hydrologic impact. You're all scientists. My background is coastal unless you weren't ecology and nutrient biogeochemistry so I'm not saying this from a place of, of pulling this out of nowhere. But isn't it logical to maybe suspect that if we can engender a better degree of natural flow across the system, even in the areas that we see today which are impacted and are not baseline. Could we not maybe expect a different outcome. I think we can. And I think we have the ability to test this in a scientific manner. Okay, I'm not suggesting throw the gates open and walk away. I'm saying, let's look at ways to bring about good things with the tools that we have, and to be more thoughtful and thinking outside of the box with those same tools. I will note that the one of the key performance metrics here for Everglades restoration is waiting birds success. Well, waiting birds are successful when they have a good pre base, and they have the right water levels to actually exploit that pre base. Now, you also saw some of the data about super colonies. Following our tropical storm and hurricane events in 2018 and 2021. I will also note, those are the same years where s 12 a and b were kept open as an emergency deviation for flooding purposes within the conservation area. So, let's think about that. Let's think we've got some pilot information that might suggest there might be some merit to this. I'll close here I know I'm at the end of my time to speak with you and I appreciate it and I look forward to answering any questions, but the Mikosuke tribe is advocating for a holistic view of restoration, a holistic view of the Everglades. While we are so in the weeds, literally and figuratively on the minutiae of modeling and data. We need to think about these things in the broader scheme, where we've got a complicated web of projects and infrastructure and engineering solutions to be brought forward. What is at the heart of this is to decompartmentalize a compartmentalized system and provide an opportunity for water to flow from the Kissimmee river and the chain of lakes through Lake Okeechobee, which don't even get me started on that here. But down through the Everglades, we have more constraints on this on achieving this than we than we do anything else. So the Mikosuke tribe would be strongly advocating to reprioritize efforts to move water south from its historic upper watersheds down to the coastal estuaries and base. And I appreciate that you've all let me say these few things. I think from the tribe's perspective cop is a mixed bag, but is still subject to be to be evaluated at a later time. And we'll be certainly working very closely with the core and the district and our partners on where set water control plans are going to be set going forward. Thank you. And we have all the speakers up for the panel Q&A, please. And for the committee indicate that you have a question just by raising your card. And for those of you that are on zoom, Stephanie and I will keep track of your virtual hands as you raise. So we're going to extend our session a little bit go to 1025. So we have time for questions. And we're going to start with Jeff Walters. Committee's charge is to identify challenges that could restoration progress. Yeah, what part of the charge of the committee is to identify challenges that could Pete restoration progress and constraints fall under those challenges and I'll start off by saying hearing Dan Crawford say that since the seepage barrier has been put in the flood constraints from the 8.5 square mile area which have compromise to some extent every restoration effort in Northeast Shark River slew since experimental water deliveries in the 1980s through Water Year 21 under cop was thrilling I got goosebumps just hearing that that might actually finally be overcome or close to it. And the report vinyl reports full of good news in the sense that things are happening that were anticipated represent restoration success but the one section that alarmed me a bit was the biological opinion section and because there are a lot of residential take thresholds in there and for kite Storks and sparrows and some things weren't met that were supposed to in Water Year 21 I know it was a wet year, but for Storks and kites requires two consecutive years to maybe have to consult again but the sparrows by my math. If they'd have gone out on the survey and found five fewer sparrows. They would have exceeded the threshold and maybe had to consult again so there's only one year in there Water Year 21 so I'm curious what happened in Water Year 22 and 23, which were different were things better with endangered species then. And if not, are there plans underway to find ways around these issues so that endangered species don't become a real constraint on progress and constraint on operations. I've been here a year. So I've been a big fire. But it's hard for me to get all the information that I need to be able to answer every question to a certain. That being said, that we're trying to look forward for trying to be as adaptable and work with our partners and listen. Our charge is obviously to really keep foremost in mind the ecosystems that the species inhabit. That's a part of the of the Endangered Species Act. What I want to say is we're really trying to focus on a paradigm shift in the future with SAP and the new water control plans. And such as what Kevin just mentioned, we're, we're looking at the landscape level and we're looking holistically. That doesn't mean that we're ignoring the species impacts, we're evaluating each one of those. That's why we attend the PDT meetings. That's why we attend the EVM meetings. We're there every step of the way to try to evaluate and be very thoughtful about how to provide input that tries to create a balance and keep in mind all the different species and the habitats in which they interact. It's tough. There's no denying it. It's a complex system. But in terms of identifying constraints, there are so many different constraints and I use the word with a little C, not a big C that the engineers use. Obviously, it's something that we have to take into consideration. That's what I would say. We're trying to focus on conditions based operations. We're trying to look at the landscape level and we're trying to provide input and evaluate the best hydro periods that work for a host and a mosaic of the Everglades system. And so that includes tree islands. That includes the the regions, the systems, and that includes moral prairie. And with that, then we look at the changes in the vegetation and how the species will live within those vegetative habitats. Hey, Charlie, and Bill and then Marla. Well, thank you all for that presentation. I had a question or two questions actually on the water quality presentation. So I wanted to, I guess, specifically talk to you Christina. So I appreciate the presentation. It's quite interesting. So the first question is, do you have a good handle on what is the mechanism driving these changes in phosphorus and then I guess related to that is you talk about total phosphorus, but have you looked at the various forms of phosphorus that would provide insight in terms of what's going on and driving those changes? Yes, so not all like Bonnie. I have been with the National Park Service since June. We have looked at the different types of phosphorus that are part of the mechanism. And we have seen that some, of course, total phosphorus is kind of the main measure that we're looking at, not looking at inorganic and organic and going down that is a bit unravelable. And that's what the cop is addressing, right? So that's what we've stuck to. But there are mechanisms in place that do affect these phosphorus concentrations. So aside from the stage and the flow, there's also mechanisms where, and I mentioned the sentiment characterization study where sediment may have phosphorus as well. You know, there's other conditions that may be affecting and bringing phosphorus into the park. For I have Donato Sarat on the line, he's virtually available to answer more specifics on this question, given that I've been here since June. But there definitely, yes, total phosphorus is not the only measure that we're looking at. So Donato, if you're online and you'd like to add anything to that response, please feel free to chime in. Can you hear me? Yes. I apologize, but I'm dual task at this point and working on work at the same time. I only heard the part about the TP and as a part of the study that Christina was mentioning at the end, we have started investigating some other components of the total phosphorus to try to have a better understanding of the actual drivers that we're seeing for these cyclical spikes that we're getting particularly down at the S333 structures and S12D that are contributing to the exceedances that we're experiencing for for water quality going to Everglades National Park. So we are looking at, we looked at some of the soluble reactive phosphorus and total dissolved phosphorus as a part of that study and that type of information will be coming out in the near future. As we continue to finalize this investigation. Was there more to the question and did I answer that portion of the question. Yeah, so this is Charlie, Charlie Driscoll and I guess the other part of this is do you have good handle on the mechanisms or what are the mechanisms that you're evaluating that could be driving these changes. So right now the biggest driver that we've been focusing most heavily on is the stage dynamics and that was why she spent a little time focusing on the 9.2 feet stage threshold. And that came out through our evaluation going way back started in Everglades restoration transition plan process. We started noticing that, you know, below some different stages we could see that concentrations were starting to increase above that that desire or protective concentration of eight parts per billion. And as a result of those evaluations, we did some serious in depth sensitivity analysis to ultimately formulate those recommendations that Christina laid out earlier in the presentation. Right now the biggest driver we're looking at is this stage reduction, and particularly when we're starting to disconnect from the marsh and getting that good clean rainwater driven marsh concentrations that would normally help feed the canal and help reduce those stages. I mean concentrations where we're seeing that that stage difference when we drop below that threshold. We're seeing that in concentration increase so we're looking right now to try to find solutions for managing that type of dynamic. Did that help. Yes, thank you. Thanks. So first I want to say thank you as a first timer on this committee. I'm sympathetic to drinking through the fire hose and but this was really informative I learned a lot. So my question is oriented towards the ecological side of things I think this might be from Andrea. So I heard mention of crayfish and I heard mention of apple snails. I'm curious how much attention is being given to invertebrate responses, given their sensitivity to both ephemerality as well as water quality. Are those the only two invertebrates or are there, it's actually community based analyses that are also occurring. It depends on what part of the system you're looking at. I think in the main part, the everglades are main indicators are our fish and crayfish but and we're not looking at the invertebrate community other than like, you know, one off studies within northern estuaries oysters or a key indicator and benthic in fauna is an up and coming indicator that we're working to develop in the southern coastal systems, looking at pink shrimp and epiphana on the on the seagrass and those as indicators so it depends on which part of the system you're looking at. But in the main part of the everglades and Laura, if you know of any, but yeah, we, it's basically that we got two main types of crayfish that have proven to be important and that respond differently to the hydrology, and end up being very important for some of these super quality events. Thank you. I want to echo everyone's thanks to you all for your presentations and bills note that I too am a first timer on this committee and yeah that fire hose man. It's a lot. My question is relative to the cultural values and tribal interests objective of the cop. And I wonder if you could perhaps provide us with a little more detail on how that was operationalized and what metrics have been used to monitor and assess the effects on cultural resources and tribal interests. And I confess that I did skim the cup by annual report for that data, but it didn't jump right out at me so any help you could provide in pointing us toward those sections of the report would be greatly appreciated. So that this is Melissa Nasuti I can take that one unless Kevin you are about to speak. Go ahead Melissa thank you. Okay. Yes so in the report as you mentioned and as Raj presented, we did look at a metric with respect to tree islands tree islands being culturally significant to the tribe. Chris Altez, who isn't on the panel today. He's our archaeologist for the core for this project. He puts out additional reports I believe on a monthly basis that also talk about changes in water levels. So we also have that reporting mechanism as well. But I think tree islands are the one that we've sort of keyed in on, and I'll stop there if Kevin like would like to provide any feedback or anything else. Thank you for the question. It's one that I feel is important and I feel that deserves a little bit better discussion. Now, you all saw that tree islands were considered as part of the ecological performance measures. I think a fair answer to your question is is that there isn't a specific cultural resource or other related type of a performance metric included. It's not being tracked by recover for example. Yeah, that's not all the fault of, of any, you know, one effort or not to be sure. The Mikosuki tribe very closely guards the species and the particular resources that have cultural or medicinal value. And so where we are now in 2023 is what I hope is a really great opportunity to actually build in some performance measures that are culturally based, but that will be proxies proxies for resources that are important. Culturally or traditionally to the tribe, but for which the tribe seeks to want to retain as being private and protected that way. So, to this end, on the, it's not necessarily related to cop, but where the science monitoring and assessment component of Everglades restoration by way of recover. So that's restoration coordination and verification. It is the entity here that is supposed to be providing the data driven science to help folks like yourselves to help the South Florida ecosystem restoration task force to make recommendations and data driven decisions on Everglades restoration. Recover has a new module called the Southwest Florida module that the tribes were helping to advocate for in order to provide a framework for science for monitoring and assessment to be done in a way ahead of the Western Everglades restoration project. I know this is outside of cop discussion, but there is a relation. And as part of that, we're going to seek to try and actually develop these proxy performance measures so that as a key partner and a stated stakeholder in Everglades restoration, the tribe will have that opportunity to provide a basis of quantitative empirical science and or monitoring and assessment in order that we who serve the tribe can be the intermediaries with the rest of the agencies who are performing this important work and to be part of that work and helping to design that work so that we can be in position to report back to the tribal community, how the important resources are trending. And also be able to protect those resources in the very specific manner that we are charged to do. So I guess more to come. Okay, Matt, and then if we will have then have a little bit of an opportunity to give feedback on the cop report after we hear from Matt. So that was actually where I was going to go. Perfect. I'm just, you Melissa that asked the question about feedback on the effectiveness of the report. And I'm interested in it from sort of two types of perspectives. The first is on documentation of the process and the second is on communicating the results of the effectiveness and the results effectiveness and the outcome effectiveness. So, my first question is on the documentation parts. So, we've heard that the periodic scientists calls were valuable. The formal adaptive management thresholds were not particularly triggered in those first two years of cop. There was a lot done in this operational space right with the feedback and input from the periodic scientists calls. The copper port didn't go into this very much and I'm curious as to why that is. This is Melissa so we produce a lot of reports. In addition to the biannual report that we talked about today, the course responsible for producing a biannual assessment report to the US Fish and Wildlife Service as a requirement of the 2020 cop biological opinion. And within those reports, which I believe were appendices to the biannual report, our water manager, basin manager for water conservationary three and Everglades National Park does produce a table to try and summarize the feedback that we've received from the periodic scientists calls. So, it is there but I concur that it's a bit varied and there may be a better way to communicate what occurs at those calls and how it feeds back into operations in future reports. Yeah, I believe you're referring to Appendix C for the cop report, which is actually the second part of my question. We can go there. Reporting on outputs what happened and outcomes. What does it mean are two different things. One is in a conversation space of sort of the why and the what the others in a conversation space of the therefore. And so we see this challenge and lots of reports, including this the system status reports so I'm curious from a report planning designing and writing perspective can you sort of speak to the why the report didn't go to the therefore aspects and the kind of give this from Appendix C. And so this is a table that describes the conversation space for those periodic scientists. On the left hand column is a column that describes somewhere in the order of 10 to 15 kinds of recommendations from the different entities that participate. And on the far right column of that table is a description of sort of the decisions that were made as a as a functional result. So what's missing is the therefore part. So I look at that far right column and I look at the far left column of the 15 on the far left column I can only actually understand maybe what happened to three of those recommendations, because that therefore is not sort of there. And so I was curious as to some feedback as to as to why you, why you think that, whether you think that there might be an opportunity to add that therefore part of those descriptions. It's good feedback that could be taken back to the team in terms of producing the by any report or the by annual assessment on reports. I don't think that it was done on on purpose. We just use sort of a standard template to produce those reports for several years. So really, like Andrea said, I think we're just, you know, welcoming any, any feedback for potential improvements. Yeah, I just wanted to say as one of the many members who's read the whole entire book at the appendices that I didn't feel like for an audience like us it communicates well. What has happened I found like I got a clear picture of the changes that have happened under a cop and what has happened in those particular water years. One question though just to make sure I understand it right. My understanding of the, the modeling the model predictions that things are compared against is what would have been expected under cop during each year in the period of record that 40 years. Is that correct. If you talk about the hydrologic performance reporting. Yeah, it was our first attempt to try and do something of this type so it took the entire 41 year period of record and was graphing it for example like the hydro periods. You know, and comparing it with the, you know, real world, you know, baseline years and the cockpit implementation years. Troy Hill who did some of the initial of this modeling he then took another job. And, but one of the ideas he had before he left was to try and subset the cop modeling years to the ones that were most similar in terms of rainfall to the actual implemented, you know, real world years and see if that might be a way of going forward but we just haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Okay, that's where I was going to go whether there were efforts underway to try to compare to like conditions in this year, not some to what actually, what is predicted to have happened to what actually happened using using like current years instead of past years. Yeah, and I guess the best where you're going with that is like the most similar past year but not yet going to trying to model. We won't be rerunning the models with this year's rainfall the idea would be going back and looking at say, like I said the five or 10 most similar years in terms of rainfall from that all cute data set and seeing and being able to do a comparison and rerunning the models will. It takes a lot to get in line with the IMC in order to rerun these models. And so that's the constraint that prevents you from trying to like take the actual water year 24 and run that through the model. Yes. Okay. I wanted to get on this question. So yeah, we look at like a COP model output like a very close, for example, 25% very closest rainfall years, and we compare for different time period for example weekly basis, or in a dry season in the wet season how that compares with that 25% of the closest rainfall years. Sometimes we also look at the try to mess the antecedent conditions. So sometimes I present in the EBMs called that type of information. So we just to tell you that we also explored those between the model and current observations. The next thing of course, not everybody's going to read that whole report. So do you have a do you have you worked on like some little Jeff synopsis just hold that part of your question. Dan, did you want to follow up on this. I did. Thank you. I just wanted to acknowledge a couple other, you know, again, Jeff, we're very much welcome to feedback but a couple other limitations to be aware of. And one reason we didn't take the tact of trying to compare models to real world with this initial report is that we only have two years of data. And we know the front end of that two year cycle was influenced heavily by tropical storm Ada that kind of surcharge the system and you know that storm would have happened whether we were under top or whether we were under the predecessor operations plan. And so as we look at the effects of cop cop is also affected by areas outside of our, you know, area of responsibility, if you will, you know, Lake Okeechobee operations operations of the state storm water treatment area and operations of water conservation is one and it also includes inflows from mullet flu from the west side of conservation area three a all of those areas also have an effect on the water that makes it into the cop water control plan area being conservation area three a in the park. And so we felt like after only two years of data. I think it's a little bit of a statistical rigor to warrant going back and comparing back to the modeling data, but I think it is something as Raj alluded to that we're, we're open to exploring and more depth as we move out to the next biennial report and certainly we'd welcome any any feedback. So the last thing I was going to say is, I was just wondering if you have some synopsis of this report or some shorter thing to share with the more general public about just as a way to demonstrate communicate restoration success. You've had under cop, because I know you want to write more reports and things like that. And this is Andrea Atkinson. At this time, no, and which is why we handed you the cop poster as a way to try and give you a kind of synopsis of some of the big things that were going on but we did not do that for this report that might be something we should think about for the future. Okay, I think we'll end there. Thanks very much to the panel for your presentations and your other contributions greatly appreciate it. I'm a little behind schedule, and so have a bit of an abbreviated break will resume at 1050. Sherpa Jason climate change science and planning. And Tom Frazier has a starting off and he's going to give us an overview of Florida flood hub and sea level rise guidance. Thanks Tom. Thanks, James. So, um, yes, Stephanie asked me if I might come and chat a little bit about the Florida flood hub for applied research and innovation some of the work that we're doing. Excuse me, with regard to climate change sea level rise. Have to be really close. All right, this is going to be fun. So talk closely into a mic and read very small print. Anyway, so we'll get moving along because there's a couple of folks in this session I think obi's got a number of slides and I'm going to try to save him a little bit of time. So, the flood hub is really a center for flood data right it was created by statute with base funding from the state of Florida, and it's really intended to this to serve as a thought leader right on flooding research for Florida really to prepare for the impacts. I need to see next slide to don't I. We got all kinds of technology. You know, but they, the hub's mission really is to prepare pluridians and stakeholders in the state for the impacts of rising sea levels, stronger, more economically. Important storms and extreme rainfall events. Next slide. All right, so in order to just serve that mission, the flood hub actually leverages work groups and its partnerships, really to a community based programs designed to address flooding and sea level rise in Florida. And the work groups. I mean, many of the folks probably on this panel are aware of how NC sort of National Center for ecological analysis and synthesis works. It's modeled after that particular program. And so the work groups are really the heart of the Florida hub. Excuse me. And so they're scientists and other subject matter experts they can be on a regular basis to address issues related to sea level rise, high tide flooding events, storm surge and extreme rainfall events I'm not going to talk about that I'll be going to incorporate that into his talk next, but the work groups really concentrate that expertise to fill gaps and data, evaluate models in some cases they create new models where appropriate. They solve and address scientific problems and advance our understanding of the risk that are associated with flooding that can obviously occurs a result of multiple factors and the issue of compound flooding is really top of mind for this group. You know, and that's something that we think about as we move forward. So right now we have three working groups. I've indicated them up here. We have a sea level rise work group. A rainfall working group and we're establishing a bring together our comprehensive modeling group again to start to get a handle on that compound flooding issue. The hub is really collaborative by design, and it relies on the strength not only of its work group members but its partnerships, right to ensure that the work and findings and the products of real world impact. And the partners include academics. It's not limited obviously to academics, water management district scientists and other professionals there, people that work for utilities, regional planning organizations, resiliency coalitions and a number of folks from the agencies at both at the local state and federal level. So, and of course we were very, very closely with the resilient Florida program, which is a major initiative in the state at this last couple legislative sessions. Next slides. So I'm going to give you just a little bit of an overview of what we are doing right now, particularly with regard to sea level rise. You know, and again, as I said before, obviously to talk a little bit about the rainfall efforts and I think john stamps on the line as well and they might be able to answer any questions that they have in that regard moving forward. Next slide. All right, so as I indicated earlier, these work groups are comprised of leading scientists and subject matter experts from around the world nation. With regard to this particular group Gary Mitchum who's a physical oceanographer at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science serves as the chair, but other members on this group, you know they've contributed the IPCC reports, the national assessments either as authors and or reviewers, and all of them are well recognized experts in the field. The ex official members are West Brooks who's the chief resiliency officer for the state, Mark Reigns who's the chief science officer for the state, and myself next slide. All right, so rather than get way into the weeds I'll give you kind of the conclusions up front. Essentially what the work group did was they took a look at the most recent national assessment which was released in February 2022. We analyzed the data they essentially acquired the data, took a peek at it, and they found that the sea level sea level rise projection for Florida, regardless of the time horizon that you're interested in right whether it's 2040, 2050, 2070, or beyond are remarkably uniform across the state. And that's in contrast to what the national assessment said and we can talk about that little later perhaps during the panel discussion. We also found that the results for Florida agree very well for a line with the global projections. And as a consequence of those findings right, the single set of projections can be used, right, or can as justified, regardless of the time horizon employed so next slide please. I'm just going to give you three slides of methodology again at a very high level. What do the group do. They, they looked, they didn't actually collect new data, they acquired the data that was used in the national assessment. Right, they re aggregated the data, and they looked at essentially the one degree by one degree gridded data set. They created a smooth coastline, all the way from the regions considered in the national report, the Eastern Gulf region all the way through the South Atlantic region. Next slide please. All right, so then. So what they did is they essentially took that smooth coastline and those gridded data, and they extended it in a linear way so that's a representation of that kind of linearly extended coastline. I mean, the vertical black lines represent kind of the Gulf margin of Florida, Pensacola on the black line on the right is the north coast of the east coast of Florida, so that'd be Jacksonville. And so what you see, as I said earlier, is when you look at total sea level rise and the projection given here is the 2040 time horizon is that the sea level rise is remarkably uniform right the blue line is the total. The orange dark orange line is the ocean component. That's the thermal element in the stair ceramic components. The yellow line is the vertical landmines in the purple line is essentially the mass components that's fresh water storage and form of glaciers and land storage, etc. And the total obviously is the sum of those component parts. So next slide. So, again, the slide looks very much like the last one, but it bears on that conclusion or deals with that conclusion that the projections for Florida are remarkably similar or align well with the, the global projections and essentially what it's saying is that anywhere in Florida that the elements of the global projections which are essentially the thermal elements, right. When you couple those with a vertical land motion that that's what you see in Florida so they align quite well. The analysis so implies that there's no regional dynamics here right or they're not important. The alternative of course is that they are important, right, and they're not captured by the global models in the national assessment. And that's important to know moving forward and certainly it's going to be an effort at this group, both the sea level rise group and the rainfall group and again I'm not going to still be thunder I'm going to talk a little bit about that. So, next slide please. I spent a lot of time on this. Again, this is just supporting data that says that that the deviations at any point along the coastline are relatively small relative to the average. It justifies using that single value for any of the projections moving forward. Next slide please. Alright, so these are the confidence intervals for the projections for 2040 2015 to 2070 time horizons from left to right they represent the low intermediate low intermediate intermediate high and high sea level rise projections. And there, these are things that everybody in this room has seen right it's not surprising as you move further out and extend the time horizon that the variation around those median values, which are the black dots increase and you get greater separation of confidence and what's going to happen as we move out in time. I think what's important here, and people probably should pay less attention to the variance per se, but the median valid values which are the black dots because that's what the exceedance probabilities are based on right moving forward and really are the basis for the decisions that planners make moving forward, excuse me. So, next slide please. Alright, so what does all of this mean. You know, we're again trying to put it in a risk based framework, and I'm going to probably read some of these because I think they're important. And the national report essentially this work group really assessed the national assessment and kind of made it applicable to Florida and and there, the exceedance probabilities given in that report are for various emissions scenarios right this particular work group focused on the three degree temperature increase scenario based on the emission efforts that are on place by 2020 that's the most likely pathway. But regardless, if you're going to use these data, right, you have to make a decision. Right, we can't tell everybody what to do and that's going to depend on your degree of risk tolerance, moving forward so in, in, in short, the group really I'm going to go to bullets to and sticks here. I think that the group didn't spend a lot of time considering those they thought that they weren't a much value. But if you look that for the intermediate low projection, it has an 82% chance of being exceeded, and that's certainly be appropriate for applications where there's a very high risk tolerance. So if you go to the intermediate projection, it only has a 5% 5% chance of being exceeded. And again, that's a moderately risk based decision. And then finally the media intermediate high projection has less than 1% chance of being exceeded and so folks that are fairly risk averse might considering that and things and the decisions that they're trying to make moving forward. Next slide. All right, so, yeah, I just wanted to show people some numbers, right, and this is again is based on the most likely scenario, the projections are given on the left, or excuse me, the time horizons are given on the left, the 2040 2015 2070 time horizons, various scenarios, the level rise scenarios of low through high or on the upper part, the values are in millimeters and inches. And so what you can see here and I'll go just for the moderate risk tolerance thing. 2040 looking potentially at 10 inches of sea level rise, right, and 2070 we're looking at 22 inches of sea level rise. I think it's important to note that all of these projections are the benchmark years 2020 or 2000 excuse me. Right. And so they have to incorporate sea level rise that's taken place for the last 20 years and in Florida's case it's probably just a little less than four inches depending on the projection in the scenario that you're looking at. Next slide. All right, so next steps. I think there was a lot of discussion given the, the interest in the probability of exceeding any particular scenario. Right. I think the group felt that they can do a better job at characterizing those exceedance probabilities at shorter time horizons. And for various mission pathways not tying them specifically to temperature. Again, it's important to note in the national assessment everything was based on 2100. Right. And so you'd have to take with some confidence that the nature of the of sea level rise is not changing. Right. And again, that's something else that people don't quite understand. When you actually look at the projections for any particular time horizon. That's a discrete time period. Right. So you're not actually getting smooth curves. People look at these and they tended to refer to them as sea level. Rise rates. Right. I wouldn't look at them that way and maybe that'll come up in the panel. Moving forward. The group also recognize that there's probably some biases in the vertical land motion estimates that are provided in the national report. So they'll examine those but they're relatively small and they'll certainly get swamped out as you extend further along in the time horizon. There's a strong interest in exploring the regional ocean atmospheric processes, again, not only by the sea level rise group but by the rainfall group. And then they're going to continue to look at some of these other things as well. They're going to look at the regional tide gauge analysis, some of the satellite altimetry data to kind of validate the gauge data so we can see if we can use that empirical data right in some decision making process. Moving forward. Right now I don't think the group is very comfortable using that tide gauge data for that purpose. And then, finally, we're going to look at the impact of run up on flooding risk. It's more of a problem on the West Coast. We don't expect it to be one of the East Coast per se but something that we're going to look into. So, thank you for your time. And I'll yield my time to Obi. Sure, this is as for it. Good morning, everyone. Good to see some familiar faces. I know some of you are new to the committee so I'll try to set the stage for why this talk might be relevant to what you're talking about. So if you can bring up the first slide. I have a long name Jan, they call me Obi for obvious reasons I guess. But I'm a research professor and a director of the sea level solution center in the Institute of environment at FIO. So I'm going to talk about a couple of topics today. I'll try to try not to get into too much detail, but stay at a higher level but in the panel discussion they can have. Next slide please. So like I mentioned, I will cover two topics in the agenda. One is on the scenario development. You know, basically, the idea is we are planning for future condition if the climate change is relevant with the hydrology be the same in the future. So can we come up with some scenarios for regional model development and I've done some work sponsored by the Florida Water Management District. So it has to look at these teleconnections, you know, basically global phenomena affecting the rainfall patterns in Florida revisiting this concept of particularly Atlantic multi-deckill oscillation. I'll talk about that very quickly. And then, piggyback on what Tom mentioned on Florida flood hub work, particularly on rainfall extremes and we have a two prong approach what I call short term and long term. And then the relevance to this is we had a workshop in 2019. I think some of you attended that in FIU. We kind of set the stage for this short term and long term approach in that meeting. Next slide please. So why is it important? As you heard, there is a lot of regional model being used. I won't go into detail on that. But I think the concept here is like team here is we are planning for future condition. Can we use the historical hydrology for planning for major projects like what we are talking about. And this concept of stationarity. I'm not going to talk a lot about that, but I think the idea is to have a paradigm shift to non-stationarity. These are a couple of regional models. Next slide please. This is the only animation that I have. So there was this paper in 2008 that kind of raised a lot of interest in the concept of non-stationarity. So I think person that a lot of people have been working on this. What are these scenarios into the future that we should be using. Next slide please. So we have followed pretty much what is being done in California. You see on the left hand side, I won't go into a lot of detail on this. You see these yellow boxes. Sorry for the color blind, but the left most boxes. You know, first step is to look at the observed climate data and see how we're seeing any evidence of climate change already. That's the first step. And I think Carolina might be talking about trend analysis. And obviously, in the future condition, we start with the general circulation models and you all know that they're very close. Some of the models half of Florida is underwater, but we need to use some dynamically downscaled data set. But we look at those two periods. One is what we call a retrospective simulations for the past century and 21st century of the current century projection. And we look at the downscaled data set statistical and dynamical downscaled data set and we look at how well they represent in this teleconnections and also how can we use them for future planning. Next slide please. So we have been looking at two sheets of models at the global level. They call a system model database. One is a CMA five or climate model into comparison project version five or CMA five. And then we have started looking at CMA six sheets of data that I will be talking a little bit about both. Next slide please. For the downscaled data sets, we have looked at, you know, these are a lot of acronyms is that we've been using called LOCA, MACA, CODEX, and JupiterWolf. These are basically different versions of downscaled data set, you know, first to about six kilometer statistically downscaled data sets, the CODEX is a dynamically downscaled data set using regional climate models. And then JupiterWolf is something that was used here in the region, sort of an hybrid approach for looking at extremes, and also for long term averages. Next slide please. So this is the approach we use for scenarios you see on the left hand side the LOCA data set. The idea was, can we come up with scenarios for regional modeling into the future you see on the base condition on the left. The idea is that the historical data set is like, you know, variability, and the other ones are more smooth data sets, kind of look at the, if you take up the natural variability, are we seeing any trends. And the idea is looking at base and future, under future conditions, which is in this case 2052, somewhere around 2080. In the scenarios we should be looking at. We have about 27 models and large number of ensembles of this model. So the idea was that that was proposed was to come up with like five to 10 scenarios of climate model output that could be used for regional modeling because it's not practical to run all the models with the regional data that we're talking about. And so this is what what you see here is, there are more drier conditions in the future compared to the historical data so we picked like five scenarios that could be used on the future condition, and you see that in the same kind of pattern in the other data set called my car. Next slide please. Another interesting aspect we need to be thinking about is the seasonality change. And so you see that the solid blue lines are the 1950 to 1999. These are the retrospective simulations for the historical period. And then the box and visco plots are more for the future condition. So we wanted to look at is there a seasonality change in the, in the, in the rainfall patterns and what you see here is actually reduction in summer rainfall and increase in early dry season rainfall. This is very significant if it is a curate, right. So, because I think we are trying to plan for future condition. So this is something we have found. Next slide please. We, we also look at the new data set CMF six and you see the similar kind of pattern maybe not as much drying in the scenarios but seasonality change is very similar so it's kind of two models, data sets showing a similar type of patterns for both seasonality and long term rainfall. I think that's significant that needs to be looked into. Next slide please. So the other aspect we looked at is this teleconnection the idea is that the remote global phenomena like El Nino, La Nina and so and Atlantic multi decade oscillation has an impact on Florida rainfall you see this, this graphic showing the periods of rainfall and its variability. It's very well aligned with this AMO cycle. Now they don't like to use AMO anymore is called Atlantic multi decade oscillation because it's not a regular cycle these are multi decade cycles. So now they prefer to call it Atlantic multi decade variability. So the question is, what, what is the latest thinking on this used to be considered as a natural cycle. So we organize a panel of experts recently this year actually may to kind of get the recent research input on a more and I'll give you one slide showing what the outcome of that is next slide please. What they came up with was the AMO AMB has a fairly strong influence on the on from the external forcing, which means volcanic eruption aerosols, but more importantly greenhouse gases. So if this is true that future rainfall might also be influenced by this external forcing, not a natural cycle and. And when you look at the AME variability in it's supposed to be increasing beyond up to 2100 and this could be significant for that teleconnection to Florida rainfall and precipitation in the summertime is also projected to be increasing in this analysis. Next slide please. I'll get into the Florida flood hub part and that was on the averages and scenarios for rainfall. This one is more on the extreme rainfall I think Tom gave a nice outline of what Florida flood hub is doing. So we have a short term strategy basically based on statistical approach to look at climate model output to compute what is known as a change factor in other words, it's my hundred year rainfall how much is it going to increase like percentage increase. So this work was initiated with the help of us geological survey and and I think in this part. John Stam who is on the line may be able to provide some answers to some of the questions may you may have. So the short term part to produce the statewide change factors for extreme rainfall using the statistical approach is pretty complete now. And then only the report is pending, and this data has been relayed. The interestingly, you know we wanted to use a physics space approach to look at extreme, because I think the concern is that maybe that physics of what's happening in climate in Florida might be important for extreme rainfall particularly at sub daily scale, not only the thermodynamics part but also the storm dynamics might be changing if you hear about what happened in April 12 in Florida they'll you know, 25 inches of rain fall in, you know, within a short period of time. The idea is to use a long term climate modeling approach using a weather research forecasting model. A sequence of other models that I will explain real quick to look at the long term changes in extreme rainfall using physically blaze based climate models on a long term basis next slide please. And then I won't go into the detail of this change factors. This is the statistical approach that was used. This was published it's a nice report. This was published by USGS. And, but it only covers South Florida, but now the work has been completed by Michelle, sorry, and others at USGS, and the statewide data available and we are looking at that data to see, can we how can we, you know, assess that date and release Next slide please. Let me talk about the long term effort long term strategy is to tie some of these scenarios to temperature changes like I think Tom mentioned for sea level rise. We come up with scenarios for two degree three degree mean global warming, but use the relative to the historical scenarios in other words if you have a simulation for historical period, how would they change if you have a warming scenario with the two degree three degree. And so this is what they call pseudo global warming approach. And, but the timing of when that warming might happen might change from one greenhouse gas pathways to another. Next slide please. So, real quickly this is kind of showing when the two degree might occur by 2100 is one scenario in this particular case maybe SSP 4.5 And three degree might be another higher scenario. Instead of following a path where the ideas can be tied these scenarios to warming level. Next slide please. So I won't go into the detail but three levels of modeling we have a global scale model to coupling ocean and land by you know proposed to be done by University of Miami using their model 50 kilometers scale 10 kilometers scale on the ocean. Then we will use a regional atmosphere ocean model to kind of so many with the 10 kilometers scale within the regions. That will be done. That's proposed to be done by FSU. And then finally USGS will do the weather research and forecasting model worth one kilometer scale and hourly output and there's a lot of research to say that show that you really need a global scale modeling to get the dynamics of storms happening. Next slide please. So the idea is to, and these are very expensive run so we only will run 2011 to 2020 historical scenario and then sort of like, you know, using a delta approach to run some warming scenarios. And then we will run some weather simulations, and hopefully we'll have 50 years of simulated data at a very high resolution for the state of Florida. I think that maybe all what I have next slide please. Okay, I think I did okay on time right. Okay, good. So you may have a lot of questions but I don't know what are we having questions and answer later. Until after the panel is finished. The rest of Carolina speaks. Okay, so Carolina Moran is next coming to us virtually, and we're going to talk about software water management state trend analysis for predicting extreme weather conditions. Good morning everyone can you hear me well. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much for the invitation to be here. I think I'm going to tie in straight to some of the points already presented by both Tom and Abbey. Please go to the next slide. So yes, I'm here as the South Florida water management district and I think that slides helps us to compass to allies how we are approaching this question. So we do have a system, the Central and Southern Florida project that we manage. So it was built in the 50s to respond to those extreme events that occur. We had both significant trial and hurricanes and flood events that happened in the past. And it was understood that we needed a system to be able to manage water in this region. Next one please. So the system is starting to be built. And I would say in the same time the system was being built those unintended consequences were already being detected and already being reported. So the significant effort of really addressing some of those unintended consequences of the system started and we have significant efforts through the comprehensive evidence plan to really work on the side of the restoring ecological functions that were lost because of the way the system was built, and also ensuring that we have a way that we can preserve, maintain, conserve all those valuable ecological functions in the system. Next one please. And then we have just the other book that I'm showing here that have those significant projects and I know I don't need to talk about this with you all because you all be the experts, but I think it's important to make the point here of, yes we have a system that was built and that yes we have the significant efforts right now happening to be able to address those unintended consequences. Next one please. And the other statement that it's important to make here is when we think about the water management district, the functions that we do in terms of water management, and the role of like looking at resiliency. We have to recognize that ecosystem restoration supports the mitigation against the level rise and other impacts from a changing climate. We don't have a lot of publications on that topic yet you're making progress on BBC on the way that we look at that, but there is evidence it's very obvious that the work that is being done by by every great restoration is already providing significant resilience when we talk about what are the types of metrics resilience metrics that we want to look at in the region. We have already made some progress just with the projects that we have been implemented and all the efforts done here. I'm going to talk a little bit about those metrics next but anyway, just to reinforce that circles in general are aligned with adaptation strategies needed to put resilience in South Florida. Next one please. So, as we look at that as we look at the system that was built seven years ago as we look at all the significant progress that was made to serve to restore ecological functions. We also need to be looking at other changing conditions that we have in the region, including like population growth land development, and really the project itself that has been evolving so. Next one please. I think the important piece is just just to look at that like how much development occur. How many things have changed since the project was developed and continue to change as we look at those future evolving conditions from a primary perspective as well. Next one. So, I'm going to touch one piece of that which is one of the, the major issues that we have in the system right now in terms of how are the limitations for a system that was built to to train the communities. And that's happening today too, on those on the areas that those communities leave. So we do have coastal structures there the system is a gravity system. We do have coastal structures that operate by gravity. And the major issue we see now in the capacity to really operate and maintain what are levels in the region is that with the silver rice, and between four six inches already occurring in Florida. The capacity of the discharge of the system has reduced significantly. So, from the design conditions to today's, we already see significant reduction in discharge capacity, which limits our ability in general to operate the system for all the purposes not only for protection but also to maintain water levels during the dry season, and all the other aspects that we have there in terms of water management goals. Video here I don't know if it's going to play but just show what's happening one of our our coastal structures where we see tail water so the ocean side so high that is over topping so even the design conditions from the past did not even account for that change. So, even with free board and all the other considerations that are done when we design a structure like that, we are already reaching over top in, in one of the coastal structures and in the most vulnerable parts of the system which is in South Miami. And on the left here what you see is the number of days when we have tail water elevations higher than head water so the inland cannot really discharge when the tail water on the tide side is is higher. So we are here just taking an average of those total number of days that we have every year. Next one please. So you can see the water is playing and you can see that the, the water really over topping the gate and at this location this is ocean water is salt water coming inland really defeating the purpose of the gate to be there to control saline intrusion as well. Next one please. Next, based on that some of those observations and I think I'll be pointed really well the first step we need to do is to look at data, it's looking to look at trends, and we have this effort here that we call water in climate resilience metrics. So we, the district already actively monitors a variety of water climate and ecosystem data. We understand that those changing climate and evolving conditions have a significant impact on water management operations, and also in the infrastructure needs. And so we have implemented a set of initial metrics we have 15 now to really monitor and document trends and observe data so any shifts and trends in observe data. Next one please. And the call I also have the, the person who is leading the Zephanie Concorde test she's coordinating with technical leads inside the agency to collect the data to interpret and to report on that. So here basically is a, is a glance of those 15 metrics that we have, we have climate driven like the primary drivers of change here, rainfall ET and tidal elevations that poster structures. And we also have what we are calling resilience metrics, which are consequences of changes, like the cascading impacts from those initial drivers of change there. And we have somewhat intrusion we have groundwater levels, minimum flows and water levels, flooding events. And we have water quality for. But others there that we are looking at data, selling the at the for the bay and this team bay soil subsidence, and also history and island migration. So, we say that as we operate the system, and we have capacity to interfere in those resilience metrics. That's what we need to be kind of tracking as well so we will continue to monitor the climate rain for ET and tidal. And we also wanted to look closely at those additional resilience metrics where the decisions on water management will have implications. Next one please. Oh, since we started this work about three years ago. We have been publishing some of those results and technical analysis and the reports we have the initial report that really lines up the plan on how we want to do this analysis and explain the 15 ones that show the additional methods that we might want to approach in the future. And this is the image on the center and on the right we have to hear the, the famous software and environmental report we have a chapter there to be it's the third year we are publishing now that we go metric by metric and we explain assumptions and do a more scientifically analysis of how we have been reached to some of those initial trends what's the significance of those trends. What are the process and assumptions behind. Next one please. We also have a hub where we publish the data. So this hub is more like public. It's oriented towards public access and sharing this information mostly within the local governments. We understand that as a regional agency, looking at this data and looking at this analysis we provide valuable information that will be considered in planning processes in other processes. Also advanced by local governments in the region so we have designed this portal to be a way that all the partners in public in general can access and have readily available information on how we are looking at this trends and can access the data and can make this the the analysis reproduced the analysis and and really make their own interpretations on what the data is telling. Next one please. So, I will touch quickly on three four of those data sets, of course I'm not going to have time to go into too much detail. I'm not sure any other future question that we might have, but just to give you a glance of what we have now. So in terms of rainfall observe rainfall. Next one please. We have here three images so the analysis was done by region. In all the other metrics we have the data at the buy station real time data monitor and the station available data for rainfall. The technical leads here supporting this effort recommended that if we look at the station by station we still have too much noise in terms of how we look at observe data. And we decided to perform the analysis at a more regional scale so we can start seeing some of those trends, even at the regional level we're still seeing some noise. We still have some regions like when I show here them is Kalosahatchi region in the southeast Florida, where we have detected significant trends upward trends in the wet season rainfall so this is average wet season rainfall and we are detecting more in the west coast, but we also have for instance the Everglades agricultural area where we detected a lower like a decreasing trend in the wet season rainfall here. Next one please. The next metric that I'm touching is tidal elevations at the post structures next one. So here what we have is, in addition to know what data you might next one please. In addition to know what data as you know, we have significant network of amount of monitoring for tidal elevations in our coastal structures. So throughout the coast, maybe on the east coast but also we have some monitoring on the west coast and our BCB system. So we have data that goes back to the 19, early 1950s, the 60s sorry, and we have been monitoring those trends and of course as expected, along with the, the know all tidal stations we see the, we detected upward trends, significant upward trends in all those stations. And we do have now real time data in real time trend analysis being done in the system so we can kind of monitor this additional set of data here to look at a tidal elevations. Next one please. The next one is our intrusion. Next, next please. This metric, we look at both groundwater levels and chloride concentrations as they are related when we want to assess our intrusion. So what we have here is one of the locations. We also have to report some noise here in terms of areas where we see upward trends, areas where we see downward trends. And specifically for this example here that we are showing in Miami, we see for this chloride, we see an upward trend this is the red line in the red dots here in the chart. So in this specific location, the concentration, the concentration of chloride has already surpassed that 1000 milligrams per liter here for there, and we have you we see a study for significant trend. And what we see in this location in terms of groundwater, it's a downward trend. That's the blue line and the blue trend there that we are seeing on the chart. So for the same locations, the map on the left show where we have data for both the chloride and the groundwater levels. So we can look at those same charts here for all those locations along the coast significant amount of data there. And again, the trends are automated. We can go to our db hydro insights and already look at those plots for all those locations. The final one I'm going to touch today is soil subsidence in South Florida. So this is another metric that we are looking at we don't have all data in db hydro we don't have a fully automated analysis yet here of trends but we did look at data that has been collected in partnership with some universities in South Florida too. Next one. And what we have there is those are the most most of the locations that we have data it's in the other big national park for debate. And we see here some trends. I captured two of those examples in an area that is frequently flooded in a site that is frequently flooded. And what we can see here is a Christian Ray, the Christian Ray the innovation change in the expansion rate for this location and some trend being detected that in the same occurring in a permanently flooded site. This TSE team location, again pointing to the rates that we see the elevation rate and the accretion rate. I mentioned all those tools and especially on the hub is really being the design with the purpose of communication and engaging public and other local governments as well. So we the goal and for this effort and I have to applaud Nicole there is in the line here too for her big contribution in terms of really helping to translate those scientific information into a way that we can that can be easier to understand with real time data access and really more interactive features so we can have a greater understanding of what those initial trends are saying. Next please. And what we have here. I know I'll be also share share this slide. This report in his line. So moving from observations into projection so yes we look at all those trends and we also need to start thinking okay are we observing a trend. How are we going to be looking at that into the future what's happening into the future. And that's definitely not an extrapolation effort. It's a much more complex effort. So we need to be really looking at those climate models and all those additional approaches, so we can interpret how we build those scenarios and how we look at the future conditions. So in this case of rainfall we have a workshop that was organized with in partnership with FIU to really develop the strategies of short term strategies looking at the available downscaling data sets. So we have a short term strategy what I'll be just presented which is really developing a regional climate model for the state of Florida that can help us capture unique occurrences from a rainfall perspective that are particular to Florida. Next one please. I don't need to present too much details on that but I'll be already touching and I think it's great that we are now moving to a statewide projection but what we have here in the same portal is the data that was developed for South Florida. So we have here provided access again to users to public and local governments to the results that USGS and FIU produce for South Florida. We have an interactive portal as well as part of the whole metrics hub where we have the whole data, the access to all the USGS reports and all the information developed for this study. So you can go by each county and by each rainfall region and the user can get access to what is the projection there, what's the range of uncertainty and how to navigate on making assumptions. And just a point here that is important to make what we have now is really looking at extreme rainfall change factors for flood resiliency planning. So we are really focusing on the extreme wet. That was the initial part of the effort. We are now again in a partnership with the USGS and FIU to also look on the extreme dry side. The draw was not a metric that was initially selected for the hub because of the lack of comprehensive data sets that we could beginning to look at. But we are definitely and certainly looking at draw. We have this partnership now with the USGS and FIU. The work has been making some initial very interesting progress. And we are really trying to also capture those the extremes. I know I'll be show you when we look at those those scaling data sets, how we are looking at average and changing in average conditions in month to month. But also as part of looking at future projections, we need to be able to fully capture those extremes, the frequency, the intensity, the duration and the spatial distribution of extreme wet and extreme dry events because this is going to drive a lot of how we want to manage water in the future. Next one please. So we're going to go through and we can move quickly to those but this is just the portal from the USGS database that was produced for South Florida. Next one. We also have their next one please. We also have there the report that the district produced on how to adopt those scenarios. So USGS produced the overall range of how the different dynamic and statistics of those scaling data sets are showing future rainfall in South Florida. And here we produce our internal document on how we want to adopt that as part of planning efforts. So we are still on the planning arena, but we do have significant planning efforts. So we made a report on how we are adopting and interpreting those results and bringing that to future scenarios as part of the district planning efforts. Next one. We also have in that portal a glance here on what are those change factors for South Florida. What we see here is in average, I would say a 20% increase if you look at the median values for all those locations for both the 25 year one day duration and the 100 year two day duration. And of course he varies a little between those counties. Next one. Another way to see that is also plotting those those change factors. So just quickly to tell you what's a change factor the change factor is the multiplication factor that we are using that we are deriving from the climate models to really project from the events from the past from for each given return frequency 100 year three day 200 year one day. What is the multiplying factor that we want to use when we model future conditions like 50 years from now that that was the horizon that we use for this study. So here you can see also that of course it increases a little bit. Also the uncertainty range as we look to longer to more intense events here the 200 year. Next one please. We're also looking with both USGS and FIU is, for instance, I think that event from April 12 tells us a lot of stories, in terms of is this a new normal how we want to be able to capture those extremes. How we want to represent that when we look at trends and shifts in our system, and also the importance of looking at refined scales if you want to reproduce the rainfall right in Florida. Or be also touch this point, we need a one kilometer resolution to able to to really capture those localized process that are significant on the way that we should make decisions for water management next one please. Next one please. One of the next steps on this effort is really, we are advancing this partnership with the USGS FIU and in the South Florida water management district. I didn't touch but when I talk about drought that also belongs to a larger strategy that is our water supply vulnerability assessment. We're going to begin stepping into that as soon as we finish the lowest cold water supply plan. For the first time our groundwater models will be capturing sea level rise and we're going to be doing verbal density analysis to be able to look at future conditions of sea level rise and we're also going to bring the climate drivers in the in the start of the next, I would say me. I would say late spring 2024. So we're going to start bringing those climates in our as in sea level rise to a longer term water supply vulnerability assessment. We need to refine the analysis, I'll be touch on the sub daily data there is significant need for us to also look at trends on sub daily data, and also bringing CMI P6 data to to the analysis we have, we are heavily. I would say utilizing CMI P5 so far and we need to be able to see what else is being said using those more recent data sets. I touch on the water supply vulnerability assessment I don't know I'm going to try to running out of time so I'm not going to describe but we have a whole report it was attached to the resilience plan this year. If you want to just get an understanding of how this is going to be done this is the approach that we're going to be using to do the water supply vulnerability assessment. Next one please. I also, I didn't explain but as we built this data and as we look at those scenarios future scenarios. I mentioned right now the water supply vulnerability assessments we also have a programming place that is almost a decade now that is looking at the flood risks flood conditions and into the future that's our level of service program for protection level of service. So here is a glance on really what this program is looking at future conditions and assessing for the risks in Florida. We have looked at all those basins there on the lowest cost you can see orange and reds are the ones that are underperforming already today, if any else are already underperforming in terms of what we want to achieve in terms of flood protection level of service in those basins and for future conditions next one. There's a lot of reds. So 50 years from now we see a lot of those basins will be really underperforming and really put, like a five year rainfall event could be certainly causing significant flood risks to all those areas that we have in right there in red there sorry. Next one. We have a similar effort happening right now with the core it's the CNSF flood resiliency study. It's running in parallel to the level of service program. Of course this is a significant effort we're going to be looking at flood risks and partnering with the core there to be able to validate all those assumptions and vulnerabilities that we're identifying for that and plan for what are the adaptation strategies needed. Next one please. And all of that is being integrated in our resiliency planning. So we have the 2023 silver rising food resiliency draft plan here in this slide. It was published on May 24 we received 20 plus comments from different agencies we are finalizing the plan this year with addressing all those comments that were received. And what this plan does is based on all those scenarios looking at those future conditions. What are the infrastructure needs that we already have being that already were identified for South Florida, in terms of really managing the system to address all the needs that we have there so flood protection, water supply, ecosystem restoration ecosystem, ecological functions so we are looking at that and really highlighting key projects that we need to be able to advance to continue to to successful manage water in this region. Next one please. Two more only I believe. So those are just divisions. I want to skip that one in terms of saving times. Next one please. But all of that really belongs to our integrated efforts in the region to address those future conditions to bring those two scenarios and to start lining up what are the infrastructure investments needed to continue to perform. I have one project here to highlight on the plan. This is our Everglades mangrove migration assessment this is a project that is looking at teammate placement in some of the mangrove areas. We have a tentative site near the Florida Bay there, they're going to be testing upon funding confirmation, really to look at what's the capacity of soil acquisition. We want to approach the soil subsidence topic as one of our metrics, we want to be able to validate what kind of natural processes can be accelerated here to be able to give provide higher resiliency in the region to natural processes to really enhancing mangrove sites. Next one please. And the final message here is we're looking at all of those efforts we're looking at all the SERP efforts we're looking at the efforts done by the communities to protect themselves we're looking at efforts done by the water management districts to manage water in a way that will be continued to successful delivering those those needs of the communities into the future. And the big message here is that we need to be able to collaborate with everyone. There are multiple goals there are multiple strategies, you need to line up those those resiliency strategies so we can be successful in the region. Next one. And now with that I would say thank you. These are links just for you how to get involved in the resiliency program at South Florida, and get updates from home and subscribe and get updates. Thank you. Hey, thanks Carolina, we're going to postpone our scheduled q amp a and hold it combined with the last one of this session. And we'll move straight toward the Southeast Florida climate resiliency efforts. And this is with Jennifer, you're Ardo. Thank you. Last time around and appreciate the opportunity to share again. I'll admit, and if the presentation can come up please admit that while the presentation is titled Southeast Florida and a lot of our work is integrating with all the work of Southeast Florida most familiar with what we're doing in Broward County but it does have, you know, great regional relevance. Next slide please. And so I wanted to begin by acknowledging we have about a 20 year history of developing our climate initiative strongly informed by policy and planning documents at the county level as well as the Southeast Florida level and I refer to Southeast Florida. I'm referring to Palm Beach County Broward County Miami Dade and the Monroe and keys, and we've been working with the four counties for about 15 years on coordinated climate resilience strategies both mitigation and adaptation. And there's been a really robust foundation some of the tools that we're applying as it's evolved and been endorsed through the four county collaborative which is the Southeast Florida climate change compact. And I want to acknowledge that that technical work is strongly supported by federal agencies, as well as academic partners so a lot of the work that I'll reference today has been informed by input by Noah USGS department of the material I guess larger South Florida Water Management District University of Miami FIU and there are others and so because we have a history of working over the last 20 years. I would like to, I guess, articulate that much of the partnership like FIU's work and OB's work has helped to inform what we did here in Broward County. And a lot of that work was then scaled to the regional efforts and so you'll see a lot of overlap in terms of the data. Because I think we've been able to pilot regionally so much as what has been needed statewide and it's really great to see the refinements today. I also acknowledge that we also strongly believe that it's important to be able to have the flexibility to address regional needs within statewide frameworks and, and again, a lot of work already being done that is embedded into our standards embedded into our models and embedded into our planning. Next slide please. So, you've heard and seen reference to sea level rise projections, of course, this is the projection that we use in the four county planning area. We know this is our third iteration. We benchmark most of our planning to the NOAA Intermediate High. It accounts for other scenarios. Yes, we also include the NOAA Intermediate Low because of state planning requirements, but we plan for NOAA Intermediate High. We utilize data that came from not the most recent NOAA update where we know that NOAA had adjusted their projection downward. We've already adopted projections. We already have these the 40 inch sea level rise scenario embedded in our planning and models and it's really important when we're working at the local level that we're not changing projections every three to five years. The business community really needs to have the certainty about what they need to plan for and how they design and we need to have consistency and infrastructure across scales of development. So, we felt very comfortable staying with the 40 inches by 2070 also benchmark to 2000. And if we don't hit it in 2070 we know we'll hit it a couple years later and so that that's where we continue to work. Please. So this was again for counties. It's used across any entity that's doing work in our communities. I also want to acknowledge that we are not stagnant in the way that we approach planning for future conditions. We are constantly in a situation of iteration. As you know, science comes you consider the scientists peer reviewed provides recommendations and then we have to go through the lengthy process of county adoption and implementation and amendment of standards, the the local level. So it's it's constantly underway and a lot of the work I shared today was informed by projections at the time which were for 27 inches of sea level rise by 2060 now we're using 40 inches by 2070. So now we have planning tools also that are crossing that decade and the projections being used. So one of the questions asks us how are we using the information next slide please. This is all the areas of progress so we have embedded into our land use planning requirements and it's important to know we have is there's all kinds of ecological system considerations and and so forth. I'm really focusing on that the built environment today and I'll acknowledge that's the bulk of where our work is taking place I acknowledge the planning for water supplies I'm not going to really be addressing that here, just kind of narrowly focusing my conversation. So we have to address issues like design standards for infrastructure land use infrastructure siting level of service so our challenge has been, how do you take a sea level rise projection and begin to embedded in all the areas of practice and importance and local government so one of our first challenges was just straight bathtub application of the sea level rise scenarios, knowing that we would bring this into our more advanced hydrologic models, but we wanted to not use the, lose the opportunity to inform smart planning and areas that we knew to be at increased risk simply because of proximity and hydrologic connection to the coast and waterways influenced by sea level. So we now have a tool whereby if we have projects in our vulnerable areas as indicated in the pink and we updated the map for 3.3 foot sea level rise also again 40 inches. This is how we evaluate at a very high level risk and resilience requirements for infrastructure so what does that mean next slide please. One of the first and early efforts was focused on drainage and water management requirements this work was very much undertaken and continues to be advanced in partnership with the USGS. We modeled the change in the groundwater table with sea level rise red areas of the model map on the left show the one to one connection, graphic and the middle shows a cut cross section west to East and Broward County can see the shift in the historic groundwater table in dash blue to future conditions groundwater table in solid blue and land surface elevation in brown and so we have the amount of storage that's being lost in our system in the groundwater soils with rise in sea level so we needed to account for that. As part of seasonal trends as what's happening with time what's happening in different geographic locations in the county. We adopted an updated map that now requires all drainage and surface water systems to be designed in accounting for 2.5 feet of sea level rise. This was an earlier adopted map. Next slide please. And we're in the process of continuing to undertake that work as we can see there's no slowing in the in the rate of which rise is being realized in the groundwater table. It's most prominent in the central and southern portions of Broward County this is from a well and in Hollywood next slide please. And because that signal is strongest in the eastern portions of the county, we're currently undertaking an update for the eastern portion of the county that now aligns with the three point, the 3.3 foot sea level rise scenario, and we're bringing those maps together so we're in the process of stakeholder engagement and we expect adoption of the updated map again for the 3.3 foot sea level rise scenario 40 inches with implementation by the end of the calendar year next slide please. And we could just move on. Thank you. Old map, new map. So the next area of work really related to the increase in flood elevations and really needing to be able to integrate through our advanced hydrologic modeling the relationship between the primary canals managed by the South Florida Water Management District of course constructed by the core that are part of the entire Everglades back from water delivery system. How those interact with our secondary canals, which we have about 1800 miles of canals in Broward County that are managed by several dozen water management entities. How that relates to all the drainage and water management infrastructure in Broward County, and how that cascades to flood elevations that impact our structures and our ability to navigate in our communities looking at different design storm events, but here the focus really being on the 100 year three day event. This was significant work because it was the first time where we took our advanced hydrologic model that has been used by Broward County Water Management District FEMA. All these entities having historically used our integrated model, but now we integrated the effects in this case of two feet of sea level rise, extreme high tides, super saturation of the ground water table with sea level rise and a 13% intensification of rainfall for the 100 year event. And we went through an exercise whereby we arrived at the 13%, which was an initial approach and applied regionally but I'll talk about in a moment. And we developed a countywide updated future conditions flood elevation map with more than 350 different flood zones or elevations and those zones throughout the county and today, any project that's being advanced has to conform with the highest to flood elevations that we have developed in our county. And that includes application of the FEMA map, including the coastal a zone includes our future conditions mapping, includes site specific modeling or 18 inches above Crown of road, but we do have this model map and the rainfall intensification that's been integrated into this map adopted sense and applied since 2020. We're now in the process of updating this map, because subsequently we have an adjustment to the sea level rise projection and we want to be able to incorporate the 40 inches of sea level rise. We also were unable to account for the influence of storm surge in this modeling and the constraints on the primary canals and the discharge abilities, what happens with water levels in the canals and how that relates again to all the infrastructure back into the inland portions of the community. But when FEMA was doing their work and coastal a zone was just not being modeled at that time, the data was not yet available. So we knew that we were moving forward with a map that would soon need to be updated based upon these forthcoming conditions. Next slide please, or or data. I just wanted to share that we did go through an exercise whereby we arrived at that 13% change factor for the three day 100 year event involving many of the same entities that have already spoken today and that have referenced, you know, various data sets and statistical and dynamic ground scaling, noting that we had to be able to move forward with rainfall intensification we knew that it was taking place. Again, we adopted a map in 2020 but the project was a three year project going even before that so a lot of work already embedded in what we've been doing in Broward County. But as we got ready to undertake this map update, we also knew that there had been additional work that had taken place and that additional data sets I think it's called MACA was the most recent one that got brought in. That wasn't part of the data here and we knew that the district and FIU and USGS were coming up with, unfortunately rainfall intensification even greater than the 13% that we had incorporated at this time. So next slide please. So it would, I'm not sure which is the next slide. We jumped through several just now. Are we sure we're on the right slide. I just want to make sure I don't. Is this the right slide that moved after the flood map image. I'm not sure who I'm speaking to. Stephanie is okay so okay so this is okay so we're on the right slide thank you I apologize it just moved around a bit. So I wanted to acknowledge that we went through and exercise our team and evaluating the various design storms that last modeling accounted for the three day 100 year but we knew that there were other design storms best, especially because we look at issues of you know roadways level of service we wanted to be able to address not just finished floor elevations for flooding. So we looked at our data we also looked at the updated data that came from the USGS south Florida water management work and then we looked at all the data that had come from FIU and we, we knew that there were some ranges but based upon this whole of change factors that was evaluated across these different analyses we then settled on 20% as the adjustment that would be brought in as an updated change factor for the next work so we moved from 13 to 20 and we're applying that to all the design storms, both shorter duration but like the one day or you know several hours to the that the three day it seemed to be relatively consistent next slide please. Okay, and so now we're in the process with our current modeling effort of undertaking combined scenarios for all of these conditions, all these title conditions sea level rise scenarios both two foot three foot king tide storm surge variable and saturated groundwater water table. Rainfall scenarios for the various design conditions. And so there's, I don't know more, more than 36 or three dozen different combined scenarios that are evolving from this for the purpose of then working to select scenario that can support the whole of adaptation planning, not just for new and redesigned infrastructure, but for the community that already exists in Broward County and isn't going to be redeveloped immediately next slide please. And so where we are right now as we've completed the no action analysis. These are examples of the viewer that we're utilizing to assess or compare those scenarios and also truth these scenarios with some of the more significant recent events that have been experienced. So just as a matter of orientation, the map on the right would represent basically what we have in place right now with our two foot sea level rise scenario flood map. The map on the bottom left incorporates the three, everything else being essentially the same but three foot sea level rise plus the 20% rainfall intensification, and the map on the right, right. The bottom right is worse of worse, and it includes 100 year storm surge on top of everything else and so this isn't necessarily the condition that we plan for but it's one that we use to reveal for ourselves, what those conditions look like. Yes, it was just coincidental that we unveiled this map, precisely at the time that we were in a conference room that looked like this, and we experienced the April 12 rainfall event with the 26 inches and while we didn't model the two thousand year storm which that ended up being the flood elevations aligned very, very closely, five feet of sea level rise at the airport or excuse me flood elevation at the airport, and two to three feet of flood elevation and many of the communities that did see those water levels so it did really reinforce those conditions can exist and we were also able to look at how did that relate to some of our primary canal considerations next slide please. And I'm going to get to that in a moment, but one thing I did want to articulate is that one of the tools that's been very helpful, I think is the USGSF IU water management district work to aid local governments with those change factors. We kind of played with the tool and we assisted some of our cities through the compact this was a compact exercise and undertaking vulnerability assessments and so for those communities that don't have those massive robust models. Can they assign a change factor to their planning because we all need to be able to move forward with infrastructure planning. We tested that tool the exercise compared it to our hydrologic model results and they aligned very, very well so our quick tools that can support local governments in these exercises next slide please. So I'm not going to go through the details of our resilience planning effort but noting that the intent is to address virtually every scale of infrastructure planning that we have control of within Broward County with support and engagement and implementation by our municipalities we don't own all that, but we have to have compatibility of these planning scenarios with what happens with the regional system and that's basically what we said last time when we were here. And it's been the point that we've been advocating to the core and the district for the last 10 years, the district's known the exposures and limitations of the primary canal network. And we know that this system needs to be reevaluated for the future conditions and upgraded to be compatible with everything else that's already taking place throughout the region and beyond that slide please. And so we saw with these extreme storm events you know high concentration of rainfall next slide please the limitations of the primary canal system to be able to move water during these rainfall events. I won't go through the details but the high tide signal is reducing the flows and the canals the water levels are continuing to build. And that cascades because a lot of the communities in our region have gravity systems that have to be able to drain downhill into the primary canals and when the canals are not moving water is not moving anywhere else in our systems next slide please. The same thing played out with the April 12th rainfall event next slide please, even though this was principally coastal if we look at the C 12 canal we saw a five foot rise and the elevations in that canal we've never seen that I think the right increase before been three to four feet exceeded anything observed previously. We have advocated and advocated for intensification of rainfall as part of the 216 or resilient study that that Tim's going to be talking about. I know at one point in time that was still being debated I think that that's now going to happen rainfall intensification. We just know that it has to be part of the way that we plan and we have to have that capacity in our systems next slide please. And so my final slide is just this acknowledging the real critical importance of what happens with that regional system we all rely upon it. We're planning moving forward very quickly at the local level we need to see these updates we need to see consistency in the way that we're viewing future conditions and be able to account for the influence of sea level rise rainfall intensification the increase in storage that's needed in the system and the primary canals are part of that ability to move water and maintaining the discharge capacities that Carolina reference so we view this as an immensely critical study and hope that we see that those kind of scenarios carried to the broader regional work that you're all interested in as well. And that concludes my presentation thank you. Thanks Jennifer. Next we'll hear from Jason angle and Tim gison of the core on South Florida regional resiliency studies. Good morning. So, that's a couple of pretty amazing speakers to follow the density of information in my slide deck will be lower than. Yeah, so a little context for the South Atlantic coastal study. And then Tim is going to come in and talk about the CNSF resiliency study so the comprehensive study for Southeast or Florida or Southeast near United States started after the hurricanes of 2017 so Harvey, Irma and Maria came through and did damage all across the Southeast. And it was inland and coastal, and it resulted in authorization to conduct this study starting in 2018 took place over four years, and it concentrated on coastal storm risk. It looked at it in terms of economic social and environmental vulnerability. And there is an immense amount of information all easily discovered online. You can do a simple Google search for South Atlantic coastal study it's all out there, including a web viewer that's a pretty interesting way to look at the data and break it down and visualize it in different ways so if you're interested it's definitely worth a visit. Obviously the areas from North Carolina to Mississippi as shown here. It was a collaborative effort with stakeholders. The audience for this is a little bit different than a typical core study. So typical core feasibility study the target audience, although it involves the public and stakeholders along the way the target audience as we want them to authorize project target audience for this were decision makers at all levels, elected officials, municipalities, states. Other agencies right wanted to provide a common context for coastal risk now and in the future with climate change. So this study of this type had been done in the northeast after Hurricane Sandy came through in 2012, and that proved the value of it to set a common context regionally across several states to say what where are the most urgent areas where coastal risk has to be addressed, and where the core and other agencies could focus or collaborate. So it gets into the role of the core authority, and also the role of state and local governments to address issues and and as you heard from both Dr. Moran and Dr. Harado. There is, there are efforts taking place at all levels to address coastal resilience and this study definitely highlights the need for that to occur at all levels. Next slide. And so it does align with I just wanted to show this is another, another document that this board might be interested in this committee might be interested in reviewing this R&D strategy for the Army Board of Engineers, and the committee also study aligns with those highlighted items there to mitigate adapt for climate change, support resilient communities, and ensure environmental sustainable and sustainability and resilience. So the study took significant time to look at the environmental vulnerability of systems in the southeast to climate change and storms. Next slide. So the goals of the study are on the left. And you can see a common operating picture. This was this is what I was talking about. We wanted to provide decision makers at the federal level, state and local level with a common operating picture of coastal risk now and in the future. Identify the high risk locations. Identify risk reduction actions at all levels. Promote and support resilient coastal communities. So the data was intended to help jumpstart resilience efforts where maybe there hasn't been much momentum, right? Certainly in southeast Florida there's a huge amount of momentum on resilience, right? But in some places it's fairly getting off the ground. And that's what this study was intended to do is to provide a stepping stone or a first step for communities that might not have as much momentum. There are sustainable projects and programs. So in order to evaluate coastal projects, we need a comprehensive storm database, right? It's the foundational element of any coastal storm risk management study is what are the storms and what are the climate scenarios. This provides a state of the art and I'll talk about that a little bit later a state of the art database on those storms that's publicly available. And really, it's a game changer for the way that we do our coastal studies. We basically leverage ongoing actions. So we have this, what's called the geo portal, which is the, the site that I recommend you poking around and looking at the data. Providing that the key data and products and incorporating the findings and ongoing efforts. So there are studies that are going that are coming out of this, or that were recommended, even during the study. Miami-Dade back bay, coastal storm risk management study. It's going on right now. We already knew that there was high risk in this back bay area. So that study was started during, during four years. This was going on, but there were now beginning study and keep this game to look at the same thing. And St. Augustine. So these are all areas that were highlighted in this study that are moving on for full feasibility. Next slide. So we just, the point here is that, that we leverage data really from all available sources. There's quite a bit of effort put into looking at the available data and, and incorporating it into the analysis. Next slide. And so, applying the tools and the steps that you see there that the one through nine. If you think about one through five is how far we took this study, right? When we go to a full level of feasibility, we're going to go all the way to step nine. Where you're, you're developing and implementing a plan you actually constructed an eight and then you monitor and adapt and step nine. So the feasibility studies are going to take that foundational information that we developed in step one through five with this and build on it to complete those final steps. On the right is a graphic. That's from that. That's GIS viewer of the data and Southeast Florida or Florida in general had nine of the top 10. Most vulnerable locations in all of Southeast and that should be a surprise to no one in this room. Like I said, several of those feasibility studies have already started. Next slide. And so the coastal hazard system, this is the storm database that I spoke about. I'm going to have two slides on something that took millions of dollars and years. And as, like I said, a game changer was something that I had personally wanted to see us have after seeing this developed for the northeastern part of the United States. We've been asking for it. And unfortunately, sometimes the opportunity comes after storm events. And that's what happened here. So we now have the storm database available as said publicly. Very robust in it. And, and boiling down what it does is it provides a set of plausible per king storm events and extra tropical storm events, both with existing water levels and with future sea level change. And where that's really important is in bay and estuary areas where there's a nonlinear response to sea level change, where storms are just going to be get greater, not in a linear fashion but in a nonlinear fashion with sea level change in bays and estuaries. And that's really important to know. And so that information being baked into this is very helpful when we look at our back base studies. Next slide. And so this is just the coastal hazard system. And, and, you know, how it was really developed. There's a storm suite development and hazard quantification it goes through this data storage and distribution process and data application. What's interesting is that last acronym there were the core so we're very good at acronyms. HRPS or troops is actually something that they're working on now, which would allow us to use the database and when you have a storm coming up through the Caribbean be able to take a look and say, which one of the storms in our database are going to are statistically most likely to represent this storm when it comes through or which set. And so you can provide quite a bit of information without actually making new model runs. So it's a way of operationalizing the database. And, and that's, as I said, it's not quite online but it's coming and it will be a pretty significant upgrade in terms of how we can, you know, forecast storm surge operationally during events or previous events. Next slide. Okay, and this is where I'm going to turn it over to Tim Geissen, who's virtual. Hey, good afternoon, everybody. My sound coming through all right. Very well. Okay, great. All right, so Jason said my name is Tim Geissen and I'm the resilient senior project manager, working out of the ecosystems branch in the Jacksonville district. So this is the first time I'm addressing sister upon something other than Lake Okeechobee so kind of excited. So next slide please. All right, so I want to first try to kind of tie together everything that you've heard so far when we talked about resilience. I think this is really important slide and everybody's kind of touched on. The fact that it's a multi level effort. There's no one entity that can tackle resilience, whether it be the science or the solutions at one level, it requires a collaboration of all levels of government. We've heard what what both what things are going on at the county level from Dr. Harado at the state level from Dr. Ren and there's a lot going on at the federal level as well. So how all of these things kind of work together requires us to be very collaborative and communicative to make sure we're all going in the same direction. You can fill the holes under each of our authorities. So it's really, really important this collaborative effort. And we're all working towards the same goal, which is a great thing to be doing when we talk about resilience and that's to build a sustainable community resilience. And when I say community resilience, that means all systems, both natural and man made that are able to overcome events and adapt to changes over time. And that's what we all want to achieve is that that community resilience across the region in South Florida. Next, our water resource infrastructure is that connector between all of these different systems, whether they be a natural ecosystem, a flood risk management system or transportation systems, which include roads, airports, ports. All of that works together to to build a resilient community, which can then thrive both economically and for the people in Florida and Fonda that live in those communities to live a happy healthy and productive life, which I think is what we're all trying to do. Next slide please. So I want to talk about a little bit of a different kind of way of thinking, especially from the core side of things. We're very stovepipe oriented. We have business lines and ecosystem restoration, flood risk management, navigation, coastal storm risk and we're very used to thinking about things just in those categories. But what we're kind of doing now through what we're calling project integration is really thinking about how all of the projects function together to create multiple lines of defense and that's defense against changes. That's defense against events to make sure that those systems are adaptable to change and resilient throughout time. Excuse me. So what this graphic shows is kind of a cross section from the coast to the inland areas. Excuse me. So it just kind of shows linear linearly how these projects really fit together and where they come into play. So we have multiple authorizations for coastal storm risk management which Jason talked a little bit about. So that's beaches and back base. And those things are kind of the first line of defense against coastal storms. And then you move and transition into that overlap area in inland areas where we typically talk about flood risk management. And then finally moving into the further inland areas where we talk restoration, particularly CERP, which I like to call the comprehensive Everglades resiliency plan, because it's a huge part of the resilience effort in South Florida. And between the dashed lines that you see here is really a transition zone where we have effects from inland flooding and coastal flooding. So that becomes a really important part of the evaluation of projects in these areas, whether they are coastal or flood risk management. So in order to try to think about these projects, how they work together, we in Jacksonville are thinking about things in a little bit of a different way. And that's through project integration. As I said, our projects, our authorities, our funding, our technical guidance, our tools that we use typically fall in a stovepipe under one of our business lines. But the challenge is because of all these things all work together, how can we really integrate them throughout their life cycle? So what we started doing over the last year is really looking at integration of all of these projects, whether they're in planning, construction or operations, to really understand how they fit together. How can we talk about them working together? So that comes through two main areas of integration themes. And that's communication and technical integration. So communication is really between the teams, between our projects and our vertical reviewers through South Atlantic Division and headquarters. And it's communication externally with our stakeholders, with our sponsors, with the general public. So that we can all really be understanding how our projects function in the greater schemes in that pyramid to make sure that we're all moving in the same direction, to make sure that we are sharing data across projects. And to make sure that a solution in one project isn't negatively impacting potential solutions in other projects. But also to understand how the benefits that we can see from all of these projects working together are really having a positive impact on the region in building that community resilience. So that second part is the technical integration, and that comes from, again, the project team sharing data, utilizing data that other governmental agencies are developing, which we've heard a lot about, and employing that information into our projects in a consistent manner. And then also, as we're working through studies, making sure that the way we're looking at benefits, the way we're calculating benefit ratios, the way we're looking at comprehensive benefits is consistent, so that we're all talking with one voice when we go to get authorization on projects. And this is a new concept in a way that we're, at least for now, with our multiple authorities trying to make sure that we are integrating all of our efforts. Next slide, please. And this is just a different way spatially to look at all of the projects we've got going on. Just in Dade County alone, we have six major federal actions ongoing right now. There are actually four planning studies and several construction efforts. So really making sure that we are coordinating between projects is more important now than ever before. Next slide, please. All right, so just, I'm sure everybody's fairly familiar with the Central and Southern Florida project. It's a huge multi-purpose project authorized by Congress that really is the water resource backbone of South Florida. And everything, most of the things that the Corps does are related to CNSF in some, some respect. SERP itself is a modification of CNSF, the operations that we have ongoing are part of CNSF. And then these tie into our coastal projects, even though they're outside of CNSF. It's really important that this, this is the backbone, but it was designed as Carolina mentioned 70 years ago. And there has been a lot of change since that time, which we now must try to account for, which takes us to the first project I want to talk about and that's our CNSF flood resiliency study. So next slide, please. And then just a quick overview of what this study looks is looking at. And I think both Dr. Herato and Dr. Moran touched on the needs in the coastal structures, the salinity control structures, which are the outlets to the CNSF system, and the impacts that climate has had on those already. So this resiliency study is going to look at those structures in particular, those high risk structures along the coast to try to improve the conveyance capacity of those structures so that they can handle increased runoff, increased sea level rise on the tailwater side of those structures to make sure they can continue to provide their authorized purpose. In conjunction with looking at the structure capacity, we'll also look at the canal conveyance capacity of those primary CNSF canals that bring water from the inland areas to those structures. Now, one part of the overall initiative that we're no longer able to tackle under this particular authority is the volume of water, the changes in urbanization, the loss of storage over time that we've seen. More water is getting into the system and less storage is available to hold it back and keep it for the beneficial purposes that are needed across the system. So that volume problem will be tackled under future efforts. So this one will focus strictly on the conveyance capacity of the canals and structures along the coast. Our projected finish is in 2026 in time to get into a potential word of bill of that year. So we're trying to move through this quickly because we understand the urgency of these solutions. Next slide, please. And this will be my last one. And this is a new authority that we just received in the last word of bill for a comprehensive central and southern Florida study. And this one is pretty exciting because it's different than past studies. It's because it has multiple authorities, we can look at storm and flood risk management, water supply, ecosystem restoration, and other related purposes, including recreation navigation and others. So planning for those all in one study effort, which is a different way to do things. The integration effort is what we're doing now, but hopefully this type of study is the way we move into the future to really look at these water resource issues. So this will cover the entire CNSF area, which is the entirety of the South Florida Water Management District, plus a portion of the St. John's River Water Management District. So we will likely be working with both of those agencies on this effort. And it really will focus on that strategic community resilience item, as well as long term and short term planning. So tackling things that are urgent but also looking in the long term to create that resilient community. We'll really look at comprehensive benefits, which is a newer thing for the Corps as well. And we'll likely kick this off in fiscal year 2025. So we're still working through the initial discussions and looking at when we would be able to get funding and line up all of our scope and our sponsors and all that good stuff. So this is an exciting thing to keep an eye on. It would not have any negative impact on the ongoing work that we have, whether it be SERP or other projects, it will build upon all of the great stuff that's already going on. So with that, I'll go ahead and close out. Appreciate that the invitation to speak today. Hey, thanks, Tim. We'll move to our panel discussion and we'll devote about 15 to 20 minutes for that. So if I could have all the panelists to the front. If you avoid the two middle chairs, you'll avoid getting the light shined in your eyes. Our virtual presenters can turn their cameras on. We'll spotlight you during the room. Questions. Go ahead, Wendy. I suspect that Dr. Moran will talk a little bit more about it, but what I would say as a lead in for her would be that we're very much engaged with the water management districts efforts that she outlined. Right. So we have our own scientists and experts that are part of that. We're very much looking forward to having those scenarios. I think as Dr. Herata mentioned, there's a desire to incorporate those into the 216. There is, we certainly want to incorporate those into the comprehensive study that Tim talked about in his last slide. So those are brought to bear in those as we obtain really actionable precipitation change scenarios. We can bring those into our operational studies like the set operational study that's going to replace cop. You know, when we, when we have those scenarios, they can be brought in. So I would say that we're integrated and we can act on those. We have our own climate community of practice. We take the new science that's developed and passed it by them and get acceptance at the core level for that. And that in the past and we'll continue to do it. I would also just add that as we evaluate Army Corps of Engineers projects. Well, we have guidance that says we shall evaluate the project for the three C level change scenarios that the Army Corps has in our guidance where we often incorporate the other scenarios. So we're not, you know, we're not we're able to incorporate other work like Dr. Herata presented. So when you say scenarios, are these the scenarios that Obi is talking about, or the scenarios that Jennifer's talking about? Ultimately, the ones that we are concentrating on are the ones that the Water Management District is developing, because that's our partner in service, right, and in operating the CNSF system. But I know that they are engaged, so I'll let Obi take it. Yeah, actually scenarios work that I reported is sponsored by Water Management District. So I'm hoping they would look at our recommendations and, you know, they will use or develop the scenarios further for the region of modeling as a standard practice. I was thinking, for example, decision scaling or stress test like what Casey Brown typically promotes. I think there's an opportunity to use these scenarios to look at future alternatives, not just using historical hydrology like what it's been done right now for future conditions and use some sort of a risk based framing. I am happy to end here. After you Dr. Fraser. I'll just say, you know, and Carolina, thank you. I mean, from the floodhubs perspective, right, we're trying to coordinate with all of these folks, right, we've certainly spent a lot of time with the district of these group, the USGS. I mean, we're fairly agnostic with what we're trying to do with regard to who receives the data. We just want to be able to provide the best of data available and if the Water Management District in the partnership with the core, or any other entity wants to use it. Right. Then they should write again the goal from our perspective is is recognizing that everybody, whether they're in South Florida or not, has a need to better understand how rainfall patterns are going to change. Right. What is the likelihood of a, you know, some type of a frequency event or something like that. And so, knowing that identifying all the partners, right. And just making sure we're what we're trying to do is get people to recognize that we're all working in the space. Right. Yeah, and what I was going to add is three basic things one is, as you can see, all of us are speaking about the same players. We have been coordinating in the region since the work is started, I would, I would really recommend Broward County was the first one who really apply those future scenarios when we talk about rainfall. And of course, the liberal arts has been incorporated in many efforts, but we're all talking. It's this basically the same players, and we are exchanging information so we can find as much consistency as possible and this is great news like we are revisiting all those same data sets and the very same approaches so we can find more and more consistency. And all of us are speaking the same language making the same assumptions and evolving in the process together. This is a very, I would say we are still navigating with a lot of uncertainty and the more we talk and the more we discuss and the more robust science we incorporate to that, the easier will be for us to fully incorporate those scenarios. So the second thing I was going to say is really the science we need to be able to bring really robust science to be able to back up assumptions to help us on validating those scenarios. I think working with the USGS, FIU and other universities we are now bringing to the statewide effort, FSU, UM, other universities that are represented through this stakeholder panel like the scientific panels that are put together to those work groups at the state level. So I feel we are doing this part of science we are doing this part of collaborating between us and finally, the third point is we are being fully transparent, like all the data that we are creating all the assumptions all the calls that we are writing are fully available for everybody to review to provide input to help us make the right assumptions here and validate how we can really get to those scenarios. We have everything that we have done so far available in the website of the district we are creating those tools that we can provide real time access to the data as much as possible. And the main goal of that is also to get feedback to get the information that we need, the feedback that we need the considerations that we need, assumptions that we need to be accounting as we evolve on those processes. So we are trying to build in a way that as we navigate in this uncertainty, we make the step that are right to make that we are all understanding. Yes, that's the right step to do now at this point, we are feeling comfortable to move in this direction, as we build those scenarios, and not just feel overwhelmed and don't take any action or even don't do any any scenario because we are feeling that we don't have enough data, we need to learn how to navigate on this uncertainty, but also having the opportunity to review how we can make the best assumptions at this point, and how we can all collaborate in building those scenarios without ignoring what is happening there and what the data is beginning to show us. Hey Helen and then Margaret. Sorry Jennifer. No, I raised my hand late in the process so I think appreciate jumping the line. I just want to acknowledge that I would agree. I think that there is a great deal of collaboration information sharing an intent to align scenarios and just as we adjusted our work. Based upon updates, I would, I would think it useful to ensure that we don't allow or you all would be very watchful to make sure like rainfall intensification isn't left out because someone said it was too expensive or uncertain to include. When decisions are made that overlook or exclude key opportunities that are represented everywhere else, you know, that would be a concern. Having scenarios that would be, I think, artificially driven to a low scenario like NOAA Intermediate Low. Good to have for planning, but if somebody benchmarked a long term project on that scenario, I think it'd be a huge misstep. Everything else is being aligned, you know, to higher scenarios and we still have entities that will reference NOAA Intermediate Low as the basis for key infrastructure planning, which we all have dependencies. So I think it's a watchfulness to make sure that you don't see outlier scenarios being the ones that move forward where everything else is aligning to something that's more capturing of a larger envelope of likely scenarios rather than the conservative ones. Thank you everyone for a really great set of talks. I found it really interesting and horrifying at how much work you all have in front of you. And this might not be the right panel to address this question to, but I'm wondering if you know the extent to which or if scenarios and these projections of rainfall, sea level rise and extreme events have been incorporated into ecological models and into consideration about some of these ecological indicators of ecological restoration. For the future. I'm not sure that was a complete sentence, but maybe you get what I mean. If I can chime in. I think the LTER group is looking at future climate scenarios for their work and I think and John Kamlisky is here. I could probably respond but they are already looking at some of the future climate change scenarios in their work. That's the only thing I could add. For a subfloor that we have. So we incorporated three metrics so far in the way we look at the observed trends and shifts. I mentioned the salinity in the Bay, I mentioned the Peter accumulation soil subsidence and I mentioned the migration of main growth and other important communities that we need to be able to track in terms of ecological response. So we are tracking those. We did one assessment of the migration of those communities in the base. We did, we have a paper that we published along with the SERP team that is looking at climate change scenarios and how does that mean in terms of transitioning of those communities vegetation communities there and assuming different rates of soil equation there too. I think we're beginning to look but for me the best example to on South Florida how we are looking at that is BBC here. I don't know, Jason if you want to talk about it but this is definitely the first planning effort that we're doing that we're accounting for silver wise that we're bringing those scenarios and are looking at some of those ecological responses and even building those scenarios in a different way because of the way we want to be looking at that. There are very interesting metrics that are being brought to that. I don't know if you want to talk a little bit more Jason on that. That's a good example and the one that I was going to bring up is so that. So that this came day in southeastern Everglades SERP project is incorporating sea level change into the regional hydrology. This is a first right so the previous projects many of them were further inland, perhaps less affected, arguably, but certainly this one needed to incorporate it so we're bringing sea level change into that. So the performance metrics and I'm going to be out of my lane here a little bit as the engineer, the performance metrics on that BBC were likewise adapted to be able to pick up on the changes in the hydrology through time. And so, perhaps as a follow up we could give you more information on that but we are making strides in that direction, I would say that was the first step forward was to get sea level change incorporated right now we're talking about hydrologic scenarios. When those are ready to be actionable, you know, and and incorporated and we seem to be there. And so I think the next studies are the ones that are going to bring both. John has to rent the hand raised. Yeah, John, would you like to speak. Yeah, can you hear. Here we are. So this is something just as an aside, is that part of this work that we're doing with the flood hub and with South Florida and Carolina is that as we're looking at evapotranspiration responses in terms of the hydrology of hydrologic modeling and so on. And what seems to be a big and important part of that is the metal resistance. So, just to bring this up is that that is something that we're trying to incorporate is that you know temperature change can affect evapotranspiration but when you get more CO2 the stomatic close, and you don't get as much water loss. So just to bring that in is it's kind of an ecological thing but that is being considered an important part of the water budget. Margaret. Thank you for those presentations my question actually goes back to the coordination question that was brought up before. So you all, as you said, work together and collaborate. Has there been some effort at coordinating who develops and hosts what kind of format has there been some effort at standardization. We have formats and forms and so on so that, for example, modelers are not having to struggle with how they've been to format the data or how do they use data from whom and so on and so forth, just making it easier for those who are doing the modeling to use those data. And then related to that also what's the timeline and process for providing updates on those data. Let's just speak from the floodhubs perspective again I think we recognize that there's a great deal of kind of variability out there and how people approach different projects right and we recognize that, you know, one of our kind of most important stakeholders are the water management districts including South Florida but we've got Southwest Water Management District we've got St. Johns, Swanee and Northwest right and they all have different ways of kind of carrying out their business how they do their modeling. And so what we're looking for is to coordinate and work with those groups so we can understand kind of what the common needs are and to the extent possible, try to provide tools with some standardization. We can't standardize everything I think we recognize that but to the extent possible. I think we're trying to make some of those tools interoperable moving forward so so that's I guess my answer I think probably wants to chime in as well. Yeah I think flood hub would be, you know, great entity for sharing data, archiving data and, you know, those that are being worked on by the flood hub efforts. But in terms of modeling coordination, you know, perhaps, maybe you're aware that there is something called an interagency modeling center at the water management district. There's a collaboration between the Water Management District Army Corps and I think BOI. So that's where the standardization of the modeling the same version of the models are being used and the data sets are basically standardized. I think at the regional scale that level of work is being coordinated even at the sub regional scale USGS is involved in many of the modeling efforts so there is some good coordination among the modeling for various applications but I think flood hub would be a good place to also standardize not only data maybe also models when we get into the modeling. Can I add something here. Just quickly. On the district side, we have a portal. So for the data side we already show you all the data and how we are bringing the information with the same goal that you highlighted here and sorry I couldn't pick your name Mike. Mike here is not so good so I apologize for not addressing the name of the person who asked the question. From the data side we have the portal and we are hoping we can achieve consistency on the way that we all look at the data and apply them to good scenarios. From the modeling side, the district also has a repository of modeling tools and results and input data that's called SMMS itself or the modeling system. I'm missing a word there. Basically every model that we develop is made available there, and we can and any user can download get the input data and get the modeling setups to be able to reproduce analysis. But I wanted to touch one piece because I think it was very interesting and it was one of those lives presented by Jennifer. The district had advanced the future rainfall work with the USGS and FIU. We publish out the results of the data, all the change factors, all the assumptions in the portal. And then the local governments start looking at that and say okay, I want to be able to use that as part of my resident Florida vulnerability assessments. However, some of them do not have an age and age tool that they can use when they're doing their vulnerability assessments. So the compact that one of the the partnerships they're doing now at the level is to produce this document that is going to be really helping a local government to make some assumptions on how they can still translate rainfall and densification into their vulnerability assessments when they don't have an age and age readily available for that. So I think this is a great example of how we can collaborate and kind of really help all of us to make assumptions. And thanks again, he put the whole link there. I didn't know you were here but I knew you would be happy that we mentioned the SNMAS system there as well. Okay, our last question for the session is going to come from Charlie. So thank you, I had a question for Jennifer. Could you give us a little bit of information on the feedback that you get from the local communities and businesses about your work I just interested in how they're responding to the type of work that you're doing to just give a little perspective on, you know, the local engagement and concern about these issues. Yeah, absolutely. And I did just want to acknowledge on the modeling sign I mean I don't want to talk about hyper local things but but but there is an extensive amount of sharing all of our work is made available to all the cities who then apply it at the very local level so we're trying to make sure that all the boundary conditions are correct when we, you know, scale things to different types of applications. And then just reiterating that the county's model reflected decades of development, the district took our model improved it for application and their work FEMA took our model improved it for application and their work and then we've always taken the model back after they approved it and improved it further. So we're all very familiar about the tools and the resolution of which these types of models can work and apply, and continue to enhance them rather than starting at ground zero every time when they were so well positioned as we've developed shared confidence in a model that reflects everybody's enhancements with time. And then on the on the local issues. You know, the most controversial was when we were starting out with the, the, the ground water table map. It was the first time we were talking in the community about new standards. And there was a response from the development community and some of the engineers that were working and saying, you know, we're going to push back hard on this and they wanted to go. I think challenge some of the scenarios with the assumption that maybe we were being very extreme and in what was being painted. But we came back and had said, look, we worked with the USGS these are all the scenarios we looked at and this is the one that we're advancing, and we went further and evaluated what does this mean to development projects. How would you have taken this exact same project and developed it under these future conditions, and we were able to bracket that the cost increase was about point six to one point six increase in the total construction costs in order to really do the same project, but design it for future conditions. And with that, it was a quiet conversation and we move forward with all of our recommendations to the county commission without any opposition, actually. And the business community as a whole has had said early on, just give us the number. We don't want to have a competitor who's getting a sweeter deal, because they're not being held to the same standard, or we don't want every other project to go down to Miami Dade, for example, because they don't have the same requirements. And so it was about creating uniformity and certainty in which they could make investments. Subsequently, they've also appreciated quite well, and we have a very strong partnership with the business and economic development community since about 2016. And we've incorporated and we've brought that whole community to our regional action plan planning process. The recommendations developed in there were developed with the business community, not by just ourselves. And what they've appreciated is that there is such a dependency in the economic circumstance in our region as to what the global perspective is of risk in our region. And our real responsibility is to take our hydrologic models and everything that we're doing locally and make them relevant to the global risk assessments. And so right now, a major part of this resilience plan is that translation. It's to take all of the work and translate it to economic benefits risk reduction and communications that are relevant to risk rating entities, you know, the finance community, and the business community has said in the end, give us a plan with metrics that we can have confidence investing in and we'll pay for it. So that's what we're working on now is this organized plan because so frequently they've said, you know, show me something with milestones Oh, that's not really how we work. So, so we've really had to refocus and develop something that communicates to them and and and it is a very rich conversation and and we when even when we I didn't include it here we went through seawall standards we updated the seawall standards to a minimum top elevation across all of Broward County. In some communities that mean men that they'll be designing from one foot and AVD to four and five feet you know it's a sizable jump. Even in those conversation the acknowledgement was it's flooding and we need to have certainty and nobody wants to make the investment and then be compromised because the neighbors aren't being held to the same requirement. So being able to say emphatically with time everything will be brought up and when it does this is how it's going to operate provides a huge justification to moving forward in an organized manner and being able to deliver the flood reduction benefits that everybody wants and we also tie it back to insurance accounts and and all of that whole. So it's been a process with really good partners individuals as well right I mean you find the right people who end up being good advocates within their peer group as well. Thank you. Okay many thanks to the panel for a very informative session. I'm scrolling our next stop is lunch. Emily is going to tell you about lunch but before she does that. I just want to notify you that we want to be back here at 150 sharp for session three. Thanks very much. So this is session three on surf adaptive, adaptive management and science to inform decision making. So what we're going to be seeing us off is Gina Ralph from the US Army Corps of Engineer and Amanda con Amanda can con from the South Florida water management district. Yeah, you can hear me now. Yes. Okay, so if somebody could bring up my slides. That would be helpful. But I am Gina Ralph with the US Army Corps of Engineers. I am the lead scientist in the Jacksonville district. I am also the restoration coordination and verification program manager. I'm going to talk with you this afternoon about surf adaptive management. And I know it's after lunch. I know you're all probably feeling a little sleepy, and I've been asked to talk about policy. So, this is going to be a riveting conversation. Amanda con is going to follow up on some of the additional items in the agenda. So whomever is actually running the slides, all of our slides are in one so you don't need to like stop in between presentations. So if we can go to the first slide please. Okay, so I've been asked to talk about policy and some of the guidance that we have for surf adaptive management. And so adaptive management was first authorized in the 2007 Water Resources Development Act or word up. And from that, anytime we have a Water Resources Development Act, the Corps of Engineers will enact guidance. So two years later we received guidance on how to implement adaptive management. And so there's two sections and I'm not really going to focus on section 2036 that is more for wetland mitigation plans. But section 2039 provides guidance to the Corps of Engineers on how we implement adaptive management in our ecosystem restoration projects. So with SERP, we have to take that as our overarching policy guidance so that's what guides the Corps of Engineers and how we implement and how we plan in our feasibility level studies for adaptive management and there's all sorts of policy and guidance associated with that. But we need to know what do we need to do for for SERP because we were working in SERP long before we had actual policy guidance on adaptive management. So in the 90s, we developed the Science Foundation for SERP adaptive management. And then when SERP was authorized in 2000 within that yellow book that I think Carolina showed on screen. We actually have the provisions for this adaptive assessment and monitoring. How are we going to monitor for uncertainties? How are we going to monitor for success? And how does that look on an ecosystem system wide basis so that we can understand whether the goals and purposes of SERP are being achieved. And then of course, just like with the past word, we get regulations or guidance on how we're going to implement. So in 2003, we have these programmatic regulations that required this development of this adaptive assessment and monitoring program. And there's very specific guidelines that we follow, but it is flexible enough to allow interpretation. So if we can go to the next slide please. So there's lots of technical guidance out there. So because SERP and everything that we do is multi-agency with multiple partners in the restoration coordination and verification realm, there's 10 federal and state agencies and two federally recognized tribes. So we have a lot of people with a lot of different knowledge experience and their own guidelines on how we can implement adaptive management. And so as we talk a little bit later this afternoon about some of the challenges in implementing adaptive management. So fundamentally it comes down to authority for the core of engineers and what we can do within our authority to implement adaptive management, how we can take lessons learned and apply them to future projects. So if you want to go to the next slide please. Okay, so our science framework. All of you have seen this before in various forums. This is the framework for SERP where we start with conceptual ecological models that we use as the guide for connections within our ecosystems. These were initially developed and published in the 2005 version of wetlands. And recently within the last year, they have been updated. And we have revised conceptual ecological models that now take into account things that were not originally considered or not considered to the detail in which they are now, including climate change and invasive species. And we've taken all of that information that we have learned over the past 20 years of SERP science and integrated that to update those conceptual ecological models, which led to these ecological premises and hypothesis clusters and we've also hosted a workshop, I don't know last week or the week before where we work to identify monitoring needs that we have current monitoring needs and future monitoring needs as part of these new hypothesis clusters. All of that information we use into our performance measures and our monitoring and all of that is lumped together to inform and adapt, and this is where adaptive management comes into play. Look at the principles of adaptive management during the planning stages of a project, because again with the core of engineers it all goes back to that authority so if you can be forward thinking enough to identify uncertainties and potential management actions that could be taken, then you have the authority to move forward and integrate when you get or reach a certain trigger or threshold that was previously identified. But, you know, we wish we had a crystal ball in recover and in all of SERP. We do our best to make predictions about what we may need in the future. And so it was nice to hear all of that information that Carolina and others were talking about in the last panel of the climate change. You know, helping us to forecast so that we can be proactive in putting that in a project implementation report so that we can gain authority for certain adaptive management strategies. And so, you know, we have this very structured management approach to address uncertainties by testing hypotheses. And one of the things with adaptive management, it's not just putting your uncertainties to try to minimize risk in an adaptive management plan, but we like to also include all of the monitoring that's needed in order to measure project success. So if we reach a given threshold that says probably not really getting all of the benefits of a project that you could, we have strategies to address that as well within that adaptive management plan. So moving on to the next slide please. Okay, so this was part of your read ahead. I'm sure you all have seen this. I'm not going to go into any detail about this. But we do have this adaptive management integration guide. And with that, it helps to kind of give advice to different project delivery teams during the planning of a SERP component, how to incorporate adaptive management. And it matches it up with the course planning framework. It's that beehive that you probably have all seen how the core plans is projects. It also crosswalks it to the National Environmental Policy Act documentation process of when we need to identify different things. So it's a good read. This is actually part of our five year plan that recover will update this in the fiscal year 2025 time frame. So we're going through several precursor steps right now, where we're looking at existing uncertainties, trying to identify is it still an uncertainty. If not, then can we remove it from the list because we've learned sufficient information to say it's no longer uncertain. Or is it something that we still don't have enough information on, and then what are our priorities for trying to address those uncertainties. So the adaptive management team is currently undergoing that process now. Next slide please. So one of the things and I'm going to turn this over to Amanda after this, but we have SERP adaptive management, and then nestled within that, all of the project delivery teams have an adaptive management plan. So for, we call them our generation one projects like Amanda's going to tell you about, like picking you and strand didn't have an adaptive management plan because it was pre 2007 word of guidance right. So what are we doing in that circumstance. But the whole idea of this overall SERP adaptive management strategy is to have a team nestled within restoration coordination and verification. In which they do the communication and coordination across all of the SERP projects to understand how information within an individual SERP project adaptive management plan can be leveraged can be used in a future plan. What type of information we already have available. So it's kind of that overarching umbrella, and then all of the green circles are all of the project plans which will have you know we have 68 components we don't have 68 projects. But they're all supposed to be talking to each other as well, and sharing that information and again it's, you know, coordination and communication, which is the foundation for us to be successful, because things that we learn in pick you may be very valuable to a future project such as Southern Everglades, where we may be looking to undertake some, you know, similar types of restoration initiatives. And I think from now, I think Amanda is going to talk about this game bay coastal wetlands so next slide please. No. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. She's not going to talk about that she's going to talk about project level adaptive management. You know, so I'm going to kick off from the program level adaptive management system wide and talk about the project level. So, I work at the South Florida water management district and I'm part of a new exciting team of scientists who are working with the project managers and the scientists and PIs who do the ecological monitoring and write the ecological monitoring plans and adaptive management. And so a liaison of assisting with contracts as well as communication to make sure we're reporting the responses of the ecosystems effectively to inform management and the policymakers. Next slide please. So first of all, I'm going to talk a little bit about communication coming up, but to kind of have a common ground where we're all starting is recognizing that adaptive management is iterative. And we have adaptive management in place at the project level to decrease uncertainties or to address uncertainties to conduct science to gain knowledge so that we know we reduce the risk of uncertainties. In doing so, we increase how effective the restoration activities are going to be and the effectiveness of design and operations. Next. So you're going through this process of gaining new information redefining the problem assessing and just to continuously, but we recognize that while we're working in the framework that Gina mentioned of federal projects with the federal state partnership that should there be something identified that requires a significant design adjustment or additional constructed feature that does need to then go off for reauthorization. So the reformulation component up there. So it kind of little veer off the circle and hopefully get back in but we can learn ways to work within the framework. Next please. So in some of your readings of the adaptive management guidance you may come across the terms active and passive adaptive management. So first of all, let's talk about trial and error, not very effective for efforts that have a high degree of uncertainty. We're dealing with large scale ecosystems and ecosystem human interfaces. There's a lot we don't know yet and that we need to learn. So passive adaptive management occurs after something is constructed in operations and you learn something from it being fully operational. And then you can make a refinement. And then active is field of experimentation you're going to hear from a couple of our amazing scientists from the DPM science team about that field exploration of learning before implementation or helping refine a design based upon the knowledge you gain from science to make it more effective and to do the best you can. Next please. Like Gina, I'm throwing some CGM at you. So CGM is served guidance memoranda. And I want to emphasize that it talks about that am activities occur in the life cycle of the project, answering those unanswered questions. And it's a stage for decisions and activities to ensure restoration success. It's integrated into project planning and implementation. And it's required for all ecosystem restoration projects, as mentioned before, post 2004 2007 because of the guidance. Next, in SERPs adaptive management guidance there are three types or approaches that could be followed for implementing adaptive management or having adaptive management options. So informing implementation as I mentioned this can help with informing preliminary design or design phasing of construction. If you have knowledge that something may occur in one part of the system if you fill the levy this way versus your build the levy or this way or fill the canal in a certain direction. So that helps inform implementation process and then operation so forming operations. That can be interim operations or complete operations because as you'll see these are so large scale that some components are coming on board at a certain time, and others are coming on at another time so you can help inform operations all along the way to have the best ecosystem responses. And then the contingency operations so those are the ones that go in place after it is built and finished. Next please. So, as you saw from the previous presentation, there was a lot of guidance and guidance memoranda that came along over the periods of several years. And I think a lot of that has to do with our concept and gaining more knowledge of what works what doesn't having more science behind understanding the ecosystems and the interconnectivity, having refined pms performance measures, as well as modeling improvements. So it has evolved and later in my next presentation I'm going to talk about a couple ways that that's dealt with how the previous earlier projects didn't have structure structure in place. It is intended as an iterative process as you'll read in the documentation it mentioned several times that the am plan and monitoring should be updated according to new information available. So we want to make sure that that's living documentation and iterative process. Because some of these p irs were written almost 20 years ago now. So we want to make sure we're staying. And we have to recognize to we don't have all the answers because this is still fairly young. There aren't the large scale projects, fully implemented yet. We're learning as we go during the best we can to inform things along the way, but it is a young. And so the process is also too evolving. So we just hope to learn as we go and implement the best knowledge we can. Next please. So, and I think Dr Fred star who's not here for a conversation that we had and for a couple of these slides. Communication is cornerstone. Not just making sure you're communicating clearly, but we want to come to a common ground and terminology so that's another thing we need common turn and terminology on what adaptive management means, how implementation is framed. And also, understand how everybody understand that it's an adaptive process it's flexible, we have to be able to be flexible while maintaining within the framework of the policy. We're also working with people across disciplines we have engineers we have geologists we have chemists we have biologists, and we have management at certain levels, who are helping to make these decisions and we really need to make sure that we're communicating across those different languages, so to speak. And also when we communicate with our public as well to let them know what's going on and what we're doing across projects and components. So adaptive management can't live in a vacuum within one search project, because the search projects aren't within a vacuum, it is part of an entire system. So we also need to make sure that if we're learning new information in one project cannot help inform a different project in how designer operations is put forth and how is their inter activity and interconnection between any adjacent projects, or upstream projects. And then, this is what we're trying to work on. It's important to have really effective communication and conveyance of knowledge to get through to the implementation. So as I said where it's a learning process. And these are some key attributes we recognize. Next please. All right, I'm going to hand it off to Gina for a couple of slides. She looks puzzled. Okay. Okay. Pause for Q&A. Any questions from the community. So I want to hear a little more about the exciting new team of scientists and what exactly you're doing. Okay. Sorry, you'll be hearing from them next. Thank you. Can I ask what projects don't have adaptive management plans, based on either timing or other reasons. Pick you in strand and in interval gain source. And C11 spreader canal does. Hmm, BBC W does, and I'll mention this came back coastal wetlands and I'll talk about how we're approaching it and picking strand after this Q&A. Okay. So C11 spreader canal does not. It has operations. Yeah, it's. So it's not the traditional SERP adaptive management plan. And again, it's one of those foundation projects. But it did had, have a provision for changes in operations as part of an adaptive management strategy. But C11 spreader canal is currently. It's a low book. It's being, it was constructed and is now operated by self Florida water management district as a component. Does that mean, well, I know it was expedited. Does that mean it's being taken out of. That does not mean it's being taken out of SERP currently there is no project partnership agreement, which is more the legal document for cost share. But it is still considered a SERP component. And it was done under a permit to South Florida water management. So I had another question. Just for clarification. So the yellow book also had this figure with four boxes that was supposed to be the adaptive management plan. And they were supposed to be a system planning and operations team that would produce option reports and assessment reports. And that was kind of keys. The key structure for doing system level adaptive management is that been that part of the diagram been replaced by something else. I wouldn't say it's been replaced. I would say it's been absorbed. It's been absorbed under the recovery recovery umbrella where we had, you know, evaluation and assessment, those, those teams way back when when recover was first organized. And now, because of the integration of everything, it didn't make sense to have those specific teams. It's all under the recovery. Okay, thanks. Good Matt and then Dave. Thanks for the overview and I appreciate a couple of your slides, particularly slide 12 where you talked about informing project operations is falling under part of the larger adaptive management umbrella. This is what I was sort of speaking to it trying to capture the lessons we learned from the cop report. I'm really happy to see that particular as it relates to communication adaptive management isn't easy. Is it really a circular process it's actually a helical process. Over time we still want to work on a trajectory right so it's not just simply stay here stay here stay here stay here stay here stay here. And so from a helical perspective, finding ways to communicate and document like you mentioned in your last slide and sharing that is going to be really important so I was glad to see those slides. It was very helpful to after going through and reviewing the document actually have explained has been very helpful. My question is and having looked at adaptive management programs in multiple complex places situations is am I correct in assuming that recover is the primary responsible entity to implementing and managing consistency across the adaptive management process. So, I don't want to recover handles the system one right it's the overarching umbrella and all of the projects and I'll speak to this actually when I get to how recover has developed a process for various interaction points during both the planning and the construction design and implementation phase of a project where we can insert ourselves to act as that body to share the lessons learned, but each individual project team is responsible for development of an adaptive management and monitoring plan for their individual project, which again recover will help facilitate the conversation and the lessons learned and the, the knowledge gained from other projects to impart to that team. But it is the project delivery team that ultimately comes up with that individual project level adaptive management. One follow up question that so who's responsibility is it to make sure that gets done. I guess is my. So, it's a shared responsibility, right, each individual project is managed by a project manager, and in order to, you know, be policy compliant, they have to include the provision of a monitoring and adaptive management plan. So, the, ultimately, they're responsible at the project level at the system level, that's the responsibility of recover to go ahead and do that interaction with those individual teams, as well as to continue to bring new science gained to those conversations. Thank you. I just want to follow up on Dave's question to ask, does that mean each project is open to its own timelines in terms of reporting, because past scissor reports have been concerned about the lack of the kind of reporting that we saw earlier with a very clear project objectives that were monitoring results there were clear comparisons to modeling. In many cases at a project level you just see data, and you don't see those comparisons to objectives. So, is there any kind of expectation that's consistent across projects and a timeline of reporting that gets caught the set of those timelines but. Sure. So, as part of Amanda mentioned, the SERP guidance memorandum number 55 or 56, where recover in 2018, and I'll talk to this again in my thing. We created this SERP guidance memorandum number 66, which is the recover interaction, and there are actually interaction points that speak to that how the information from the individual projects gets reported at the system level, and how individual projects and recover is about reporting information in terms of project success or adaptive management or status and trends. So all of that is also captured in that, but in terms of because some of our SERP projects are so large, there are various contracts right that break them into smaller more manageable components. So, like, Central Everglades planning project, for example, we have a contract for step north and that's broken into what five or six contracts or more to just get that portion of the system done. So, there has to be that connection of what is required to implement in the adaptive management and monitoring plan based upon the construction elements that are in that individual contract. You can have various starting and stopping points you're going to have that collection of that before construction information that you're going to need for your baseline in order to assess the project success afterwards. To say there's one size fits all I can't say that because of the number of construction contracts we have and the need to collect that baseline information based upon when a certain component may go into operation. And also for a couple of the projects like BBCW and Piggy and Strand, there is a chapter in the South Florida environmental report that covers primarily the water quality for compliance, however it does include also some additional ecological information. And, and again like you said there's multiple contracts for construction but there's also multiple contracts for various PIs doing the monitoring and of course they always have a reporting requirement for those as well. If there are no more questions I guess go on to the next phase. So, just to kind of set the stage before Amanda gets into some of the generation one projects. I wanted to talk a little bit about that active adaptive management. Amanda showed on a continuum trial and error passive and then active. So, we wanted to highlight a couple of examples of active adaptive management strategies and understanding the need to address uncertainties, far in advance of when you're actually going to need the information. So, this is just one that I want to highlight and then we will have the decomp physical model is another example of active adaptive management, and then I'll have one more to share with you. So, I think some of you in the past have been out to Lila. I see some heads are nodding, but this is in water conservation area one or the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. So, this was created years and years ago where they created tree islands to tree islands region slew communities to understand a variety of different interactions and how Everglades restoration could, but or how this could be used to inform Everglades restoration and lots of different manipulations that they can do out there with changing water depth. And they did some different elevations of tree islands they did some different types of plantings they did different planting densities. Recently, last year, in July of 2022 recover hosted a workshop, because part of the central Everglades planning project, we are going to build these hammocks within the Miami canal to not only act as wildlife habitat, but also to be a hydrologic speed bump to help slow the water down for the portions of the Miami canal that are going to be backfilled. So we got together with scientists with modelers with engineers, we sat up in West Palm Beach for two days. We all visited Lila. And we worked with the scientists to understand what we know about tree islands from these created tree islands that were developed in Lila and how we can take those lessons learned and apply them to the hammocks that will be built within the central Everglades planning project. And I'm calling them hammocks, as opposed to tree islands, because tree islands have a very culturally significant meaning to our two Native American tribes. And so we know we could never create recreate a tree island. But what we could do was put in a hydrologic speed bump, which was vegetated which may serve as wildlife habitat, as well as to help slow the water down. So we sat in a room for two days. And we took all of that information to apply it to a recommendation to the project delivery team. So we adjusted the transition zones. We looked at the orientation of the tree island. We looked at the density of plantings. We looked at the species to be planted. And we came up with several courses of action that we could ask the engineers to consider during the design of the SEP North project features. And so, about, I don't know, maybe two months ago, I saw a preliminary drawing. This, this is what recover recommended. I saw a preliminary drawing and it looked really similar to what we, what we suggested. So it's just a good example to share of how this adaptive adaptive management the lessons learned and the science gained is being used to inform an actual feature within a SEP project. So next slide please. Okay. And so, the proof of concept physical models. Again, de confiscal model will be talked about by a couple of South Florida water management district scientists. I think Carolina put in a plug for this as well. But this is the Everglades mangrove migration assessment or Emma. And this is actually exploring the use of RFM techniques, regional sediment management techniques, techniques where we would actually look to apply a thin layer of sediment to key locations within the southeastern Everglades to see if we could jumpstart the internal processes of a creation. And where we may be able to build mangrove islands to improve habitat, as well as to increase resiliency. So this is a proof of concept. We're still hoping to get funding from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to implement this we've chosen a site within the Biscayne Bay and southeastern Everglades footprint, very close to the s 197 structure, which Melissa no mentioned earlier today. That is right at the base, if you will, the outlet of the the Seattle set. So those are our active adaptive management and I'm going to turn it over to Amanda. Next slide please. As we mentioned before, a couple of the projects were in place and their project implementation report was authorized prior to these guidance memoranda on adaptive management. So what example I'm going to provide for that is picking strand restoration project. So you'll see in the in the yellow book as the Golden Gate Golden Glades estate project. And as you can see, the PR was finished in 2004 and it was authorized in 2007 so that means it's probably written around 2002 2003. And the point is to, it was this estate that was almost developed, kind of a con artist type situation, selling parcels of land in very flooded area but they had already put into place roads and canals and they were also logging tram roads there as well. So three pump stations were built at the north end of this diagram so those green green little arrows up top, and then these canals shown in blue are in the process of being plugged so the one on Prairie canal all the way to the east has already been plugged, and we're in the process of finishing some of the others as well. Next slide please. So, as I said, an adaptive management plan was not within the PR, but there was recognized that there is some adaptive management guidance from 1999 2000. In 2009, the monitoring and assessment group, the mag for picking and strand was formed. It's a multi agency team of people, scientists and managers from various agencies, including us fishing wildlife and FWC. Generally these specialists are expertise in the area of the big Cyprus and then 10,000 islands estuaries as the plugging of those canals and the degradation of the roads is going to affect obviously the downstream hydrology in those estuaries, beneficially effect. Next slide please. So I'm just going to mention a couple of the acts that the mag has been able to implement. So in 2016 there was a reauthorization to implement what we call the Southwest protection feature. And this is basically a levy and you see it in pink down there. And that's to prevent water from going into areas where it's not wanted at this time. And so they recognize, okay, now we have a new feature. None of this area was in our monitoring plan under the idea that this feature was there. So they were able to develop both water quality rain and ecological monitoring attributes and put a plan in place and propose it. And so now we can get all the good data that we need in this area, specifically to look at how that feature is affecting the area. All right, please. Secondly, a couple of years ago, there was a discussion on the fact that there were federally listed red-cockaded woodpeckers, RCWs, in one of the project footprint areas. And in looking at the hydrologic models of the project as it would be completed, scientists and wildlife biologists recognize, hey, that hydrology is not super beneficial for the habitat of these RCWs. So we looked at additional modeling on a little bit smaller scale and looked at potential options for an improvement in that area for those RCWs while not negatively impacting other larger areas of the project. So the MAG put together a proposed road removal plan that they're looking at Miller Boulevard. So that's along the Miller Canal. And talking about instead of degrading it the entire way, only degrading portions or degrading it to a certain height, so that you maintain a different type of hydrology and not as deep of water across that Pine Island area for those RCWs. Next slide, please. So Biscayne Bay Coastal Wetlands phase one. It does have an adaptive management plan in it. It was authorized in 2014. And the purpose of the project is to redirect flows in more natural hydrologic hydrologic movement across the wetlands and into the estuaries and reduce that canal type discharge into the estuaries with the fresh water, therefore improving the salinity regimes and the habitat. It includes pump stations, spreaders, ditch plugging and conveyance features. And as you can see it's on Biscayne Bay. Next slide please. So the folks working on the Biscayne Bay Coastal Wetlands phase one project made recommendations that they should install a temporary pump before putting the full permanent feature in so they can understand operations help inform the capacity direction placement of the pump to have the most effective outcome for the restoration activities. And then they recommend that when this when the permanent feature is in place that temporary pump can be used elsewhere in the project footprint to design or to help inform other features. Next slide please. Then in a portion of the BBCW footprint is called Deering Estate. And the people on the ground recognize hey this is drying out a little bit too much to maintain a healthy wetland. Well at that time they were doing on and off and on and off pump operations. So it was recommended that a continuous pump operations be implemented to maintain that hydration. Also in other areas to better encourage more sheet flow. It was recommended to incorporate a shallow spreader feature so that the water is spread more evenly over the wetland. Also in order to attain the best data to inform success, the they have updated the water quality monitoring plan to have more effective characterization of the downstream effects of the project. And a key part of the adaptive management plan as written in BBCW phase one project implementation report is that the data and knowledge gained from this phase one can help to inform components of the BBCR the base came by southeastern ecosystem restoration. Holy cow. Glad that has an acronym. The BBCR project. So that's another key component is that that information and I really thank you also for saying that it is helical we do want to get off the wheel eventually. Okay, I'm back. I want to talk to you a little bit about the recovery support to projects and specifically about these project interaction points that we have. So as Amanda just said, back in 2017, there was, you know, folks on the ground were looking at BBCW and said, I think we have an issue here. And the request then came through recover to change operations so that we had this continuous pumping. And so, at that point in time, recover was thinking, Oh gosh, you know, we're actually moving on now to projects that are in operations and we need to lay out a process for recover to have these interactions with project delivery teams outside of the planning phase. Because let's face it for years and years and years we are concentrated on what's going on, how do we inform planning of a project. And then we actually had things on the ground that we're starting to operate and now recover needed to have a process for information to decision makers and to project managers to actually take a change or, you know, change direction or understand information that we were seeing on the ground, and how that could be best used to inform a project. So, next slide please. So, again, back in 2018, right after BBCW recover started development of this SERP guidance memorandum number 66. And so I think 66 is the latest that we have I don't know that there's been one since. But it actually speaks to these recover and project interaction points, it establishes standard operating procedures, and it very clearly defines roles and responsibilities of the recover team for our project managers and then to get core speak if you will we have planning technical leads we have environmental leads, and we have engineering technical lead. These are all of the folks that comprise the project delivery teams. So next slide please. Okay, so, again, going back to SERP guidance and these programmatic regulations, there are very specific roles and responsibilities that recover plays and so I'm not going to read it just highlighting that recover was formed and developed and specified in the Water Resources Development Act in the yellow book, and in the programmatic regulations to continually to have science inform serve planning, serve design and serve operations. And so we have these guidance memorandum that we use to kind of outlay the process so that us, our non federal sponsors South Florida Water Management District and all of our partnering agencies understand how we're going to implement this recover assistance so going on to the next slide please. Alright, so, as I said for years we were so focused on planning and this process was really well laid out. And it just starts at the scoping phase, it goes all the way to the chiefs report which then goes to Congress for authorization. There are seven key engagement points for recover. Each one of those seven have a standard operating procedure that outlines the roles of and responsibilities it also includes a schedule so that it's very clear because we're very schedule driven in the core. When recover needs to, to interact and how long that interaction is going to take. And so you'll see that recover does review the monitoring plan, as well as the adaptive management plan. And we also look at, you know, an evaluation of all of the alternative plans so coming up in Biscayne Bay and southeastern Everglades ecosystem restoration project. And then moving into our third round of modeling that modeling data will be given to recover at the same time it is provided to the project delivery team for recover to do an independent assessment and to make recommendations as to what should be the expected plan for that particular study. So those are just some examples of what recover does during the planning phase, but we're more interested in how do we take information that we're seeing from operational testing and use that to better inform. So we can go to the next slide please. So this is the one this is the new SERP guidance memorandum I think I provided it to Stephanie with the SOPs but if I didn't, I apologize I'll give it to you after the meeting. And so again it starts during scoping and scoping in this instance is not the traditional scoping where we go out as part of the National Environmental Policy Act. This is when we know that we have money now available to have a project delivery team with our non federal sponsor to help inform the design of a project. And so we're going to be with you right there when at the first sign of money being available we will come on in and you know be part of that team and have a dialogue. And so, as Amanda indicated, or that some of our projects, when we first develop them put a project implementation report, sign a record of decision as part of our National Environmental Policy Act, and then it just sits until a water resources development act and an authorization. So using SEP as the example, we finished the report in 2012. In 2014 it was authorized. And then we started talking about design of some of the components probably in the 2018-19 time frame right so anywhere I would say three to five years later. But there's a lot of information that had been gained since 2012 that could be used to inform the design of various components of the construction. So you know recover is collecting data on an annual basis as part of our monitoring and assessment plan, and that information we is updated within a system status report reports that we get on an annual basis from those principal investigators. So all of that information can be brought to the study team to the project delivery team to help ensure that we have the best available information included as we're you know initiating design. And then what we'll do is we're going to have to do a crosswalk with the individual project monitoring plan, as well as the monitoring and assessment plan because if we did it right during planning, there's a lot of leveraging of information between the two. And then the board knows, you know, the court gets money through the president's budget, and there's a certain amount of money that's allocated to the monitoring and assessment plan as well as to individual projects on an annual basis. So there could be some differences in the model and the monitoring that was envisioned and the monitoring that is currently being implemented. So we'll do that crosswalk to make sure that we have the appropriate monitoring to not only look at what's happening at the project level, but is it consistent with our system wide analysis. And then the next step is, we will review the analysis for ecological monitoring, there's always that operational testing, right you put something in the ground, then you have to test it to make sure it works. And then the data as you're doing that. So could that data then, again, iteratively be fed back in to better manage the operations of that. And then Stephanie I think you asked how how is that information reported right so we have a very clear standard operating procedure for how we are going to gather how recover is going to gather information from the project teams to roll that up into our system reports that occur on a five year basis. And then there's also other reporting mechanisms as Amanda noted in the sphere report, the Weidingberg report. So a lot of that information is being shared among agencies. And then again, you know this recover and the project level monitoring data, how that feeds into adaptive management at the project level and then at the system level. Have we learned information from the project level which could help reduce some uncertainties that we identified at the system level. And then, you know, it's again, it's that feedback loop, it's that constant process of information sharing. So this, although the SERP guidance memorandum isn't new, that's from 2018, all of the standard operating procedures were completed in, I don't know, may of this year, and they are available. We've been giving presentations to all of our project managers are environmental leaves and next up will be our engineering leaves. So I think that's it for me. That's just what they look at. You can't, you can't actually read that but there's a lot of information and again the roles and responsibilities are bulleted and very clearly laid out. Next page or next slide please. That's it. And with that, I think we're done. Thanks to you both. Any questions from the committee. Yeah, so I guess one question I had about CGM 66 is, is that in part clarifying roles and responsibilities is that also streamline the process. So like the decision to make the pump change it during the states actually took a while. Right. And that was not a, that was not a, let's fix this in two weeks kind of thing. So how does CGM 66 sort of streamline and in addition to identifying the roles and responsibilities and the appropriate points of intersection. So I think prior to CGM 66. Nobody knew where to provide that information who needed to play into that, you know, because it was the folks on the ground, give it to recover, recover, gave it to the recovery executive committee, which ultimately signed out a memorandum for the record, which then went to, you know, the two implementing agencies. But I think by having this close, closer relationship, all through the phase, you never have to go back through this memorandum right here. You have somebody there having a conversation with the team and with the project manager and with the operators to then, you know, be have a more rapid response where you don't have to go up and down. You know, searching for the right person. You all already are talking. Again, thank you. This has been very helpful in explaining some of the concepts that you're going through. My question is word is an authorization bill. It authorizes the core to do certain things to actually implement. You need an appropriation. How do you, how is that appropriation identified do you have do you have a line item that says this is the adaptive management part that goes into the appropriators. So the short answer is yes, and the longer answer is we have can be tech who will be on the panel who is really more of the money person that can help you address that question better than I can. Just a second part of that then as you pivot from planning to operations. Again, is it, and I'll get to Matt's point that he just as you develop the guidance. It's a different type of adaptive. It's a different type of research or science or monitoring that you're doing to actually assess operational impacts versus what it might be. Is that again articulated in the guidance documents to allow that to happen. And so, so yes and no, I, there, there's some of it, but I think we need to drill down a little bit deeper for when we plan a project and I think a really good example is Melissa Nesuti this morning. She talked about construction of the mod waters project construction of the C 111 self date, and when those were complete, we formed an operation plan to take advantage of both of them. So that's a totally, you know, it's a different beast, if you will. And so what I've been thinking about is that recover really needs to come up with an SOP for those operation plans to really dig down and put a little bit finer point to the process. So, yeah. Yeah, thanks very much. This has really been informative. I feel like I understand how I am works in practice. Much better than I did before this. The one question I have is is about authority. What, what authority goes with Do you present things as recommendations or like, how does that interaction go do you have some kind of authority that people have to listen when you come with this or when I speak authority. I mean congressional authorization. That's what I mean by. Oh, I know I'm just talking about like, What does it get done if you, yeah, if you see something that would suggest a change in operations or something. Kind of what's, is it just a recommendation that people can take or leave or get through picking strand of an example of like, who talks to whom, how, how many times do you go up and down in communication with their path. So, so I think now there's a clearer pathway than what there was with BBC W. And again, if recover is making a recommendation similar to what we did with the design of those hammocks in the, the sep north in Miami canal. We offer that as a recommendation we don't have recovered doesn't have authority thou shalt do this. We work together to make recommendations and whether or not we present those to the implementing agencies, and then they work together to decide what may or may not be implemented is kind of the short answer for that one. Any follow up or additional questions. Okay, thank you. So next, we have Colin Saunders and Sue Newman both of from the district and they're going to begin by I believe talking about DPM knowledge gained with focus on implications implications for sep. DPM is decont physical model. Thank you. Good afternoon. One things I'd like to point out before I get going is the success of the decont physical model project is due to the extensive multi disciplinary multi agency group, some of whom are represented here. And so Colin I kind of given us feel here but I just want to acknowledge that this is a much bigger group. And you are seeing here today. And it's even bigger than this but these are the people who really contributed to the efforts representing today. So what is the decont physical model. I wasn't sure if Amanda was going to be presenting this or not so put it up there just in case. Many of you may or may not have heard of the decont or the decompartmentalization of three a which is part of this sub projects when the original yelled projects, often considered the heart of the Everglades. There's a lot of uncertainties associated with that project. Well what kind of flow should we restore the Everglades to none of us were here back then we don't know what the velocity should be. Should we fill in the canals all the way, or partially what would be effective it's a very expensive process is there a way that we can do that better. How much velocity we do we need to have a rigid slew landscape versus moving sediments. These are a lot of the uncertainties that were preventing decomp from moving forward. So part of that was the development of this adaptive management plan the decont physical model on DPM, or sometimes as I call it the damn physical model because of the frustrations. That's an English thing I'll take that back. So anyway, the project is what is considered the pocket it's between the L67 a and the L67 C canals separating three a three B. Before after control impact design study and bucky design. And so originally actually we started work in 2010, where we started monitoring background information prior to construction. And the idea behind the project is that we are restoring flow. We have a series of 10 five foot gated culverts that discharge water across the landscape. And to look at the effects of canal treatments on the levy was removed from this side of the pocket. And then we had different backfill treatments where we had complete partial or no fill. And we could compare what we observed in those environments. So in looking at the system we monitored within the flowway those obviously are the treatment sites, and then we monitored outside the flowway controls so that we could see how things changed over time. And one thing to be aware of is that we did not discharge water into the system, unless the inflow geometric mean TP was less than or equal to 10 ppb which is very important that's the Everglades phosphorus criterion. So, before we get into well how is this information used it might be a good idea to kind of tell you some of the stuff we learned. And so to kind of get you a little bit there. The first thing that we observed and it was a bit of a surprise was the water actually didn't flow where we expected it to. It didn't follow the historic ridge and slew pattern. The second thing we observed is that we got a we got a little bit of a handle on what velocities we needed to rebuild the ridge and slew topography and that was in the order of 1.5 to three centimeters a second. And the significance of that is doesn't want to know if you maintain sustained flows within this zone. It's a positive you increase the velocities and you see sediment transport. But if you increase above these flows, the high flows, as you might expect to end up with localized phosphorus loading, even if your phosphorus concentrations entering the system less than or equal to 10, because the load is so high. What we observed is the actually backfilling the canals can improve habitat quality. And then another observation we had was that if you use limestone to fill the canals it actually can cap the legacy phosphorus obviously the canals have quite phosphorus enriched sediments by putting that limestone fill on that we can actually reduce sediment phosphorus transport further downstream. This is Colin. This is my technical support. Okay, I just wasn't plugged in apparently. That's something you. So what we're going to do is we're breaking up the talk into two different sections Colin and I will be alternating so you don't have to listen to me drone on and on, as much as I might like to do that, I won't. The question is, how is the information that we have collected been used to inform set projects. And then the second part of the talk is, well what's the potential for information that we have to inform and it hasn't been used yet. And we're going to have this box. So kind of let me explain this box to you a little bit. The first question is that what was the DPM product. What can influence does influence operations. Kind of influence design and that's not just necessarily the design of the features it could also be a design of the monitoring associated with the project. And then also, does it have an impact on construction. One of the first things out of the box as far as the DPM project was concerned is initially we got approval to operate for only a handful of months, generally in the two to three month time period. So the first phase of the project through 2016, we could only open the gates for very limited time so obviously our understanding flow is limited to that time period, however, the data collection that we did during that allowed us to actually then create a longer trigger. And our trigger for the DPM project is based on, well what was the prior month phosphorus concentration in the L 67 a canal. What was the stage difference between the canal and the marsh. And then also there were some restraints on we couldn't flow if the L 29 constraint was in place we couldn't flow if one site had a value of 8.5 feet because you just you wouldn't want to be flooding and then you also had water levels in the canal that had to be a certain night before you could discharge. So with all these parameters in place we actually were able to improve our confidence and we have a monthly actually as 152 trigger which predicts whether or not the phosphorus that following month is going to be less than or equal to 10. So using that information we were able to get a permit to extend the flow to year round flows the first thing out of the box with the project was actually to increase from a very limited flow period to the potential to flow year round. So the to give you an idea of what that trigger looks like. It was actually earlier this year. And so what the trigger is doing is predicting the next month's phosphorus concentrations. And as you can see here, it was increasing our forecast was that it was going to increase and so therefore we recommended keeping the S 152 close. Now we make the recommendation ultimately it's not our decision that is up to the operators, the core and the district. So moving on. Well the next things we observed within the project is that there was restrictions as far as restoring flow. A structure flow coming out of a structure gives you a radial discharge and only impacts or increases velocities within a certain footprint within the marsh if you kind of think of half of a target that's kind of the zone that we're looking at. And so with that in mind and looking at the operations of the S 152. Originally the S 152 structure was supposed to be removed it was a temporary structure. But if you look at the components of set south, you can see these structures this is the blue shanty flow way. You have to in the downstream section and really not much going on up here. And so it was decided that in order to actually give us optimum ability to operate the system to have greater flexibility as far as hydrating the area and also to potentially expand the zone of flow as well as improve water quality. The S 152 was actually incorporated into set south and is so now a feature within the set south project. So that was another finding. It was helpful. This was the very first finding that was a bit of a surprise. The flow was supposed to follow that arrow the actual layout of the monitoring was in that direction. So of course we rapidly went out and establish some new monitoring sites within the flow way. So what you can see is that the flow headed east. It didn't head in that south direction so but if you look at the landscape. It's pretty obvious this is dense vegetation. You actually have somewhat of a pathway for it to flow here so that was one of the first things we started looking at you know well. There's a resistance to flow. There's also though a landscape toper gradient which would have expected it to flow. I'll call it Chris's why she took a look at the historic imagery and this is the 1940s imagery for that spot. And what you can see is way back then there are a lot more slews in the landscape. Now we've done a lot of work looking at actively managing vegetation. We call Amy active March improvement. And so we have experience of basically changing the vegetation community for benefit. And so we felt that we could do that and then along with some modeling that Chris did we were able to feel pretty confident if we went in and we managed the vegetation we could actually create a flow path that would improve how water would move through the marsh. And so we went out. We created these polygons on the landscape sprayed them. And you can see the end result. And just in fact we did. We had a significant effect on velocities in the marsh. At the beginning this is pre Amy. This is 250 meters from the inflow heading east you can see and most of the flow went there. However post Amy you get equal distribution of velocities. Most importantly those velocities also travel further into the marsh and so creating these slews has been a very huge benefit in terms of restoring this degraded region through landscape. And the significance of this is that, let me go back one second. The significance of this is that by restoring flow direction and velocity, we have gotten a really good handle of what it would take to do landscape restoration, but only at this scale. So, is there a way to scale it up. This is something that Jed Harvey and his group are looking at that USGS. They have what they call the bio free model. And this is a bio physical flow model. It's predicting velocity using hydraulic flow very measured vegetation, and then the slope and roughness of the landscape. And what that model is showing is here we're using the data from the DPM. If you look on the y axis we have flow velocity and on the exit distance from the S 152 within certain zones you're going to get the entrainment and the downstream transport of sediment and this is based on real data that we collected in the field. However, in this nice middle zone, you get slew to ridge redistribution of sediment which is something that we're targeting for restoration in terms of creating that topography on the landscape. So that you get very little sediment and so we're also trying to understand the velocity and its effect on sediment transport and topography is very important. So if we look at this in terms of this is pre and post aiming. What you find is you have very similar. You have different entrainment zones, redistribution zones and similar water depths, despite the fact you've had 11% increase in slew area so you have the benefit of increasing the habitat and no potential negatives as far as the amount of sediment you're moving or the average water depth. If you increase the amount of area of slew restored, say in this case to 58%, you see you end up with a significant reduction in water levels which is not something you're trying to do within the slew landscape. Now this model is based on in situ field data but it doesn't account for seasonality associated with SAV and parafine it doesn't account for vegetation feedbacks topography feedbacks. So we provide an interesting observation and provide some level of support for the idea that there's this optimum envelope of velocity and slew areas that would be good for restoration. So recognizing that Amy is a good feature. We want to be able to improve this degraded landscape the district actually implemented creating extending this is where the original Amy was in place and we've now extended it. And we're about here with the idea that we're going to create multiple slews following this entire pathway. The core of engineers also agreed this was a good method and as actually agreed to fund creating these slew pathways as part of downstream features with the S63X structures. Originally we were hoping that we would be jumpstarting this process and that as part of the contract one we actually had approval for putting in temporary pump stations within the L29 canal because right now you can't jump water out of that area. So basically it's going to hit the bottom and stay there. We're putting in these temporary pumps. Like I said it got written into the document we're good to go. And now we're not. So anyway that didn't happen. But the concept was there. And hopefully that knowledge at some point will be implemented. But there are also ecological feedbacks as far as restoration concern and this is something that we were a little bit surprised about. And that is, if you look at the slew prior to flow, you saw this very obvious paraffitan SAV map covering the surface. However, two weeks post flow it was gone. And if you look down as you follow through the water level, what you see it's sitting on top of the flock surface. So six weeks later, you can see that that Matt is really decided to disintegrate and become incorporated within the flock. In 10 weeks we actually had improved our cameras we took a little bit more time doing the photography. And so basically this you couldn't really tell there was a pair of fine Matt there at all it's been completely incorporated in the flock and we do have elevated flock levels. And one of the feedbacks associated with restoring flow is you lose your pair of fighting Matt. And so therefore you're actually increasing velocity in this slew landscape because this SAV pair of fighting Matt is actually blocking flow, and we observed that the flow, then also within our amy spots extended further into the marsh once terrified Matt and gone. So that is influencing construction, because we incorporated the Amy slews and actually the structures were moved slightly to align with those new slew locations with the recognition that having the downstream slew is going to be very beneficial as far as restoring flow to the landscape. And because you might not know what sediment particles look like. Particles moves in multiple different ways. And we kind of wanted just to give you an idea of what does it look like in the environment and actually, January age I think is one of the reasons we show these types of videos because she does it with fish and it's always very exciting but not quite so exciting when you see utricularia blobs flowing. But the point really is just to show you that disturbance you do, you know, under the natural system you get smaller particles but there are disturbance events whether we fish structures that are going to kick up the flock and they're going to move even more. And so there is this tremendous ability to move sediments and actually transform the topography of the landscape if we can get the flow right. Moving on. We're now going to be talking about the canals. Okay, so I'm going to switch into the canal perspective. And I'm going to talk about the, how the canal findings from DPM have successfully informed set projects. Whoops, I mean, the transport was fun. So the graph on the right you can see is the water TP and the L 67 a canal and you can see that periodically it goes above 10 parts pavilion which limits culvert operations. So one way to lower the TP and increase those the flexibility and operations would be to connect that water more to the marsh upstream, which has a slightly lower water TP level. And flow fields that were measured in the canal just upstream of the DPM structure show quite clearly that there's not a lot of water moving from that marsh on the upper left hand side of the image. But most of that water is coming straight from the canal. It's been confirmed by mixing models. And the reason, and one of the reasons is that there are these spoil mounds along the western edge of that canal. Spoil removal was already in the, the set PIR in 2014. But we had numerous meetings periodically from, you know, really starting in 2017 and 18 with the DPM science team and set project managers, and they asked the DPM team for their ideas for improving this and so what we came up with we recommended that we turn it into an experiment where we have treatment and control structures. And what this allowed us to do was essentially increase the actual physical spatial effect of that marsh marsh through canal connectivity, as well as provide statistical power and a design that could provide more robustly confirm whether the successes in reducing inflow TP and possibly some unintended consequences. So marsh connectivity, you know, increasing marsh connectivity was also examined in the L 67 C canal component of DPM. And the hydrologic monitoring here, as you can see with these arrows showed that connectivity is affected not only by what happens upstream of the canal but what happens in the canal itself. So you can see from the water budget that those big arrows show there's a lot of preferential flow through the water in the open canal system makes sense there's nothing there. However, it becomes greatly diminished, not completely but greatly diminished once it hits those yellow and blue partial and complete backfill areas. And as a result, we achieve what we consider marsh to marsh flow in the complete fill area, and we contrast this with what we call canal to marsh flow in the open canal. But the presence of fill is not the whole story. The reason flow diminished in those filled treatments is because they became colonized with dense SAV beds, and that provides vegetative resistance to flow. So connectivity is also important because it improves habitat quality, the catch per unit effort of large fish in these filled areas is much more much higher than than almost non existent in the no fill. And I shouldn't say non existent but poorly detectable. The benefit so the benefit of connecting ridges and slews is an important part of the findings from DPM. So I applied this concept to the backfilling of the agricultural ditches that exist in the blue shanty flow, which is this area bounded by the L 67 D levy and the L 67 a levy to the to the west. So the original design, and this is where it is. And this is in contract one of sep south. The whole design for this backfill was basically a one size fits all where you you move all the spoil material to the north of that ditch into the ditch and have it as one fixed elevation. The DPM science team does recommend that a design that tied to historic vegetation patterns. And so shown here are the historic slews from the 1940s aerial imagery, which were provided by Dr. Christ is why the blue ones represent the historic slews around that agricultural ditch, the yellow ones are the historic slews that we're planning on actively restoring with Amy. And this is recommended then a two level backfill design, one to marsh grade, where they're mostly dominated by sawgrass, historically, and then one that is two feet lower, that is in areas dominated by slews. And this gave us the opportunity then to make sure that the Amy would be effective, but also increase the connectivity and consider micro topography at the same time. And as a footnote, what you don't see here though is all the iterations that the DPM science team and the core of engineers engineers and project managers had when we were given different fill estimations to work with. And it looked very differently two months ago. The other thing, we're not sure this is how long this is if this is going to change so just keep in mind this is a this is a kind of moving target. And the benefits of or the information from DPM is, is being used to inform more than just set south. They're currently being used to inform project features and set north as well. And here we provided a sheet flow optimization criteria which is basically discharge per unit width that you don't want to go above in order to keep the landscape benefits of flow. And this has been used for as a screening tool for the model based designs for the L for canal spreader canal. And I'm not going to go into those details here because it actually requires a bit more context, and that's going to be discussed in part two of this presentation after we pause for questions. So I'm just going to before we go to the questions I'm just going to provide a quick summary of these successes where we have informed the design. And also provide some just a couple more additional successes where we've informed elsewhere so the information from marsh canal sediment dynamics is also informed the design discussions for reducing particulate phosphorus in the L 67 a canal as part and as 333 discharge structure that screening tool that I just mentioned is also being used for the Western Everglades restoration project. Communications have also been critical for success. Early on before DPM was installed and constructed. We have numerous communications between the agencies, the scientists and the public stakeholders which actually ultimately had the objectives of and the hypotheses of DPM, especially in the canal backfilling component. Also, there were numerous meetings between the water management district US Army Corps Everglades National Park and Florida International University, which were critical to making sure ecological objectives and the engineering design were compatible. And then finally, the timing in 2017, we were S 152 operations are reauthorized, which allowed us to do phase two of DPM. And that was critical because that's where we were able to implement those year round trigger operations, provide a do a scaled version of the active marsh improvement focus on some effects of flow and phosphorus loading which we're going to talk about in the second part, and also focus in on some of the canal marsh dynamics and a nutrient cycling in that area. And it's important because ecosystems take time to show you long term trends, and in particular provide statistically robust lessons. Okay, so that ends the first part of the talk. I think, is there, we're going to have time for questions or hope we run out of time for questions. Yeah, we have time for a couple of questions. Are you ready. I'm interested you speaking a lot about success and how you use adaptive management to kind of guide what you do the long process. What I'm interested in is, or their spots where adaptive management. You didn't have the right parts of adaptive management to move forward. You were lacking either in funding or you're lacking in data or you're lacking in structured design or decision making. Can you speak to that issue. Well, a lot of those things are the challenges which are kind of part two of the presentation. Okay, hold that quite I mean it's a great question from the DPM's perspective. One of the drawbacks of the experiment is that the canal backfill treatments if you saw them. There was canal flow going through that open canal and it just kept going into the partial and complete bill. Ideally, and in the original iterations of DPM before in fact it was called something else. There were three different levy gaps and canal backfill treatments in different parts of the entire system. And that would have provided a more integrative look at okay what does an open canal look like what does a partial canal, partial fill canal look like, but we had to, you know, can we live with a 3000 foot gap with adjacent backfill treatments. So we can learn some things. One of the things that we'll be talking about in part two is using modeling to bridge those gaps to. So I don't want to. Yeah, I just totally scooped I scooped myself. Thank you. So my question probably isn't as prescient as Dave's was. So, multiple iterations on figuring out the backfill design. You talked about, you know, waiting waiting for the next calculation on how much sediment with that was actually going to generate from a science enterprise perspective to that and essentially move as fast as it. It could given sort of the structure that you all were approaching this this planning and design process. You mean did the iterations move quickly enough. If you did an agile sprint exercise would this have solved your questions you know six months earlier that kind of thing relative to what your what the current structure is. I mean if I understand the question it's, could we have, could we have focused in on the issue and and come up with an answer right away. And really, one of the uncertainties that was causing that iteration was really about how much fill do we have to work with, and also how do you get it into that back into that ditch if you need more. In the science teams perspective, that wasn't something we had much control over. And I know there was a lot of time being spent trying to figure out how much fill is needed for all the different components of set south it wasn't just for the agricultural ditch. It had a much broader integrative problem solving going on. I think that question though is probably better answered from someone from the core who was looking at that on that. But the the DPM team, you know, whenever we would get information, you know, from the core about how much, you know, fill is reasonable. You know, we would gather the forces and come up with a plan like the one that we have now when we just showed you, we turned it around within a week. Once we were told, okay, you got all the fill you need, go for it. So, and that was over 4th of July. So thank you guys for working on that. Bill and then now. So, so if I understood correctly, and I wasn't clear on the timeline, in terms of when the AMI was applied to create those new clues. I have those that look like it was low flow in terms of the behavior that sort of surprised you in terms of where the flow was occurring. And I guess I'm wondering if those been subjected to extreme events and were there any lessons learned or surprises in terms of how those behaved under extraordinarily high. Yeah, you can feel free to correct me Sue. But actually, once those areas have been sprayed, and they were subsequently run over by airboats to smash down the saw graphs because it was just standing in the way. The first flow that we got once it was smashed down the picture that you saw with the open slews from the helicopter. And that was the highest discharge we had ever gotten, because it actually happened in a high, a high water event. There were some tropical stormers of something like that. So we almost got the maximum capacity discharges from the s 152 right away and that those are the velocities that that Sue showed you. That's 15 centimeters per second rarely ever happens. So we immediately got a good handle on what's the maximum capacity right away. Thank you, nature. But, but and then since then we've been dealing with much lower discharges just because, you know, nature. We have a pretty good idea but the bottom line is that we're still getting those elevated velocities about a kilometer or more away from the structure as before it be within 300 meters. So we know it's, it's been a thank you. Go ahead, Al, you're out there. Yeah, I'm here Jim thanks. And thanks Colin and Sue that was interesting. Some questions more technical I guess than the previous ones less about and so the spoils that are being added back into the canal in those areas where you're doing that are those originally what was dredged from the canal itself. And were they analyzed at all in terms of what their implications might be for the water quality in the canals as part of this project. I think are you referring to the agricultural ditch. I'm referring to your experimental design where you had areas that were filled with spoils and areas that weren't if I remember that correctly. If it was. It's the partial fill in the complete show I think is what he's talking about. Yeah, thank you. Let me just. Sorry, it kind of helps to make, make sure. Oh, believe me it helps me to it's difficult when you're doing this remotely. I don't know if that one but that one. Okay, yeah, this, the film material was from the levy. So, yeah, where you see no levy now that's where all that film material came from. And it was pretty much lime rock. Okay. Well, excuse me will any kind of as part of the analysis post design analysis include habitat quality or is this strictly in order to change the flow patterns. It was a bit of both. I mean we were interested in fact I'm sorry, this is going to actually be well way more explained in part two of this presentation. I didn't mean to be premature. No, no, no, it's confusing to everybody but yeah but the habitat quality though that you see in these pictures with the SAV is something that we do want it definitely has benefits and like I said it's the large fish. Catch per unit effort definitely increased with the film. Thank you. I'll provide some more tickets. Go ahead part two. Now we're moving on to the potential. We have hope that some of the information that we have has more use moments currently being used. So getting back to our little box on the left. One of the things that we recommended from the DPM project is that when we discharge through culverts, we need to have spread as well as for energy dissipators. I know that may sound odd for people who think, you know, the velocities that we see in the other glades, you know, the two to five centimeters per second were a thing that's phenomenal and I'm sure people working other parts of the world think oh my God that's a drip. But once we start getting up to the 15 centimeters per second and things like that. They significant negative impact on the ecosystem because now we're loading phosphorus and so even though we're providing phosphorus concentrations that are within the criteria for the state that by combining that with a high velocity we're having a lot of local loading. And so what you can see here is a slew downstream from the structure in 2015 you can see was a nice open water slew with water lilies and paraffin and just a mere five years later, it's overrun with cat hair. And the thing to be aware of here is this is not continuous discharge. The structure from 2013 to 2017 was only open two to three months a year. And from 2017 onwards, while I think at one point we had a maximum opening of six to seven months, we're not talking about year round flow. So what we're saying is that when we have high velocities this site is one of the sites ahead of the higher velocities we need to think about how can we dissipate that flow. So what do we say that it's a loading. Well, as many of you know, one of the causes for cocktail abundance in the other glades is phosphorus. And so we look at the phosphorus in the flock downstream of the structures. Over time, what you can find is the flock TP concentration that these higher velocity sites increased I mean they started out close to 500, and have now tripled during that shorter time period. And so again, you know, even though we're adding concentrations of phosphorus, the geometric mean of less than or equal to 10, we're seeing a dramatic increase in flock TP. This this line here, well the 500 milligram per kilogram line is there because that is what is considered by the Florida statute as being impacted. So once that sufficient soils in that case it was the top 10 centimeters of soil is above 500 milligrams per kilogram that is considered an impact site. And so what this is suggesting, this is a significant impact locally. However, it sites further downstream. We're seeing that same relationship. Now the thing to be aware of though is how do we hone in, how do we hone in on what the velocity should be that I mean wasn't the purpose of the DPM project to actually come up with a velocity did we not do our jobs I mean that kind of embarrassing. But the problem is, is that we're a phosphorus limited ecosystem. And so, when you add water to the system you're also going to have a phosphorus uptake gradient. So where you have your higher velocities you're going to have your high phosphorus and your lower velocities you're going to have your lower phosphorus because the fastest is going to be taken up it's just to very low levels and so while it may enter attend here once you get down here, you're at poor. So, it's not something you can, you can ever look at well what's, what would I have if I had a high velocity but low phosphorus concentration. What if I had a moderate velocity and moderate phosphorus concentration those relationships we did not see by looking at monitoring along the gradient. So understanding or what should we be looking at as far as load and flow and concentration we created this flu project, which we implemented in 2021. And so basically we had this screen type screening clear screening pushed into the sediments. It's about 60 meters long. And the way to look at this is we're not, this is not the area of concern. What we're looking at is the balloon, the flow way with funneling flow outside we're using this to funnel and increase velocities with this edge. And so this is actually one of Amy's moves. And so our goal was just to increase faster and flow velocities from the one centimeter per second to two to maybe three, as it narrows, coming past the balloon. And then what we did so we took measurements of velocity here and measurements of velocity here we measured phosphorus concentrations in the soils we looked at enzyme activity looking at phosphorus. And what we found is, first of all, we did in fact get the two to three centimeters per second here, which was good, meaning our design criteria. Whereas when there was no flow, we had one same reason second when the S152 was close and we were having equal distribution of flow, which was really good. Unfortunately, we've only had one flow event so far because last year it was too deep. This past quarter year it was too deep, we couldn't actually operate the S152 structure. So we've only had a few months of data during that one flow event. But during that time period, what we were able to show is that we did in fact see changes in enzyme activity just during that short six month period. But the water column suggested that we were reducing phosphorus limitation in the flow way. So we are seeing a biological response and hopefully, well, gearing up to slow, hopefully the end of August this year, and we'll be collecting more data. And so hopefully this project will allow us to hone in on well, what should the velocity phosphorus load concentration be? And what would that recommendation that we could then take to the CEP projects and say this is kind of how we recommend that you operate the system using these guidelines. And Colin is doing the fabulous job of actually bringing all this stuff together. I am not a modeler. And so, continuing with the Marsh stuff before he moves on to the canal, Colin is going to explain to me what he's doing in integrating this and synthesizing it. Thank you, Sue. So there are actually several synthesis efforts that are ongoing to really scale up all the findings from the Marsh that Sue has talked about with respect to phosphorus loading effects, ecological feedbacks to flow, and those sorts of things. And so this is just one of the modeling efforts that we're doing. And in this case, we're calibrating landscape phosphorus budgets to accomplish several objectives and two of those budgets for extreme and high flow or exemplified here. But they're basically, first of all, to take all the data and summarize the ecosystem phosphorus stocks and fluxes across these extreme high and low flow areas in DPM so we can understand what are the major players in what's moving phosphorus around, or how much is it leaving or staying or accumulating. And obviously with the models you want to use them because they can extrapolate the impacts of things like flow on ecosystem dynamics over larger temporal and spatial scales. And in particular, one of the things we're using these is to assess how quickly sediment phosphorus and that front of phosphorus enrichment is going to be moving downstream. And because it's a model we can also and will use it to evaluate scenarios of different water management and vegetation management options with the ultimate objectives that we're trying to figure out how best to maximize the benefits of flow, minimize the harmful impacts. So that's just a kind of quick taste of things that are ongoing, but they obviously have real impacts on how we recommend management of the system. So I'm going to switch back over to canal that was my little marsh time. It was fun, everybody. We're going to go back to the marsh. And this is, talk about the how the canal findings have the potential to inform restoration or set projects and serve. But it's important here to provide a bit more background about the restoration uncertainties that were addressed by DPM, and specifically on canal sediment and phosphorus dynamics. So the first uncertainty was to figure out to what extent do canals reduce the natural transport of sediments. And when we add flow, to what extent are we mobilizing phosphorus and rich sediments that are in the canal presently. So when we add backfill and limestone caps, are we effectively burying those high phosphorus sediments. And then to answer your question Alan. Yes, we were interested in understanding how backfilling can have an alter habitat quality, and the SAV was a big was one of the big findings and like I mentioned the fish results as well. And I think even before we had backfilled any of the canal than any of the construction is, we use sediment traps to collect sediment across the entirety of the L 67 C canal and control areas in areas that we're going to get impacted. And one thing we saw right off the bat was that canal sediments everywhere or, and highly enriched above 1000 milligrams per kilogram. And in the years after construction and at least three flow events, while the open canal sediments remained enriched, you see on the right, the ones in the field treatments remained unenriched and resembled values that were more similar to natural Now if you look at the slews downstream of the gap, what you found is that the sediments the benthic flocculate sediments became enriched in phosphorus downstream of that no fill site which exhibits the canal to marsh flow. And in contrast the sites downstream of the field treatments remained low in phosphorus although it is important to note that they do increase over time. So, looking at that no fill site close up here, just like we saw with the sites that were downstream of the S 152 that were getting high flows and loading phosphorus enrichment was followed by invasion of cat tail within a few years. And this result brings up the suggestion that canal flood plugs and backfill may have ecological benefits and might be needed for sep south to be successful. But it is a good question and it came up like, can we extrapolate these results to the larger sep south footprint, what are we missing here. Certainly this is because whereas in DPM, we had a small gap, but still a large amount of levy in place to final flows in the blue shanty flow way, the entirety of that levy is going to be removed so the hydraulics are going to be different. So we address this uncertainty with two efforts. The first one which was, I guess would go in the success category but it's here is that we recommended that contract one, the northern gap south of the 631 structure be relocated south of the 633 structure for a few different reasons. But first of all, because it provides a more immediate look ahead to the current sep south configuration, where you have leather removal and no backfilling. And because we are still monitoring at the DPM gap, we can compare it with the DPM gap which is mostly backfilled. So we have a basis for comparison. The second effort to get at this uncertainty is the is a model the blue shanty flow way model. The hydraulic model to assess flow conditions in the blue shanty flow way with a focus on what the flows are in and downstream of that L67C canal and degraded levy. The map here and the arrows show our collective best guess about how flows may look in the completed and current set design. So we expect canal flows to accumulate and reach a maximum somewhere in the southwest corner where it dead ends. And that would result because of that concentration flows that would result in high velocities and loading rates to those marshes downstream in that area. And if those velocities and loads are similar to what we see in DPM like in the gap or downstream of the structure, then phosphorus enrichment may occur as well. What's important is that this area you may have noticed is pretty close to Everglades National Park. It's within a kilometer. And so using the rough 100 meters per year advancement rate that Sue talked about earlier. The concern is that phosphorus enrichment could reach Everglades National Park within a decade or so. The blue shanty flow model is being used to estimate flows and loads in the current set south design, but it's also being used to identify the most cost cost effective options for plug and fill that can minimize that canal flow and achieve a more evenly distributed sheet flow and loads as originally in the set. So I'll just give you a brief overview of the model. The model domain is shown in blue here and running the model requires using a regional systems model to provide inputs, including structure flows, seepage and surface flows along the boundaries. A model of one version of the model is configured to present day conditions, and this is so we can use it to reality check or reality check it against actual DPM data to make sure the flows in the canal and the marsh are consistent with what's actually observed out there. And then we'll run a number of scenarios, including a future without modifications and also scenarios with different designs of plugs fill and levy elevations. And this work has been deemed creditable and cost shareable between the South Florida Water Management District and US Army Corps of Engineers, and is generally considered critical to inform self adaptive management. Okay, so that actually is the entirety of the talk, I will just again this table like the last time summarizes the potential ways that DPM is can it can inform Sir projects and close that feedback helix. Yes, say helix of the AM cycle. These actions as far have not been realized, and the reasons for those, I guess are the re, we're going to talk about that in the panel discussion. But I'm going to list a few of those challenges that we've seen and just talk through the or just list them here and we can discuss them more in the break if they're, if they're useful for that discussion. And this timing, incorporating, excuse me, a recommended action item is a lot easier and faster if it's considered a design refinement versus a major requiring a major amendment to an adaptive management plan. Another thing that's a challenge is whether something like adding a spreader swale or canal plugs which requires additional NEPA coverage. So DPM was anticipated for these things. And if it was, is it sufficient. And something that those two things have in common is that, and another, another aspects is that there we are constrained by the 2014 set PIR. We couldn't think of everything in 2014 because DPM hadn't even flown when that document was, you know, drafted and authorized. So there are things that we've learned, which I guess are part of that helical paradigm that you spoke of. And there's also differences in interpret in interpretation about what that document authorizes I believe between different agencies, including the extent and type of downstream water quality monitoring that can be done as well as sediment chemistry monitoring. And secondly, it always comes down to communication. And while we pointed out the benefits of communication from DPM and different aspects, the rapid and effective communication within and across partnering organizations and stakeholders as a challenge. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of time to reach agreements or not agreements. And one thing that the DPM team has always felt as we were talking with project managers from SAP and trying to see how our lessons learned could be adapted into construction features and things like that. We always felt like the design and construction train was either about to or had left the station. So aligning the timelines of adaptive management things like this and implementation is is the tricky part communication is key. Thank you Colin Sue. I think we'll go to break now for 10 minutes. And what time is it now. We'll come back at four o'clock for and we'll pick up with panel discussions. Well, you can stay where you are, but we're going to change the agenda a little bit, and we're going to have public comments now, and I think there are two of them. The reason we're doing that is because we didn't tell those members that we were going to move off the four o'clock slot. So, our first Davis. Well, first of all, I want to just thank you all on the committee for your service. This isn't really from the standpoint of an organization like mine by the way I'm Steve Davis Chief Science Officer of the Everglades Foundation. What you sort of provide back to us every two years in the biennial reports is incredibly valuable as a science based organization. We use that information to help inform our own science internally but we also use to help drive our advocacy efforts because coming from such an esteemed body. And realizing that you're sort of digesting all this information over years from both state and federal agencies, local agencies as well that we heard from earlier today. It's really a powerful tool. And just to speak as an example. The progress that we've made particularly at Tammy me trail and northeast shark river slew caught being a focus of the conversation this morning. It's, it's easy to sort of lose sight of how far we've come in such a short period of time. I, you know, my stomach still turns when I hear eight and a half square mile area but we're actually overcoming that as an obstacle to flowing water south and with removal of the terrain. Tammy me trail within the next couple of years we really have the opportunity to send restoration quantities into the park and that's a big deal but we also know that there's science that still informing the process with Colin and the presentations that we just heard about the decomposical model the considerations with phosphorus that we need to make sure that we're taking consideration of. Great progress. Obviously science still needs to be central in driving restoration implementation operations moving forward. I want to just take a quick note and speak to the level of collaboration and engagement that we've seen over the last five years or so. It's really been incredible at the federal level at the state level. The Water Management District and Army Corps of Engineers working together but also working to engage the public and groups like the Everglades Foundation. I think that's really been mutually beneficial because again it helps to support our efforts in advancing restoration but I've also seen how our work from a technical level is helped to inform restoration planning and implementation just over that brief period of time. So I think that those feedback opportunities are beneficial. I want to point to the fact that you know, I think Jennifer Otto mentioned earlier that they never expected that they would need to consider a one in 1000 year rainfall event in their resiliency planning. I think after this past month, many of us are realizing that we need to consider extreme heat, perhaps a little bit more in our understanding of the ecosystem and across the ecosystem from, you know, by geochemical cycling of elements how that impacts water quality potentially, plant and animal physiology was mentioned earlier about how heat affects plant physiology ultimately evapotranspiration rates. I think if we sort of consider this it's not that restoration or water management can mitigate extreme heat but I think we need to understand how that feeds into our assessment of Everglades restoration success and how potentially extreme heat can affect many of the variables that we're tracking in response to restoration just so that we understand its contribution to those outcomes. So I'll leave it at that again thank you for your service, particularly to the new folks welcome to the committee, your work's incredibly valuable to us. Thanks. And the last speaker if samples. Thank you. Good afternoon I'm if samples executive director at friends of the Everglades we were founded in 1969 by Marjorie Stoneman Douglas this is my first meeting of this type and I'm really delighted to be here and want to pay tribute to all of you for doing so many hours in a windowless conference room, examining the science of Everglades restoration. We think about it every single day it's daunting, and it can also be misrepresented in the public eye so what you do to make sure we're staying on course in terms of having science guide our work and our huge investment in this effort is really important. So, from some perspectives we're very encouraged that friends of the Everglades I've been in this role three years, and we see some progress, not just in the SERP realm but also in terms of water management. Loosam for example is showing signs that we're acknowledging the threat of toxic algae blooms in our water management system. Also loosam for the first time in any lake management plan acknowledges that Everglades National Park needs more water to the south so that's incremental but we're also concerned still about looming challenges particularly for water quality and the EAA reservoir. Your committee provided a great service in the last biennial review published in December in articulating those water quality concerns especially as it relates to the STAs I think you characterized those water quality concerns as challenging, a daunting challenge looming on the horizon. And of course we know that the EAA reservoir, arguably the biggest financial investment in terms of effort in SERP relies on the success of those STAs performing in terms of water quality. So in the biennial review published in December you articulated four very sound recommendations in terms of how we can make sure we stay on track in terms of water quality. So near term monitoring I won't go through all four of them they're in your report you know them better than I do. So we've amplified those recommendations to DEP and others, and I would just encourage you to make sure that those are looked at again when you in two years from now publish the next biennial review. It's after listening to the adaptive management conversation for the last hour or so I'm sitting here wondering how if we build a $4 billion reservoir with 37 foot I embankment walls that doesn't address water quality. How are we going to adaptively manage our way out of that so it's a question layman's terms I'm not a scientist you are but I hope you'll lend your your men's expertise to that question. So with that, I just want to thank you again and let you know that we'll be following your progress and eagerly awaiting your next report. Thank you. Now we'll go back to our panel discussion and this is a discussion on set challenges incorporating new science into decision making. And in addition to our in person panelists, I think we have Angie done of the US Army Corps of Engineers joining us virtually, and also Jenna may same affiliation also joining us virtually. Any questions from the committee. Thanks everyone for really interesting presentations right after lunch. And this is a general interest question that kind of reflects my ignorance of everything that's going on in the Everglades. So, when we have these really big extreme events, as we seem to be having more often. What does that do to these experiments these adaptive management experiments does it destroy the experiment. We provide an opportunity for new information and and if so does the process that was laid out work quick enough or efficiently enough to shift gears in those situations. And the question that came up before about the extreme event. I think that was an example of when for the DPM experiment. We were able to take advantage of it. As long as we had folks out there quickly getting getting data, we couldn't get all the infant, all the equipment out there in time. So we actually when we had our biggest flow event. We couldn't get our sediment traps out there so we couldn't measure sediment transport doesn't to say that we missed a huge opportunity but we could have learned something pretty valuable there. And some of that comes from the fact that it all comes down to timing again. When we had high water events and big rain events, and gates need to be opened. The DPM team will can say well, can you wait two weeks, you know, can you give us more time, but if the gate needs to be opened, it has to be open. That hasn't happened all the time. We have, we have had some successes, and making sure we can open gates, accordingly, but yeah high water events present some some difficulties and challenges for sure. I would say though. And this is not so much extreme events but sometimes nature doesn't give you equal conditions for the entirety of your experiments so once we had that big water event when we just opened up those big Amy slews ever since then, we've had high waters, which ironically have prevented us from flowing because it always went above that high mark so we didn't have some opportunities like that. As a result, we've only been able to monitor discharges that were below the averages pre Amy so ironically most of our flow is actually slower. Since Amy but the USGS folks in particular did a really good job of parsing out and controlling for different conditions and looking at relationships of velocity versus discharge, and we're able to look and get those measure those effects through more like robust and intricate statistical analysis but you know that's one way we try to work around it is to read into the data a little bit more, but there's nothing like having a nimble field crew that can go out there. Within a matter of days and collect data when you need it. I'll open that quickly, but you had a Baki analysis. So wouldn't that Baki design mitigate problems with extreme events, because presumably the extreme events are affecting your control too. Yeah. That that extreme event wasn't really. It didn't really affect the Baki because all the other events were were fairly similar. Had we had we had sediment traps out there, we probably would have just had a bigger average to compare to with the with the controls but yeah that is one of the powers of the Baki and the need for the Baki experiments to have a control. But, but one thing that we learned with the Baki experiment is that you may think you have your controls in the right place, but you may actually get flow going to one of the more than you expected because the landscape flows east and not south. So that we, nevertheless, the statistics are pretty robust even with that spillover of a flow going, going east. But yeah that's that's right. Can I just add one point to that if one of the things was, was there something else that we also could have learnt. One thing we couldn't take advantage of some of these big flow events is the fact it actually ended up being a big sediment moving event or a big paraffin slew clearing event. What we found is you would go out into the ridges and you would see this dense paraffin mat these racks just coding the edges of the ridges. And so it kind of did reinforce that concept of sediment transport and actually also the role of nature in slew clearing and creating sediment transport opportunities and topography. The dilemma of course is we didn't have met measurements before that event occurred so we couldn't go out and say well, a catastrophic event or a historic wet condition would create this much for landscape topographic change. So because we didn't have the data beforehand we couldn't then take advantage of of the data we could have collected afterwards. The theme here is adaptive management but I have a technical question about the Decomp experiments and I may have missed this, but you talked about these increases in paraffin phosphorus long term decreases particularly in the open channel. So, what's, I have two questions first one. Do we know what the mechanism is behind driving that and the second question is about talked about mitigation by Phil adding calcium carbonate and I know down here calcium carbonate is very abundant but if the goal would be to reduce phosphorus would it be useful to look at other types of film material that might be fairly effective at immobilizing phosphorus that I mean I guess that's as another experimental dimension to it and maybe you don't want to go there but it seems to be it might be something worth considering so two questions sorry. I'm going to boot the phosphorus immobilization question to see if she's a way better chemist than I am. Your question was about the disappearance of paraffin with flow, like, was that the question what's the mechanism for that. No, I thought you talked about the Phil, right would mitigate the mobilization canal phosphorus right you I think you specifically mentioned limestone or calcium carbonate and you know that's a possibility but there are other possibilities as well that you know maybe they're not maybe they're too expensive but there are other materials that can potentially effectively be more effective than limestone immobilize phosphorus if it's a chemical mechanism. The whole chemistry of phosphorus immobilization has been an interesting and complex discussion that's been happening for many, many years in the Everglades ecosystem. Dating back to times where there was questions about marsh readiness of any water that would come out of an area that you had chemical amendments. There's a big concern about, you know, would you have aluminium leaching would you have other things leaching because we are very sensitive system so the premise behind the limestone was the fact that it is naturally abundant here is part of the ecosystem and we are seeing that you know it can act as a cap. However, the concept of different things to immobilize the sediments and immobilize the phosphorus in the sediment is currently being explored as part of the S333 working group with the idea there that we're seeing periodic spikes in phosphorus before it enters Everglades National Park. And some of the questions associated with that is how much of that is attributed to the resuspension of the canal sediments and ideas that are currently being floated around include looking at mechanisms to to keep that in situ but also approaches to maybe that phosphorus onto other things whether it be using some kind of biochar or something like that but again that also has its own chemistry concerns and what the unintended consequences of that would be. So, as far as looking into it we are but we didn't do that within this project but they are considering evaluating that as part of the S333 initiative. I think it's Stephanie then Tracy and then john. So I think I have two related questions, but I want. So, so the fundamental question is really related to set what factors dictate the successes of adaptive management versus the challenges of adaptive management like which pieces go through well versus which pieces don't go through well. And the related question is how much is it. Based on what you put in the plan in the first place. So when I went back and read the plant plan on the plane. Like there's nothing in here about canal filling that I can find anywhere. Like you did this huge TPM experiment and there's nothing about canal. Does that matter. In terms of your ability to go forward with canal filling was that like can you explain how that happened. And, but then that's just part of a question on successes and failures. I'll take a quick stab and then and then run away. So if we had these discussions with multi agency discussions, as we were finishing up DPM and set was in the coming online design phase trains leaving the station phase about how to translate our lessons into action items. You mentioned the spreaders Wales or the canal backfilling and the spreaders Wales, those met with a lot of challenges, because one, they, the requirement for NEPA was considered to. I mean, I might have my facts wrong, but people were expecting that that would just take too many years to allow, say a backfill to be part of a current set contract that could be wrong. But that required a lot of time and also I think that like I said that comes down to these things are expensive to to backfill a canal where, especially when it wasn't planned for. Why canal backfilling wasn't in the set PIR in 2014 I think is a big question. And I can't explain why it wasn't. I wasn't privy to the whole writing phase but I do remember we were having conversations. I think in 2013 about choosing between the different alternatives, modeling alternatives that would, you know, basically say set has to have the blue shanty flow way. And it did come up that we know the DPM experiment hasn't even flowed yet, and that we may learn some things. But if I could go back 10 years. I would say, whatever we need to do, put some flexibility in there, put some flexibility in that language that would account for that. I'm not sure that that would do the trick because you would also have to have, you know, some, maybe some funding set aside as well. But, you know, I think that that would have been a big part of it is to have that language in the PIR. In the adaptive management plan with that accounted for NEPA, but it would have had to have been budgeted for that. Okay, so I think the most direct answer is for the core, it all comes down to authorization. It comes down to cost and it comes down to schedule. So if it was a component, a management measure within the original set PIR, you have authorization, you've already budgeted for cost, and you've already done the National Environmental Policy Act compliance. Right, so it's already built into the schedule. And as I was talking about earlier, it'd be nice to have a crystal ball during the planning phase so you can anticipate everything that you need, so that it could be a very streamlined straightforward process, so that you check off all of the boxes and you move forward. But with the DCOM physical model, and I have to say, I'm in this process at the 11th hour with DCOM. I think the conversations that we learned, right, part of the adaptive management process and especially active adaptive management, we're supposed to take those lessons learned and incorporate them into our plan. But the challenge is, how do we do that if we don't have the authorization for it. So, we can do it, but it's a lengthy process because you have to go back for additional authorization. There are some certain things that could be considered design refinements. And those design refinements, if they're within our chiefs discretionary authority, and we have, you know, budget for it, then, sure, then that may require additional environmental policy act compliance or documentation. And as a former NEPA writer, I never want that to be the thing that stops something, right. It may make it take a little bit longer. And that's when you bump into the schedule issue, right, because as you were talking about earlier, we have congressional appropriations. So, you have a certain amount of money that goes to a certain contract and it has to be spent within a certain amount of time because funds expire, right. So, it's the Anti-Deficiency Act, all of the things that go into the budgeting process. So, again, another factor. And so I think those are some of the challenges that we truly have with adaptive management, because we want to take lessons learned from other parts of SERP and apply them to informed design. And I think that was easier to accomplish in SEP North when we were talking about lessons learned from LILA to help inform design of those hydrologic speed bumps, those hammocks within the Miami canal. But those were already in the Miami canal. Those were already part of the authorized project. We all knew how much fill we had available because in the authorized project they planned, you know, you have this amount of fill available. From the backfill of the Miami canal to create these features. This is the cost associated with it. Yes, it was cost in 2012, but you factor for inflation and they have a way of doing that where you come up with a new project cost. So, there's lots of different factors that, you know, are definite challenges, right. But also, we want to try to find a way to get around those challenges so that we can truly incorporate that information because we know we need it for project success. So can I just clarify was that egg canal in the PIR that was filled in the PIR, but it wasn't okay. So it's just refining the design of how that was filled but the actual canals. Yeah, Stephanie actually asked my question. But and you sort of addressed my broader question based upon, you know, how the decomposical models being used for adaptive management in a broader sense of, is this going to be a major hindrance to adaptive management down the line for all of the projects. I sure hope not because you know this honestly this is the first one. Yes, this game Bay coast of wetlands has adaptive management, but that's operation right and so there's not a cost involved with that other than if we need additional national environmental policy documentation right that's something that's within the flexibility we already have. But this is the first large scale implementation of adaptive management insert right and so there's a lot of bugs that we have to work out right there's a lot of process issues and challenges and you know just the different interpretations of guidance, you know, we may interpret something at the Jacksonville level where as it has to go all the way of our chain to headquarters if you're going to change the adaptive management plan. And that was part of the issue with that. It's not just Jacksonville wanting to make a determination, we have to go ahead and do that vertical One quick follow up question. Sure. So what makes the determination for you to actually go through the lengthy process of chain of, you know, going through the need for process and starting to fill canals based upon new data that suggests that there's many benefits to doing that. So are you asking what what would be the process so the process. I'm sorry for trigger for deciding it's worth going through the link. I'm always up for, you know, if it's worth it, let's fight for it. But, you know, it comes down again to to schedule and to the cost associated with it. And is it within the approved authorized total project cost. Right. Is there room and contingency for it. So those are the things that have to be very well defined in order to make that decision of yes, it's within our authority. Yes, we have, you know, the cost is appropriate for that then let's go down that process. But if you're asking to add, you know, a lot of money above what we have for the entire contract. It's probably not going to happen in that contract, but it happened in another one. Sure, but we have to go back and for one month. I just wanted to go back to the active, active adaptive management and the experimental design and you guys highlighted the value of the Baki approach. But it seems like there's really not any replication because it's just, you know, individual sites. So have you thought and I understand doing landscape skill experiments is definitely a challenge. And some of the projects I've been involved with that had similar limitations, but what about trying to incorporate some replication across, you know, not necessarily for this project, but for future active. So that you, you don't just have single treatments, but it makes, you know, replicate. Unfortunately, that comes down to funding. I mean, as Colin mentioned, the original design for the DPM project had replicated flowways, not just replicating house, but also replicated flowways. And it just became cost prohibitive. So I think if we can, we would always go for replication, but we're not always financially in a position to do so. One thing, one thing I'll add to that is we, we also, even though there was a Baki design and that was the heart and soul of the data set. We realized that we, I think it was the year before we flowed just in case flow does something that we don't know about, let's make a spatial sampling design. And so we had as part of a cover. In fact, we worked with Mike, Dr. Mike Ross's team at FIU to come up with us some sampling grids that we could look at the spatial coverage of flow and at least look at the, you know, have a surface, a response surface of flows and and loading. And so we, we kind of use that to, you know, so that we wouldn't be saying this is our control site. This is what it's doing. It's acting like the rest of that landscape way out west, your way out east. So we, we did feel comfortable with both of those sampling designs. I'm not sure the field crew liked having two sampling designs. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. So, I just wondered if. Yes. Try not to populate again. I wondered if cultural resources and tribal interests are criteria within the adaptive management framework as a whole or within individual projects in particular and if so what would be the best sources of information either documents and or individuals for the committee to learn more about that. Up to this point, cultural resources themselves, or are not part of the adaptive management plan they are part of the cultural resources assessment in the project implementation report. As I said on our PDT's and also our eco sub teams, we have significant involvement from tribal representatives and scientists to help and subject matter experts to help us inform those monitoring plans and adaptive management plans. That's a really great resource for us for those plans when we're writing them, as well as there. There is significant involvement from various individuals when we're also having PDT updates and talking about what next or now that we're going into this next step of step. There's significant involvement at the workshop that Gina mentioned so that we gain all perspectives possible out there and all knowledge base is very welcome and we really appreciate the participation with that to help inform. So, hope that answers your question. Yeah, because thank you. I just wanted to add one thing. I think it was Kevin that was mentioning earlier, the new recover module, the Southwest Florida module, in which we have active tribal representation in that and where we're trying for the first time to have a performance that includes that Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge. So the idea is to listen and let the tribes guide us to where that information belongs within our footprint and how we can best utilize information that they would like to convey. But again, over the last couple years, recover is kind of taken, I don't want to say a backseat, but we want the tribes to share with us what they would like to share, and we'll take all information provide. Dave and then Wendy. Jeff, if you're next. You're waiting there politely. I miss you. Nice to protect you buddy. That reminds me of the Jerry Seinfeld routine where it's good to be next for a while so like light fast on but I'll go I'll go ahead. My questions a little, a little bit of a tangent, I want to ask about these management options matrices, which are, you know, a big part of the SAP. And they're picking strand has some and they seem to be cropping up everywhere and look like they're going to be an important am tool in the future and I realize it's early for SAP but do you have any because none of the examples we heard today involved those are there any examples yet of those actually coming into play anywhere at a project level or anything. Or is that just something we can expect to see down the road when things have been a project's been operating longer. I'm trying to sort through all the PIRs I have in my brain right now. I believe for the most part the management option matrices so what those are is it says what the uncertainty is at what attribute is being measured frequency of measurement and then a threshold or what we want to see with improvements and what would be bad if we saw something else. And then there's the management option is in the last column, and a lot of them are operational because we can do so much with operations to help benefit the system. Some of them are to some of them are definitely going to be put in place after things are operating. Some of them so there is some language to help inform design as well in there. But again I'd have to look at it again it's been a couple days. Okay, but they do play a very important role and it's also important that we are able to have some flexibility within there because that's again had canal backfill potentially been in the set mom then that might have been a potential option. So, we're learning. And also, I, it was not part of the set PIR but when, when I was talking about how the DPM team was talking with set project managers about making adaptive management happen right. So, we ended up turning this eight to nine month period of weekly meetings into a recommendations document was more like an active, you know, action item of lessons learned. This is what you can do to fix it. And just when we thought we had finished that document. We recommended that we make a management options matrix to codify this stuff. And so we did, and it added about 20 pages or something to that document but but we you know we we, it forced us to kind of put these the lessons that we've learned into thresholds if you see this much, you know, enrichment here, then you need to do basically the things that we that Sue and I talked about these are your options. But it also requires that you have monitoring place that you can detect those thresholds. And that, you know, that monitoring may or may not be sufficient but yeah it's clear that adaptive management has been happening outside of that framework I just wondered if it had started to happen yet inside of it like picky and strand red if Becker wasn't in in there, any of their moms. So that was kind of out something that happened outside of that process but I guess we'll watch for that in the future. Yeah, and we're looking right now the partner agencies are working through the process by which we can update these adaptive management plans as I said they're intended to be iterative and living documents, built off new documents so and information even from baselines that are gained. So we're working through that process of how to then take, and take the information and new management option matrices with recommendations and be able to incorporate them into an updated document. It's, it's an interesting challenge when you're working with an authorized document to try to have a component of it that's intended to be iterative and changing and updated. So my question is, is more process oriented follows on Tracy's question, and what you, what you presented on set, because I think it's a great example for saw. My concern is or my question is, is as we gain knowledge and set clearly has brought us new knowledge on flow on phosphorus, etc. I may point to a different approach in terms of broad scale where do we want to put our priorities are focused etc. So my question is, is as we gain this knowledge. And the other thing is, is I understand and correct me if I'm wrong that set was initiated pre recover. Is that. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So it was, it was kind of initiated outside of the recover. Okay, so it is in the recover. Well, we were talking earlier, and the point is, is the, the recover mechanism to take the information from the project and take that forward. That did not exist. That's, that's where I'm going towards because now as we gain new information that may require a may may provide us an opportunity to look at where we're prioritizing our efforts. So how do we capture that. Is that in the annual recover process, is it in the five year report, Gina that you referred to, you know, how do we, where is the place that we can now go back and say, should we be doing more of what has now been identified through the set process, or, you know, I'm just trying to get a sense of how would we take knowledge and apply it adaptively to making better decisions on where we put money. So I'm going to see if Angie or Jenna would like to speak. I most certainly can answer the question, but I honestly, I forgot Jenna was behind me. I do want to give them an opportunity to say something. So I think there are opportunities throughout that. POC interaction point process that Gina covered earlier. That's just one way that we can feed the project information and make sure there's integration throughout the program, the CERT program and feed into the lessons learned. There's also other things that Recover is doing to assess. Can you repeat your question more time I want to make sure I'm going down the right, right tangent. My question is, sorry for the feedback. How do we in the decision process. And if it may require a kind of a reassessment of where funding and initiative is going. It's in the broad in the broad context not individual projects per se, but it could be an individual project but it's just how do we use information that's coming forth. Okay, so through that POC process. That's where we pull the individual projects recover also conducts system wide assessments through what we call our system status report something that we've used in the past to actually process across the system kind of how things are performing and through that assessment. We can document recommendations for things that we're seeing in terms of how things are responding and make recommendations to project management on what we think needs to be in order to get to the ecological goals that we've set. We also conduct modeling exercises that can give us the same kind of information. But in a modeling framework, where we can also document those kinds of recommendations to provide to project management. And there are a few places that we can make the document basically capture that information and document it and share it through the program and in point two areas that need improvement. Based on those kinds of assessments and modeling exercises. I was kind of general response and I can go into more detail but I'm trying not to get to into the weeds. The constraints associated with conducting a replicated experiment for DPM and I was just wondering, like how much is too much money to spend on an active adaptive management experiment who decides that who pays for it is the kind of estimated construction cost? Is there some cost benefit ratio? How does the budget come to that? It's my understanding and I hope that you guys will correct me if I'm wrong that an active adaptive management plan cannot exceed 20% of the project costs. And in the case of the DPM project initially it was going to be reliant on other projects for funding but then in addition to doing the science it also had to pay for the construction of the structure. It's a very significant amount of money that could be used to use to conduct the science and it's like 90% of the project, something like that. I have to say I'm still struggling with the phosphorus dimensions of the become physical model and I'm wondering if you can kind of simplify it in terms of implications for different pathways because one implication would be you don't plug the canal and lots of phosphorus pours into Everglades National Park and now you're violating the appendix A criteria. So when I hear examples of like adaptive management that works well it seems like there's a hammer somewhere like the Endangered Species Act that says you can't go down this path and you have to go down another path. It seems to me it's a big hammer to violate water quality. Is that raising did I interpret that correctly and is that raising alarm enough to think that maybe plugs are required so you don't get down the path of pouring phosphorus into the park and then saying, Oh, we actually knew that that was going to happen but we didn't have the right element in the plan and now we'll change it 20 years later. Yeah, I mean, when we kind of extrapolate those results like I showed you to the blue shanty flow a scale from the ecological perspective that was our expectation, is that when you're going to get that much canal flow, you're going to be stirring up those inner sediments, and on top of it you're going to be getting high flows which in and of themselves create enriched conditions just by how they change the system. Yeah, I mean, and that that kind of brings up the question that you brought up David to is that we the DPM team was realizing this was a potential issue. Or like as early as we could like 2018 is when we started talking about this and actually sending memos round about the benefits of canal backfilling. So part of that is, you know, when you talked about what changes what communications have to occur, part of that is the project people, you know, the scientists themselves have to be aware when they see something that they think needs to be elevated. And that was, you know, basically communication has to be organic as well. But yeah, that what would be very helpful though, on top of this extrapolations kind of intuitive extrapolation is when we can have some model simulations showing will the plugs work do we need to backfill, where is the best place to put them. You know, I think that kind of concrete information would maybe help guide the conversation of focus the conversation a bit more. We could get a handle on those things. As much as we are trying to keep it on track, there's a lot of modeling going on. So, yeah. So, to what extent can or are our future scenarios being incorporated into the AM for example just talked in the morning about rainfall and extreme rainfall so to what extent are those being incorporated into the process or can they be incorporated to the process. Right now, it will be very actively incorporated I believe into the BBCR, which hasn't been written yet. But in developing their performance measures and the other modeling efforts and that is ongoing and the sea level rise scenarios that they are running to attain the preferred alternative. It will be incorporated into that plan. As far as previous plans. I'm not sure there may be some if we were to update them. But at this time, other than stochastic storm events, there's nothing because they they try to focus around what the project can actually do what the project is in is can handle it. They can't do anything about temperatures getting hot. But like somebody said, it's like, well, we can look at who the ecosystems responding instead. So I think we're taking really great strides forward in the BBCR study effort to really you know in the future look forward to get that captured. That also reminds me of what we when we were in our third flow event in DPM. We were facing a strong El Nino condition, which was going to be bringing a lot of water into the Everglades. And I believe there were conversations about opening up the structure, even though we had just closed it that it would need to be opened up again because of water coming down the system. We worked on a revised trigger. I think it was called the dynamic trigger the weekly trigger that we could look at TP from every every data point and make a projection every two weeks so we could actually reopen the structure we have. Sorry, some of those memories are buried deep. But now that your mind made like we actively work to get a mechanism to open that structure because we knew that the high water events were really important to capture. And I think that's kind of speaks to the importance of trying to make your experiment, your on the ground field measurements adaptable to get those high water conditions. And that actually was, we got such good data from that, that we were able to kind of stop some of our sediment transport monitoring and move on to the biogeochemistry, because we had such a great response surface the data was robust, and then we could move on to other mechanisms, but it does point to sometimes scientists have to scramble. And fortunately, we work with operation, you know, water managers and project managers to get that, you know, operational trigger in place in time to open instruction kind of tangentially related. Any more questions from the committee. Okay, we're going to go. Thank you panel. We're going to go on to our last panel now. And this is how to improve the process for adaptive management and science informing decisions making in SERP. Okay, the last panel focused on set. All right, Central Everglades planning project, this is system wide. And we have a different cast of characters up there for panel, or who, who look across these systems. And I think we should have I'll check and online. Oh, we're, we're right into the Q&A. Any questions from the committee. You have a half an hour left. Buck up folks. I'm going to jump in. Nobody knows. Oh, you. Yes, I'm going to open. Hi, I'm Kim V tech. I'm with the Corps of Engineers and I'm here wearing the programs and project management hat. And I wanted to respond to your question earlier regarding how we budget. So for the quick answer, Gina already kind of mentioned it for our South Florida ecosystem restoration program. We do typically have one budgeted line item for construction once we have an authorized project. So that was one of your questions initially. And our budget process is two years long. So like right now we're getting close to the end of our fiscal year, right? So we're in FY 23. We just submitted our budget request for FY 25. Yes. So two years out, we said, here's what we are going to be doing. This is our need or capability. And then at the same time, we are also justifying and defending what our budget request is for the very next fiscal year, which is FY 24 coming up. And at the same time, we're also executing the current year, you know, money that we have in delivering. One of the things that's unique about our program is that we have one non federal sponsor, the Water Management District, a couple of Water Management District. So we're 5050 project sponsors with them. We share all the costs 5050 all the way from start to finish. So with that we have a much more flexibility within the program, which is why we have that one line item budget from Congress versus having to budget for every single individual project. So once we have our line item that we are appropriated for a given year, we have work that was already planned. You know, that plan was made two years ago, and things do shift. So we have a little bit of flexibility within our program, based on need to be able to kind of reallocate within our program in a given year. So if something slips, something can get accelerated, we do have a little bit of flexibility to make some adjustments in our funding and move money around small dollars amounts for what's already been authorized and we do do that. But for future work we've been using SEPA as the primary example. That particular project actually had a very robust monitoring and adaptive management plan in the PIR. So when that when that report was approved, we had a total project cost the 902 limit which I think a couple of people have also hit on. So that 902 limit gives us flexibility, because it's already taken into consideration some of the unknown risk factors that we're talking about here related to adaptive management. And as Gina mentioned, it is updated regularly with inflation so that number does grow a little bit as we go. And so for the stuff that we know that we've already planned for, we are going to plan for it two years out and we're going to budget for it. So with the intent to execute the monitoring or what may already be built into it. Now, if something additional happens down the line. That's where there's been a little bit more discussion here and Gina mentioned there's, you know, a little bit different interpretation, but we do have already existing guidance on what to do if it is something small like maybe we just want to do a little bit more and that could be something that we could adjust just within our program allocation ability. However, if it's something larger, like a design change, we already have processes in place to do engineering reports packers and there's a variety of them. So based on what the scope of work of that changes, we would then assuming it was approved whatever that was, we would then defer the technical team on what type of post authorization change report would be required, not all of them require going to the technical service. So it just depends on what it is. And that would be developed through the technical teams to determine that and that would also determine, you know, if NEPA would be required also if a full reformulation was required if NEPA was going to be impacted, and then we would plan accordingly. And generally, if it's something new, we would have to then forecast out in our budget planning and get approval for that. And that would not be an overnight change. Hopefully that covers some of the questions, some of you guys have had. Marla. Thanks, Jim. Maybe I'll just give voice to the question that's went on the list here, which is, are there opportunities for incorporating itech into SERP. Rephrasing the question that I've already asked and I'm sure you're tired of hearing, but, but we have a job to do, you know, we are tasked with assessing inclusion of cultural resources and tribal interests, and that's a relatively new task for us. And so just need to know what documents do we need to be looking at who do we need to be talking about and really appreciate your help on that while we have the benefit of your presence in the room today. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Craig van de Heiden. I work for the Mikosukee tribe. I think they aren't any documents. And I think that's the problem. And to kind of preempt that the Mikosukee have been collecting traditional ecological knowledge. Recently, we submitted a paper, a letter to the US Fish and Wildlife, talking about some of the traditional ecological knowledge that describes how the water used to flow through the S-12A and B gates. Before they were gates, right, how the water used to flow. The Mikosukee used to have a state reservation that occurred from 41 all the way down to Cape Sable and Everglades National Park. They existed throughout the landscape. And so they know how the water flowed. They know what brought the birds in. So Western science has caught up to that in a sense. There's been studies that have shown that with water flowing through Western Everglades National Park. It stimulates the prey base, most likely the Perkin Barris and Alanine crayfish. It also has to be a fishless area. So it does dry down. But it's an area where there used to be slews and ridges because the Mikosukee used to canoe through that area. Used to go from island to island. And so I think we are trying to preempt what you guys are doing because there isn't any documentation on it. And so we're trying to provide guidance. There are certain things, as Kevin mentioned, that are culturally, we're not able to share. And so we do proxies. So for example, when we're doing fire management, fire might stimulate the growth of a particular species of vegetation that is important to the Mikosukee. But we're not going to tell you what that plant is. We might just say, you know, wetland prairie, something like that. So we're not going to tell you exactly what's going on, but we will give guidance as it goes ahead. And I think a positive guidance that we did have is when Gina was doing sep north and we're looking at the constructing of the hammocks. And she did approach the Mikosukee and we did give guidance on that. Thanks. Could I ask a follow up question? So while there may not be any current documentation of active pursuit of this, there are definitely documents that are effectively authorizations to engage in this timeline and places where it's flagged as something that's important. And it would be a valuable to the committee to be able to look at those, to know what those are, and to review them. And so again, if I could just ask for your help in identifying those, I'd really appreciate that. Absolutely. And what I'd like to add is, you know, back in 1999, when the yellow book, the SERP environmental impact statement was written, you know, recover was specifically set up for 10 federal and state agencies and the two tribes to guide restoration. So although there may not be any formal documentation, we've been coordinating under the recover umbrella since the implementation of SERP. Hi, so I'm Laura Brandt with US Fish and Wildlife Service, and I also am a member of the recover executive committee. And I also have a few opinions about adaptive management, which are potentially three different hats. I think from your question about, I'm not sure I'm quite getting at what you're looking for, but might be, because the Department of Interior now has a memo from the White House saying, don't shout now, think about these things that we didn't think about. So if that's the kind of stuff that you're looking for, we can help you track down those different pieces of things. And the bottom line is there's something at that higher level that's pretty general and then each department and each agency has their own way to go forward with it. That's the short answer. So we can help you find where those things are because they're all in different places. Thank you. Okay. Great. We would greatly appreciate that. Okay. So, we heard a little bit in the last, the last session about ecological responses and so while we have some of the ecology thinking folks up here I want to ask this. We heard just a little bit about ecological responses and how that was being utilized and adaptive management. I wonder if you could offer your opinions on where you see opportunities for ecological inputs to be used more in current science, like some of the things you talked about earlier. Yeah, that might be used in decision making in terms of future planning. And I really like to hear both low hanging fruit in terms of things that you know already exists and you'd love to see actually utilize for decision making and then also maybe aspiration like wouldn't it be great 10 years from now if we're at a point where we can be doing. Oh boy. I mean, I think we've got a pretty good set of indicators there were, there was a lot of monitoring that was cut back around 2011 2012 that it would be nice to, you know, be able to reinclude. So we've had a lot of cutbacks in the monitoring program design and in some places we're hurting because of that. And I think where I'd like to see things go is to develop better. Okay, so I'm the quantitative ecologist I like reporting. So I want to see us connect the feedback loop so that we can very quickly turn around the monitoring information on the ecological side and the hydrological side into information that is useful to managers. It's possible to start streamlining those reporting processes so that that are our PIs, for example, are not having to recreate things for three different reports that are slightly different. I mean, that's annoying. So wanting to create, you know, I'd like to, you know, create the code to help the PIs so they can turn out the graphics and work on developing graphics that are as informative to the water managers and the different project managers as possible. There's a little bit of arc to that as well. So, so connect, you know, smoothing out that connection of channeling that information back into decision making and making the communication happen. So, funding, get the monitoring up to speed and connect those feedback loops and so start developing more tools that are useful to, you know, help. So we got some of them already. So you see it with a cave stable sea sized ferro everybody's looking at, you know, the percentage of the discontinuous hydro period and the in the in the different subpopulations, we can calculate that every day. There's other, you know, metrics that we're starting to work on calculating every day. And that way that information it makes it easy to get it in front of the water managers and help explain what the story is. Yeah, I think the reporting is important, but I think also looking at the system as a whole. I think too often and set and insert we look at these just these compartmentalized projects, and we don't look at the whole. And sometimes we miss the forest for the trees in a sense. So I think that the managers and the people in charge should start looking at the whole and how modeling will integrate into another part. For example, Western evidence restoration that hasn't even started yet, but because it's not part of anything, none of that modeling gets in nothing infers the modeling from future projects or projects that are outside the realms of that particular entity. I jump in on the follow up to what Andrea said and just ask you what would you need to get to the point of more streamlined reporting. Is it just like developing a process that people can follow. I mean, top has tried to forge some new ground, and it's buying your report though it's not served so someone has to embrace that and it may be incredibly labor intensive. Or is it a staffing issue. Is it money. Is it all of the above. Okay, that was in charge of the world, which I am very clearly not and my boss is in the back there. I have, you know, a diet data scientist that I could basically target to, you know, sit down with the different PIs and help develop some of this reporting and then we start experimenting with it and trying out different ways of presenting the data putting it in front, I mean, we're already doing this to some extent that everybody's overloaded. Put it in front of the ecosystem based management calls put it in front of the, you know, periodic scientists calls. What people relate to what do people, you know, say, Oh, I like that but it would be better if, you know, so having somebody who, you know, is really at our coding or Python coding and can take this and take it to the next level and make it so that it's so that the PIs, it becomes something that the PIs, the various different principle investigators could, you know, pull out of a library and very easily use. And so for, for example, during one of our recent workshops, it came out that, you know, daisys dry down is very is actually at different water depths for hydrologist versus a fish person which is five centimeters versus an alligator which is more like I think 15, 15 centimeters or inches. Okay. And so if they have the code and they can just modify what that depth is, then they can rerun the same code and then correlate it to their data, but we just need to have, you know, somebody we could assign to doing that kind of task, as well as provide the direction on where to go first in order to start making this happen. My two sons for it. I'm not in charge of the world. So, so if I were in charge of the world. But a lot of what Andrew said, but I would go back another step and I would think about it too in the context of what we had originally set up is the vision for what recover would would help to facilitate. But it goes back to a comment that was made about the monitoring. And this ties into adaptive management because in order to do adaptive management, you have to do monitoring. And you have to do enough monitoring to actually be able to answer the questions that you're trying to answer. And, and I don't think we're doing that right now. In addition to that you need to have the people that are thinking about what those questions are in a way that then you can then frame them so that they are the questions that are going to help you understand whether or not understanding that uncertainty would change your decision. So we talk about uncertainties but we were not all talking about things in the same language. And that is because we're in different agencies and we have different guidance as Gina pointed out for what about the management is. We're doing way better than we were doing before so don't get me wrong on that, but we still have that communication of what adaptive management is, and what it's not and is adaptively managing an operation schedule adaptive management. It's not the context of serve it is, but in other contexts it might not be. And, but it's also the difference between the language of engineers and ecologists, because the level, what you mean by certainty is a whole lot different in those realms and and that there's the, if you're talking about cubic feet per second, through a structure that doesn't mean anything to an alligator, they want to know how much depth and so I'm more like the alligator than than the local to the structure. So it's working through some of those kinds of linguistic uncertainties that that are challenges in our getting the data and synthesizing it and presenting it because we're looking at it in different ways. And we need the resources to be able to have people who can dedicate their time to doing that, not have it be another duties as assigned or simply a task. So it's in when recover was originally thinking about how our models would work. One of the things was we were had these vision this vision of module teams where there was a coordinator of the module team the module team would be made up of of engineers and hydrologists and ecologists, and, and they would work together to synthetically look at the questions and analyze the data and pull it together. So yeah, if we could, if we could get to that, then I think we'd be doing a whole lot. It would be a lot easier to move some of this stuff forward. I'd like to add something to I think it's important with the monitoring to consider traditional ecological knowledge as well, because that is on parrot with Western science. And a good example when I first started working with the Microsoft key, we had Hurricaneoma or the tree islands underwater. I went to the agencies and I said, tree islands underwater, animals are dying, the vegetation is dying. They said, do you have data? I went back, I spoke to some of the elders, and they said, these are the species of trees that used to be on here, we still have a lot of turtles, we still have a lot more snakes in the island. And they, it corresponds the nesting season and the water coming up often corresponds so there's no, you know, cohorts, you know, progressive cohort survival. And I don't think we were heard. And so we started a, I started a research project, which we now have data for, and a PhD student that's, that's working through it to show the data is comparable to what the traditional ecological knowledge said five years ago. So I think that's an important aspect to consider as we move forward. Okay, I think Dave's next, then john and then Matt. Thank you. SERP started 2000 identified adaptive management as a critical element of the process that was going to move forward. Probably took a couple of years to get actually get feet under to begin moving forward, etc. The initial focus Gina told told us that it was on planning, as it should be you were planning projects you were trying to implement projects etc. A lot of those initial adaptive management programs were individual entities project entities, so they were kind of scattered all over everybody was kind of doing their own thing. You know, recover kind of built a tent built an umbrella, try to assemble a lot of those together so you could have a consistency, perhaps some standardization of approach that sort of thing. The report that was released here last year, this year, identified that you addressed adaptive management super superficially initially looking at kind of the components of what makes out adaptive management. One of the charges that Stephanie has given us to look at we're going to talk about tomorrow is do we need to dive into this issue a little bit more to help make it useful to make it applicable. Make it value added to the agencies, the tribes, the stakeholders and everyone else who wants to see recovery of the Everglades occur. Not in my lifetime, but in a lifetime to be to be determined. My question is and so and then Gina said we're now shifting or pivoting towards operations. And I suspect it'll be hybrid. It'll be adaptive management for projects still, and it'll be adaptive management for operational perspective. We've heard today from several of our presenters about climate change and some of the challenges that it is bringing to us, whether it's an extreme rainfall event like you saw in April. Down here whether it's the warming oceans that we're seeing right now, whether it's shifting dynamics of other ecosystem processes. But I guess my question to each of you is three federal agencies and and the tribe. What I'm struggling with and I've seen this across the country is, is the adaptive management the way we think about it now conceptually process oriented technically, is it robust enough to embrace the challenges of climate change. Or do we need to kind of step back at some point to be determined and reassess whether we need to relook at how we are prioritizing science. And how we're funding it. You know what is, is there a logical point that we need to do this. Are we, or should we not worry about it. It'll happen. Adaptive management will adapt to this and I guess I'm just from an individual agency perspective. Laura your spot on with your comments I would only add one more bucket to your group there. I would say there's cultural agency cultural issues around adaptive management. It is different in the core I tell you then it is in the fish and wildlife, then it is in parks, then it is in the Bureau wreck. You know, or an EPA, they, they're different culturally it's just agencies. It's what they are. So I'm just wondering, is there, is this something we should be looking at terms of climate change and adaptive management. I think we need to just go down the panel and see what your thoughts are there's not an issue fine. Great. One less thing for us to worry about and do but if there is an opportunity that could help you do a better job in terms of managing the resources. Maybe it's time we do talk tomorrow about putting some emphasis on this in this next review. I guess I'm just interested in your perspective. Okay, so, there was a lot in that. Okay, so I'm going to take one small part of it. And I think the answer is, I think there are some things that we're able to handle through the adaptive management process. And then there's other things as Jason angle was talking about earlier and Tim bison, where, hey, we get to the lifetime of a project and we know we need changes. The core has a process for that. Right. So, you know, we started off with the original CNSF and 1948 and, you know, serve has changed it and now this new to 16 study will change it and then again the resiliency study will change it. But I do think there are examples from around the country of adaptive management in which they are planning for climate change, in which they're looking at something as the height of a weir, where you can have an adjustable weir. Right, so you can plan for that full extent and you can adjust the weir as the water comes or if the water doesn't. But there's always that balance that you have to reach between the cost for building that adaptation and versus, you know, the funding that you have available. And what is the likelihood of that to occur. So I think in some instances, absolutely. So we're looking more for the science of climate change informing future design decisions or where we should put our more robust measures. I think BBCR is an excellent example of how the poor has now and South Florida Water Management District are using those tools to, you know, as a feedback mechanism where there are performance measures that will be used to actually change the elevation in the model to for different alternatives in the future. So, you know, I think it's a mixed gamut of whether I don't think it's a one size fits all solution, but I think you can be very forward thinking in your, in your writing in your forecasting because the poor has a 50 year planning. Right, and so we need to plan for, you know, the lifecycle of that project for the next few years. Yeah, so, I mean, it kind of depends what you're meaning by adaptive management. And also what would be the value of this committee, looking into those questions, compared to some of the other questions relative to adaptive management that might not be climate change. And what would be the most value out of that from a fish and wildlife service standpoint, absolutely we need to be considering climate change. And we need to thinking about it in the context that we can and say, are there things that we can do within our projects as we're planning them to make those into the adaptive management framework. And I do think that looking at, you know, is the way BBC is approaching it does that make sense and so that might be something that could be a very concrete place where the committee could look at it and say, yes, this makes sense. Maybe this one not so much maybe you could go that way so in that more narrow framework of it I think I think that that is useful. I think they've already hit on a lot of the key points I mean BBC or we're we're running up against this and already trying to make recommendations of things like adjustable wears and, you know, how do you deal with, you know, is there any possibility like stage different limitations and management measures, the need that we're going to have to change operations in the future, as C level rise comes up. But I mean in terms of, you know, adaptive management, it. This is something I think the country's going to have to figure out. Because we're no longer in a static situation. We and if we're planning for 50 years, and we know that 50 years is going to change, then having an adaptive management plan that, you know, only deals with small stuff may not be sufficient. And how do we deal with that from a recovery point of view at this point, I mean, we had the project adaptive management plans but then we also have this overarching umbrella of recover that's trying to pull in the science of this and see that it's being incorporated, you know, big picture, whether you know we're effective or not that's for you guys to evaluate but we're trying. Beyond that is also you've got the ecosystem restoration task force or something is beyond surf it can be raised up to that next level of say hey we got this upcoming issue. So that's very big picture adaptive management, but this is this is you put your finger on it it's it's going to be an upcoming burning issue I think around the country and right now work on the center with BBC here. And it's going to, what are we learning BBC is going to go into what's called Southern Everglades study. So, I don't want to forget Leslie, who's behind you. So Leslie, if you want to chime in. No, no, sure I don't have much more to add, you know I completely agree with the, with the rest of the panel said, you know BBC will be a good learning experience for us and then, you know the challenge becomes how much flexibility, we can really incorporate into the projects to be able to, you know adapt to changing conditions. So I think that that might be the challenge on the future. Can I recap what I think I heard and maybe translate for some new people is that it seems like new information about climate can be used when planning new projects. But now that you've planned and constructed projects, new information on climate is not very useful, unless it's it's it's within the operational levers and the operational plan. So if you didn't build the adjustable weir, you're unlikely to go back and adjust the weir within the purview of serpideptiveness that there, or without, yeah, without some kind of limit like reevaluation report. Right, there would have to be, we'd have to go through the core processes can explain. So I guess I have a somewhat related question and thinking about uncertainties and how how uncertainties are identified and addressed, and especially uncertainties that may come up in the middle of the project, where you know there's some new issue that you didn't think about. And so just if you can talk about how, what's the process for identifying and prioritizing uncertainties. I'll start and then you can correct me as I said there's there's different there's there's different levels at which uncertainties are identified and recover has an overarching adaptive management plan, where there were a series of uncertainties that were developed at the quote system level. And those are in the process right now of being reviewed and and updated. And then when the projects are in the PR stage they're going through the process of identifying adaptive management uncertainties within that context. And that's where Gina also was talking about the interaction points between recover and the project teams so that we're having that communication so that that the teams know what the system wide uncertainties are and then recover knows what project level uncertainties are. And I just want to act as part of that update in the uncertainties and the prioritization. There's also the effort to develop management options active and passive management options to put in that management option matrix for those system level certainties. I think he asked a question also about like discovering new uncertainties so tapped into another question so I'm going to jump in here to what but what's the capability of adapting and adaptive management point. So, like, you know, because some of these projects are really long, and you wrote this step adaptive management plan in 2014. And then maybe in 2024, you'll say this really wasn't the key question the key questions are x, y and z. And is there a process for that. And it does seem like there's a lot of adaptive management that's happening outside of plans and if that's the case how important are these plans. How central are they to the process of adaptive management versus just general new knowledge coming in. So, so first off from my, my fish and wildlife service had in talking with folks in the service and this was exactly one of the questions. And the concerns that that people had was the timing of when some of these projects when we do the plan and we, and you know like set was 2014. We're actually getting to it now in 20, whatever it is. So, so that is a that is a concern. And how do we deal with it. So, and then I'll let Gina and Kim answer the question about incorporating new things into the core process. And the core process can pose somewhat of a challenge at certain in certain instances, but we actually have guidance and I think I put it on my slide from the engineer research and development center. There is an adaptive management principle guide. It talks about changes to adaptive management. There are levels in which the adaptive management plan changes to that can be improved. And, you know, again, as Amanda has said adaptive management is supposed to be a living process right it's a living document it's supposed to be updated in forms of new science. But in some instances are procedures and approval chain is a little bit slower than than we would like. I'll just add to from from a tribal perspective, it's very difficult to get our opinion heard to have adaptive management. And the agencies have talk probably without us I guess in many instances. And so when we have an opinion on something. It's sometimes hard to get heard, or it's never considered in that adaptive process. Okay, Matt, you have the last one. Two questions. Right. Okay, so. So in addition to talking about different agencies and different disciplines and different guidance and linguistic uncertainties and agency cultural differences. So different reporting writing expectation for the different reporting mechanisms. And I'm not sure I'm seeing adaptive management interpretations being incorporated in all of those appropriate reporting mechanisms. So, am I and DPM results reported in the SFER waiting bird reports on an annual basis the system status reports on a five year cycle. Sometimes they get into a recommendation sometimes they don't cop by annual report didn't get into AM sort of interpretations and discussion so I think that's another potential difference and nuance that we need to sort of keep it in mind. So my question, I guess, is one of the ones that was prompted in the agenda and I was curious if anybody here is actually had the chance to take a look at it. So we've, we've had an adaptive management program, sort of ish for 20 years, right. So, 10 years ago, a paper was published from South Florida scientists community about what we've learned in the first 10 years of adaptive management. Does anybody have a chance to look at that. Now we're 10 years later and sort of figured out, what would that list of lessons learned be. Part of the challenge has been that we haven't had projects implemented and operational to actually try the things that are in a lot of cases. And I do think that some of the things like what they was learned with the PM. I want to illustrate some of the challenges of going from the science to the decision making. And what are the things that need to be considered there and the being very clear about identifying things that are covered by NEPA, not covered by NEPA would require different kind of processes and things like that. I mean, I think, as we move into a realm where we're really trying to implement adaptive manage more actively will have more lessons learned but, and I don't know if it's really a lesson learned that it was going to be hard to make that loop between the science and the management I mean, when we first started the adaptive manage stuff with him recover we spent a lot of time having workshops we had people from meridian come in we went through the whole thing of, you know, single loop and double loop learning and we set out all of those documents in the whole ideal world of one thing we learned is it was completely unrealistic to think that we were going to do assessment reports in two years. I mean, so those kinds of things but we're not. I think we have the opportunity in the next eight years to really take a step on that. I think from that list of five things to me the thing that still stands out that needs work on this communication. Yeah, I think communication is a big, big issue that was then and still is now. I'm going to echo that. I'm going to come at this from a cop perspective I mean what's been. So, you know, lessons learned. As part of cop what we did do is we identified our uncertainties me as to which ones we agree would be covered by this NEPA which would require supplemental NEPA in order to address and which were issues we wanted to keep in view. Because they were part of, for example, the sub, you know, uncertainties and people were just like, we want to, we don't want to drop them we want to make sure that they stay in front of people so we include them on the list but they weren't going to necessarily be covered as part of cop and doing that division helped. But having those those ecosystem based management feedback calls and watching the communication that is occurring between, you know, the agency scientists and the water managers and watching those recommendations be listened to. That's been really eye opening and it's something that at this point, you know, if we bring on new people I want them sitting in on those calls so that they'll learn how the system is actually operating from both points of view. We need to have more input from the, the tribes and have that, you know, part of the overall process. But that's been part of my lessons learned with dealing with the waiting birds. It's been interesting to watch because and watching the water managers listen to the concerns of the ecologists and say within the water control plan constraints and these are people that they understand that they change the, the size of a gate by four inches, it'll send water over here. I mean they understand the system like crazy. And they understand that they have that amount of flex in the water control plan if they do that here, then that'll help add additional water over into northern water conservation area 3a. And so they, they understanding what the problem was, they took it and they were able to flex the system and try and reduce the problem they did not eliminate it is still a problem, but it probably would have been a lot worse. And so watching that communication occur was very eye opening. And then, ultimately, you know what we're trying to do is push this problem forward as part of the sub increment one, you know, water control plan update evaluation and see if it can also be addressed there. So, but ultimately that communication the communication between the colleges the water managers going to also need to be with the engineers, all of that's going to be critical. I just want to briefly add that, although we've increased communication. I think many times we're still talking past each other, because we have different definitions that we're moving from. One of the things we recently learned from a couple different meetings and recover is we need a standard list of definitions to put everyone on an equal playing field. So that when we know that we're talking adaptive management, we're not talking about managing adaptively, because I think we continue to talk past each other in that realm all the time. Because we have engineers, scientists, modelers, you know, project managers all in a room. We could all have the same conversation and everyone comes out with a different understanding. And so, I think we have good communication now, but I still think we need to improve on not talking past each other. Fundamental. No. You said the question was going to be quick the answer is not the answer is not so. Okay, thanks very much on on. On behalf of the committee, I want to express our gratitude for your for your thoughts and insights and in the time you present you you've devoted to this process, and also the people who have hung there for this long afternoon, we really appreciate your interest.