 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the third meeting of CISRUP 10 or CISRUP X3. I see a couple of people from yesterday's field trip. We had a really great field trip to the West never glaze and we'd like to especially thank the Mikasuki tribe and the park service. And big Cyprus national preserve staff for sponsoring us that on that trip and it was really informative and illuminating and enjoyable. Today, we've teed up three sessions. And the first one is on climate change and BBCR planning. The second session is on adaptive management. And the third session is on strategies to incorporate indigenous traditional ecologic knowledge in CERP. I would like to thank all the speakers and panelists who spent time preparing for that session and joining us today. One housekeeping item. If you're a member of the public and you're interested in addressing the committee in three minutes or less. There's a sign up sheet outside on the table. Please sign up by two o'clock today. We're going with the first session. Perhaps we could start with introductions and I'll have the committee members introduce themselves. Maybe we can start with our fearless leader Stephanie. Stephanie Johnson of the National Academy staff and study director for the project. Dr. Dixon, professor of statistics at Iowa State University. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Casey Brown, water resources engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts. Dave Wagner. Good morning to everybody. Wilpert engineering scientific consultant. Morning, I'm Marla Emery committee member and research geographer with the US Forest Service retire and currently scientific advisor to the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. Good morning, Matt Harwell. I'm a systems ecologist and a former Everglades scientist. Charles Burgess National Academy staff. Emily Bermudas National Academy staff. Helen Regan. I'm a conservation biologist and ecological modeler and I'm a professor at University of California Riverside. Margaret Guitar Professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University. Good morning, Tracy Quirk, and I'm a professor of wetland ecology at Louisiana State University. Good morning, Al Steinman. I'm a research professor in aquatic ecology at Grand Valley State University. Good morning, everyone. Bill Hopkins. I'm a professor of wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech. Jeff Walters Professor in biological sciences at Virginia Tech. And we have a few people online. Committee members. Yes, good morning. It's John Callaway wetland ecologist from the University of San Francisco. And this is Wendy Graham. I'm a hydrologist and director of the Water Institute at University of Florida. And I'm Charles Driscoll. I'm on the faculty of Syracuse University and I'm also committee member. And I think that's everyone. And I'm Jim stairs professor of hydrology at Yale University. So Stephanie, are there any other house key house key keeping item before we get underway. Okay, we'll get started with Nicole nemeyer of the South Florida water management district. And she's going to give us an overview of BBC objectives relative to current ecological conditions. Good morning, everyone. My name is Nicole nemeyer. I work with the South Florida water management district ecosystem restoration bureau. And I serve as project manager for the Biscayne Bay and Southeastern Everglades ecosystem restoration planning study, also known as BBCR. And I'm going to provide a brief high level overview of the BBCR planning study this morning. Okay, so this slide represents the historic existing. Wait a second, we're catching up with the audio video. Okay. Okay. So this slide represents the historic existing and future conditions of the greater Everglades ecosystem. And it shows the BBCR study area relative to the greater Everglades ecosystem. Historically, there was overland sheet flow across the landscape. And that moved through gradient of ecological habitats from freshwater wetlands to coastal mangrove areas to the near shore seagrass areas. And when the CNSF project was constructed that disrupted that natural overland flow and gradient of habitats and the ecological connectivity between those habitat types. So in the future, within the study area, the planning study is contending with sea level rise, which will inundate portions of the study area and result in saltwater intrusion. At the bottom of this slide, these schematics depict the historical current day and future hydrologic regimes. Historically, the flow was traditionally overland sheet flow through that gradient of habitats to the near shore coastal areas. Present day with the canal system. There are point source discharges to the coastal areas, oftentimes too much flow to the near shore area during the wet season, and then not enough flow to the near shore area during the dry season. And in the future with sea level rise will be contending with, again, saltwater intrusion, and it makes it a little bit more complex with moving that water across the landscape and into the coastal areas. Okay, so this is a closer look at the existing conditions and the gradient of habitats that I mentioned previously with the freshwater wetlands with sawgrass and mule grass vegetation types. And within our study area, the freshwater wetlands are located within the southern Glades region, the model lands and an area we refer to as the triangle it's between two roads, us one and card sound road. And it also includes intertidal coastal areas predominantly with mangrove red black and white types in the near shore coastal areas. And then we have a subtitle. A closer look at the study area, which is within this magenta area here. It encompasses a significant portion of Miami Dade County, it extends all the way north to the county border between Broward County and Miami Dade County west to Water Conservation Area 3B and Everglades National Park, and then south and east to the coastal areas that I mentioned previously. Within this white dashed line are the natural areas that we're targeting for restoration. And that includes again the southern Everglades, the Eastern Panhandle of Everglades National Park, the model lands, Manatee Bay barn sound, card sound and Biscayne Bay and Biscayne National Park. The SERP yellow book components included in the BBCR study include the North Lake Belt, which is located in this area. Those are lime mining operations, some are still active, some are not. And they form a series of lakes so we're looking at sourcing and storing water in that area. It also includes west and south Miami Dade County reuse, which we're looking at for water supply for ecological benefit. And also the Biscayne Bay canals and coastal wetlands. So we're looking at reducing those point source discharges and redistributing those into a more historical hydrologic regime through the coastal mangroves and into the shoreline rather than point source discharges. And then it also includes the C111N canal project yellow book component, which is evaluating redistributing flows into the southern Everglades and Eastern Panhandle of Everglades National Park. Components four through six were actually components in prior SERP studies that are already authorized the Biscayne Bay coastal wetlands and Biscayne Bay coastal canals. We're part of the BBCW Biscayne Bay coastal wetlands phase one project and C111N was part of the C111 spreader canal project. BBCR has four project objectives and some overarching themes, which include water sourcing from the northwest portion of the study area, conveying that water south, and redistributing those flows and rehydrating the natural canals that I mentioned previously that are targeted for restoration. The four project objectives include restoring salinity regimes and minimizing the unnatural canal releases, restoring freshwater wetland depth, ponding duration and flow timing, restoring the natural ecological and hydrological connectivity between that gradient of habitats. And then finally see level change resiliency increasing and restoring the ecological resilience in the coastal habitats in southeastern Miami Dade County. We have a planning process timeline for the study. The study kicked off in September of 2020 with the scoping phase. We're currently in the alternative formulation and analysis phase, which consists of three rounds of modeling. Before we get to one final tentatively selected plan. We're currently in the midst of that third round of modeling before we land on that one plan. We plan to have a chief's report at the end of 2025 and submit that to Congress for authorization with word of 2026. And that concludes my presentation there is a BBCR webpage that the Army Corps of Engineers has I think you received some read ahead materials those are also available on the website fact sheets slides from our project delivery team and you can also reach out to us at this email address BBCR comments at usace.army.mil or to any of the project managers or planning leads at the Water Management District or the Army Corps. Thank you. Thanks Nicole. So, next, we're going to go to Gina Ralph of the US Army Corps of Engineers, and going to present on consideration of climate change in BBCR planning process. Good morning. I'm Gina Ralph with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and I was asked to give a brief overview of how we utilize performance measures, including those for resiliency in order to evaluate alternative plans. Okay, so we develop project performance measures that have specific targets. These are quantitative in nature. And we utilize those as part of our hydrologic modeling. So our regional simulation model is the basis for the evaluation of these performance measures. With this, we calculate how much of a target each of our performance measure will have a target, and we evaluate how close the alternatives get to that target. And from that, we have developed a planning model, which I will give you a brief overview of next. So there's just one piece of the puzzle where we develop these habitat units. This is the currency in which the Corps of Engineers evaluates projects. In other projects such as our coastal storm risk management or deep draft navigation. We use national economic development as the standard, but in aquatic ecosystem restoration projects, we utilize habitat units. So here these habitat units across all our alternatives. And then we look at all of the different other accounts in which we assess, including environmental effects. We have to do within SERP what we call our savings clause analysis, where we analyze flood control and water supply needs. Of course, we utilize economics. So we have a CEICA, which is cost effectiveness incremental cost analysis. All of these components help us settle on the plan, which we call our tentatively selected plan. So ecological performance measures. I'll give you a brief overview of them. They're all linked to our project objectives. They are modeled and they are evaluated quantitatively. Each one of the performance measures has a documentation sheet in which you can understand the rationale, the basis for the target, as well as the literature and the calculation of the individual metric. They establish that relationship between our modeling output and our ecological goals. And those are developed from our conceptual ecological models that we use in Everglades planning. And that recover restoration coordination and verification has just completed several updates to those models. And these are going to provide that foundation for those habitat units. So Nicole gave you an overview of the objectives of the BBCR project. And this is just to show you the crosswalk of how the individual performance measures are tied to the specific project objectives. So as you can see, we have nine performance measures here. And later today, Fred and Carlos are going to give you an overview of our resiliency performance measure, performance measure number seven, the adaptive foundational resilience. So the performance measures just to, again, this was included as part of your read ahead. It gives you an overview of each of the performance measures and what they are quantitatively measuring to meet our objectives. So salinity in the near shore of Biscayne Bay. This is a really savvy performance measure created by multi interagency group of scientists utilizing information collected as part of the IBEAN program, which is in part funded by restoration coordination and verification. We also have a direct canal releases. It simply measures the reduction in canal flows as a result of the alternatives. We have a timing and distribution of flow sources to Biscayne Bay. And that's looking at how similar can we get to those historical flows to the bay. Hydro period and water depths. We like to evaluate these together. Those will look at the duration of flooding and then the actual depth within our communities. The wetland salinity performance measure. This looks at poor water salinity. And this is utilizing information collected through the long term ecological restoration. I'm sure I got that wrong. The LTER program. And then Fred and Carlos don't want to spoil theirs. And then we also have ecological connectivity and sheet flow. So how have we taken all of this information? It's a pretty large area and look at nine performance measures to come up with a single score for each alternative. So we have to have a process for doing that. So we have specific regulations within the Corps of Engineers in which we have to develop a planning model. It has to go through our ecosystem center of expertise in order for them to approve of how we're going to go ahead and aggregate all of these scores into habitat units. So we first divided the area in zones. So we have five zones within BBCR. The zones were based upon their drainage characteristics, historical flows, the unique characteristics of beach and then any natural and artificial barriers. And you can see on the map here are our BBCR zones. So A, B, C and D are terrestrial and E is the near shore, which is the entire near shore of our project footprint. Within those zones, we also have indicator regions. So you can see there are lots of indicator regions in which these are groups of cells within the modeling grid that have similar characteristics. Similar vegetation, similar elevations, and they represent the landscape common to today, as well as the pre drainage system. And they are intended to be homogenous. So what we use these indicator regions for similar to other projects that we've done for SERP planning is we use that to predict what may happen at the larger scale. Because it's hard to synthesize all of the information from every individual RSM cell that Walter will tell us we can do that. But this makes it a little bit easier. So we expect that change within those indicator regions are going to be show similar responses to those hydrologic changes. And the indicator regions that we have here. We were very specific in how we chose them. It was a very long integrated process with the ecological sub team, and again a multidisciplinary and multi agency approach. So we didn't think just indicator regions were enough. We also wanted transects because we want to measure flow and the sheet flow performance measure will measure the flow at those transects. So we have zones, ABC and eat all have transects zone D does not have any transects included. And so what we've done what we've done from here is this just shows you now the name of the zone, a through E, the number of indicator regions and transects within each of those zones. And then of those nine performance measures, which ones are calculated within those zones when we roll up our scores. We can't see the boxes, but it's just a graphical illustrative interpretation of how we're actually doing this. So the planning model is on your left, the first step is we have to normalize and tabulate the performance measures so we want to make sure they're all on the same scale. So from there, we are going to compute weights and weighted scores, and you've probably heard me before say the core doesn't like to wait things. And how we've done this here, each of the performance match some of the performance measures have sub metrics included within them. And so those sub metrics, we don't want a performance measure that may have two sub metrics being twice the weight. So that's what I mean by waiting, we've simply adjusted that. So all of the performance measures have that equal score of one with the exception of the performance measure for the near shore salinity. Although that one has three related sub metrics, they're equally weighted because of the importance of having sufficient ways of evaluating the vast near shore community and ensuring that that project objective has equal an equal voice. So from there, after we've computed the weights, we start doing these these combine combinations, and we call them station scores so a station score is simply whether it's an indicator region or whether it's a transect, it's just an umbrella term that we use. From there, we're going to sum and normalize the station scores again so that no one has more weight than another. So again, putting everything on a level playing field. And then we calculate those habitat units. And from there, we're going to compare habitat units across alternatives, and we do that by comparing it to the alternative minus the future without condition. So that delta will give us our ecological lift. So that is a very short, quick summary of a very complicated process. We have a, you know, it's probably an 85 to 90 page document that I'm happy to share with you that is currently with our eco PCX for approval. We start that coordination early on in the process so there aren't any surprises. This is my third time with going and informing the eco PCX of what we're doing. We start with approval of the performance measures, then we go to the approval of the modeling tools, then we actually have a spreadsheet that does all of these calculations that also undergoes a peer review with the army core. And then finally, in October, which is just a few days away. I am anticipating another meeting with them to address any final questions and then we'll have our, our final approval moving into our third round of alternatives. And with that, I'm going to, I think, turn it over to Carlos. Walter. Okay. Thank you. Gina we can. Are there any questions from the committee. Go on to Walter. Yeah, I have one question, Jim. Gina, is any of this peer reviewed outside of the core. Yes, so we have several steps in our review process so the step for the planning model goes to the eco PCX. Right our document we have a district quality control review, which is internal to the Jacksonville district and at the same time, South Florida water management district will go through their technical review process. We also have what's called an agency technical review, which are individuals within the core from outside the South Atlantic division. Jacksonville is part of the South Atlantic division that will do that review. And then we also have an independent external peer review that will also review all of the details of the project short. Go ahead, Helen. I have a couple of technical questions. So number one in the design or selection of the performance measures. I noticed that they aren't there aren't any that are directly biotic. They seem all a biotic with perhaps the exception of expanding habitat. Can you elaborate on the rationale for that, like why they're on any sort of more ecological biotic measures. Sure. So we are measuring our ability to adjust flow. It's all based on hydrology we're using output from a hydrologic model to understand how we are redistributing flow to meet the objectives of the project. This is for habitat units when we go and document the performance overall of all of the alternative plans as part of the National Environmental Policy Act documentation. We also use a whole suite of tools that we term ecological indicator tools. And Laura Diaconto will talk a little bit more about some of those tools that the joint ecosystem modeling group has developed that will tell us a little bit more of how is it going to affect waiting birds. How is it going to affect pink shrimp. How is it going to affect alligators or crocodiles so we will understand that biotic response, but that is not used to measure and evaluate in the habitat unit process. I remember from the first slide where you see the pieces of the puzzle, those gem tools will help us to understand the environmental effects, which is another piece of the puzzle. Okay, thanks. That was a clear explanation and then my other question is, why were only a subset of performance measures used in some region. So what's the rationale behind using different sets of performance measures across regions. So, some of our performance measures, let me get to the. So some of our performance measures performance measures, one, two, and three, those are directly related to just the near shore. So they are simply measured in the near shore environment, which is zone E for the entire in the entirety of the project footprint. Other performance measures you can see 456789 are measured in the zones ABC and D and those are our terrestrial performance metrics, and that's the difference. And I just have one more question I'm sorry. So, when you're looking across each of these different zones, a to e, how then is, how then our decisions made is there an aggregate across those zones or are they considered separately looking at costs and benefits across each one, or in each one. The beauty of the planning model is that we can look at indicator regions, we can look at zones, and we can then roll it up, because, you know, when you roll things up like this, you lose that the parts and pieces, but by having the ability to look at performance within zones, there may be specific management measures which are the engineering features that are providing a certain suite of benefits in one zone. And we want to retain those and move those into, you know, our next round of modeling tentatively selected plan. We have that ability to mix and match to understand what management measure what engineering feature may be responsible for providing the benefits within a certain zone. So that's why we've done it this way, so that we can have a good idea of what's happening throughout the spatial footprint acknowledging how large it is. Thank you. I have one more question from Ramesh Reddy who is online. I was just curious to know that why the water quality as a performance indicator is not included in their model. So, we do not have a water quality performance measure that we developed as part of the ecological sub team. There is a water quality evaluation methodology that the water quality sub team is working to develop to describe changes in water quality as a result of the project. And that will be included in our National Environmental Policy Act documentation, but we don't have anyone here from our water quality team to to speak to that today. Thank you. Thanks very much Gina. Next we'll hear from Walter Wilcox from the South Florida Water Management District. Walter is going to describe modeling strategies to analyze climate change effects on BBs here alternatives. Thank you so good morning everyone. Okay, great. Yes, so good morning everyone I'm going to go very quickly through a lot of slides it's going to be break back a lot of this material has been covered in the past committee sessions so if you have any questions please reach out and you also have a lot of resources there. So this is your quick introduction to the modeling work that's being done to support the evaluations that Gina just went through. And so we have a broad range of modeling tools that we're applying in the BBC project. You can see these are the four primary modeling tools that are being used as part of the plan formulation and overall project support. On the left is the RSM wave flex model the regional simulation model is a daily time step hydrologic model that runs a long term climate record. It was developed by the South Florida Water Management District it's been in application for 20 plus years in everybody's restoration peer review twice gone through the course engineering certification process for approval for use in South Florida. This is one of our benchmark primary hydrologic model that we use to analyze the effects. When we're running that model just to get ahead of some of the questions that the previous committee had asked. We're not running a succession tool we're not starting a today's system and moving out into the future and seeing how things evolve with sea level change over time. What we're doing is running snapshots in time. We look at the current system, and we run a long term climate record through it 1965 through 2016 climate. The current system might react to that rainfall, and then we move to the future we go out to 2085. We look at the sea level conditions the future conditions and we do the same thing we run all the climate record through that future scenario, and then we compare the two scenarios to each other to see that the changes so the model actually has the capability to run succession but we haven't quite gotten there yet as an overall team with the data sets and the performance measures and things like that. So the hydrologic model is the RSM on the left. We also have two salinity models that are applied by that have been developed by others I should say the bisect model was developed by the USGS. Ishtag Kandekar and Eric Swain and Tiffany Troxler are supporting the project by running that model through FIU and USGS for the project. We also have the Biscayne base simulation model, which was developed over the years Department of the Interior was integral in that Eric Stamina here had a large effort in developing that model. We brought that into the energy center and updated it and we're running it as part of the, the tool suite to evaluate the near short salinity. And then the model on the right is the Miami data RSM it's just another version of the RSM model that runs at a smaller temporal and spatial timescale so it runs at a 15 minute timescale. And it's really used for the flood evaluation portion of the project. We'll talk about that much today. So when we're doing the plan formulation. This is kind of the workflow, the project team, Jennifer John and others will define an alternative that comes to the energy to see modeling center. So when we run the RSM GL we put all the features into the model and simulate the hydrology. That hydrology is then fed as boundary conditions into the two salinity models of this game base simulation model and the bisect model so that we get the salinity response. And then we begin the evaluation so the RSM is directly pro post process for some of the hydrologic measures the hydro period the water depth ponding those types of things. And then the salinity models and those get post process for the near shore salinity and the wetland salinity performance metrics, and then as Gina mentioned we also provide information to Laura and Stephanie Roman act for the joint ecosystem modeling group and they do all the ecological modeling, and all of that then feeds into the habitat unit and the evaluation along with all the other information of the project is selected. And I really quickly run you through some of the updates that have been made BBC has been great in sponsoring tool updates as part of this effort identified by this panel, I think, two committees ago, there was a very limited set of tools that were available for this type of work, and the BBC project has spent the last several years updating the modeling tools. So there's a lot of texts on these I'm just going to kind of quickly run through them, you'll have the presentation, you can go back and review the text but essentially we've updated the RSM GL to expand and refine the spatial extent and the mesh in the southern southeastern portion of the system to respond to the needs of the project within the study area. So you can see we've actually expanded the mesh off the shoreline. We've also expanded the model salinity or things like that but that's a necessary thing to move our boundary conditions kind of further away from where we want to model. So we're still using the RSM for the terrestrial modeling. But we want to make sure that the flux exchange from the terrestrial to the near shore environment and the stages in the terrestrial environment are well represented. And so that was a technique that we used to try to get there. So in terms of the fidelity we've expanded the, the spatial extent. We've done things like calibration it's still a challenge in this part of the system we brought into a lot of new data sets. Some of the areas are relatively heterogeneous and this is a regional scale model, but you know the improvements that we've made in the model mesh and the other data sets have improved the data matching in this part of the system. So we've kind of corrected things where in the previous regional simulation model what I call the legacy original mesh. The focus was Everglades restoration central Everglades restoration I should say. And so the boundary conditions were just that they were boundary conditions and we weren't really focused on it so you can see on the left there like the very bottom. There's a bunch of blue arrows moving along the coastline, you know like just making a left as they reach the coast and you know kind of collecting in the eastern panhandle. On the right you can see that we've corrected those types of modeling numerical issues right so the water is now moving perpendicular to the coast or it's moving within the preferred flow paths, you know in the lower spots of the topography etc. So those are the types of changes that we made. We've also incorporated updates to the data sets and I'm just going to run through the animation here quickly to the blue. So all of those land cover and specific habitats, you know landscapes that Gina mentioned, they've actually been brought into the RSM model so all of the land cover data has been updated in the southeastern portion of the system to represent those mangrove systems and freshwater systems that Nicole described. We've also incorporated updates to topography to account for the creation processes that are happening over time. And we're also updating the title boundary conditions which I'm going to get into here in a second. We're working at sea level change. The title of this presentation is actually climate change, where we haven't quite gotten to the rainfall climate scenario piece yet I think you heard about that at your last session we're working with, you know, Dr. Obasekara and others to generate regional climate scenarios that's coming. It's not quite here for BBCR so BBCR is focused on sea level change pieces of climate change suite of stressors. This is a climate change protection at the back of the station in which is pertinent to our study area. And you can just see that there is a sea level rise anticipated in this part of the system, based on a lot of work by other members of the team we're following the green trace which is the sea level change curve for our primary formulation. We will do a check later in the project on the high curve, the right curve to see what affects that higher sea level accelerated rate of change does to our project. But for the formulation step we're in right now we're looking at the green trace and that's kind of mimicking what we've been seeing in the system over the last 10 or 15 years. So for the formulation we will run scenarios at the current condition at 2022, and then we'll run scenarios out at the end of the planning horizon which in this case is 2085, and we'll compare those different scenarios to see the effects of the project, and embedded in that is a change in sea level as you see here roughly 1.6 feet additional sea level across the across the domain. And so when we do this in RSM, again the title boundary conditions in the RSM used to be pretty simplistic I think there were 10 stations that were used across the domain. We've significantly expanded the spatial fidelity of the model. We've added in, oh, you can see a large suite of gauges from a variety of sources from the NOAA offshore title stations both primary and subordinate stations, as well as tailwater conditions that are structures as well as locations that everybody's National Park Month maintains. So we have a very good, you know, spatial representation of different title conditions along the boundary of the RSM. And when we are trying to model in this type of planning exercise I think you talked a little bit about some of the sea level change things that are being done for resiliency and things like that. In the long term planning, we have available to us these long term time series of what we call the NOAA harmonic data, and the NOAA harmonic data tries to get at the signals that you see from larger scale influences on title boundary conditions like the position of the moon, you know where things are driving things around, and they do a great job of capturing some of the variability, but we were concerned in our project that we weren't that we were going to miss some of the important variability in the data set that we observed by just using the NOAA harmonic time series. In an event type modeling like what you heard last session. It's pretty simple you just add an extra offset to it you say I got a storm event, I've got a search you know I'm going to, you know, put an offset on top of the, the, the harmonic signal. In a long term planning model you want to maintain some of the temporal and spatial coherence of the data, and we started casting around saying who's doing this, and we talked with NOAA we talked with the poor climate and no one's doing this. So we had to do it. And so what we were getting at here is this concept of residuals so you can see in this simple example there's an observed time series of title data. The NOAA harmonic, which is kind of the fundamental standard that we're using a lot of places is the orange time series, and there's differences and some of those differences probably don't mean that much to us but others like the peak, you know water level differences that you see here. We wanted to try to capture some of that in our planning so that we weren't blind to it as we were doing our study. So we went through this process that I won't describe. Dr. Alali and the IMC came up with a really innovative way of trying to further decompose the signal and the observed data being predicted by the harmonic itself. And if you want to get into that I'm happy to have a great side for conversation over lunch. Again at this back of key I'm just going to use some examples. So this is the signal decomposition of the residual itself. So this is above and beyond what NOAA gets. This is the first eight components of the residual that we're trying to add into the modeling of what's already there with the harmonic. We do screen out the what we call a high frequency noise signal so there's a ninth signal in there which is completely confounding. And we said we're not going to chase it like it's just there we don't have anything to predict it. It's not worth going for. So we are trying to capture these first eight signals that we saw in the data set. And when we do that what we see is this is just a simple box and whisker of kind of seasonal pattern of observed salinity of sea water level that we see at the back of station in real world data this is observed data. And when we use the harmonic we get what you would expect a very nice harmonic signal right and so we lose some things by doing that. When we put back in the additional residual modeling and the offset. We come to something like this so you'll notice it's a little bit higher than the observed. Because of the sea level change we've actually experienced four tenths of a foot of sea level change relative to the center point of the last title epic. But we went through this exercise because we want to see that variability, we want that to be in our time series, and we don't want to just rely on the harmonic which is a completely appropriate. You know, technique for other intended purposes but for this purpose we wanted to get a little more. So, so this is kind of what it looks like in, in time series mode the, the orange is actually the observed data and you can see there's an increasing trend, and there's changes in the variability over time. If we just use the detrended harmonic data we get the red, and what we're using and maybe series the blue which has its detrended. It does it's not trying to capture a sea level change we would have a version of this for the current condition. We would have a version of this with 1.6 feet higher for the 2085 condition, and we're trying to capture that additional variability so you can see in particular this blue trace. You have captures a lot of the period that we were trying to match here. And there are some, you know, there's still an increasing trend, you know if we were at a different point in time or if we were trying to do storm surge modeling or something like that we would be worried about some of those really high peaks, but you know we were pretty comfortable with this outcome for what we're trying to do here. This has gone through all of those updates will hear about its application in a couple minutes in the next presentation but that's just to orient you the types of things that were done in the model. And then we also updated the salinity models, the base game base simulation model was updated to version five, again building on the good work that was done by the Department of the interior. We wanted to make sure that we could pass the flux data from the r some gl into the bbsm and get reasonable results. In order to do that we have to do a limited recalibration exercise of the bbsm model to make sure that the data transfer between the two models was still capable of reproducing the historical data and then moving forward into application. So we went through that process and we now have a tool that we're applying the outcomes of this tool or what actually go into the near shore salinity performance measures that Gina described, and that's been a very helpful tool for us. I'll just mention some of the recalibration efforts, you know, just, we were doing the standard things checking for root mean square and bias and everywhere you see a green here. We actually were able to improve the simulation by combining the new boundary conditions and also bringing in some of the some changes in the conceptualization and accounting for some other parameterization in the diffusion coefficient and other factors. So, again, we're pretty comfortable with the behavior of the model, just to show you some plots, the observed data is calibrated to the, you know, to the model response, you know, for what we're doing. And then just in conclusion, the bisect model has also been updated. Again, it's working with the r some gl boundary conditions, the fi ut team is putting a lot of effort to that. We also validated that model to the latest observations of poor water data that they've been collecting as part of their study. So we have, again, observation data points within transects in the southern part of the system that Dr Tiffany truck slender others have been collecting and that was used to calibrate the density dependence salinity response of that part of the model. So this model is is now in place and integrated with our overall modeling suite, and that's used to evaluate the wetland salinity performance measure that you know described in the last presentation. So that's your breakneck introduction to the modeling tools that are helping to support the project. Happy to answer any questions. Go ahead Casey. Thanks Walter that was great. I'm just curious if you could talk about your feelings and using these models and each of the models in these in the future conditions, which are seal up future syllable rise in the sense that they're calibrated for historical conditions they have various assumptions and your thoughts on how well they'll hold when you sort of put them to work under these new conditions they haven't seen before. Yeah, that's very fun of mine for us. We're trying to make sure that we do have robustness into the future by looking at obviously the reactions that we get to the sea level rise in the future condition. We've also taken some steps to adjust the data sets themselves topography Fred is going to talk about this when we get into the application phase. But over time, the physics of the system are changing and to the extent possible we're modifying the model input data sets to reflect those realities right so we're modifying topography to represent the creation changes. We believe that vegetation landscape is still going to have roughly the same roughness like a mangrove, you know in the future but we did change. We don't have it open but the map that I showed you of the vegetation map. We have a methodology for moving that those vegetation classes inland in response to sea level. So we're relying on the calibration certainly for the physical parameters opera parameters vegetation resistance, but we're manipulating data sets to try to account for some of those differences that you're mentioning in the future system. So we're working on the, when we apply the model to make sure that the responses make sense and that we're not getting things like numerical oscillation or, you know, we don't violate the water budget the R7 can't violate the water budget but you know those kinds of things. But that answers. Thank you. So, how often do you update the model run and the models themselves and what trigger those updates. So the regional simulation model is our enterprise tool that we use for central Everglades. We're on about, I would like to say five years but it's probably closer to 10 years we do a long term data extension. When we first started doing everybody's restoration that the types of models that we're doing here. They use the climate record from 1965 through to actually was 1995 when we first started every legislation. And now we're up through 2016 so every time that we do one of those big data updates we revisit globally the calibration efforts and so we will bring in the latest data will recalibrate the models across the entire spatial domain. We also do efforts for specific projects, driven by the project needs to update the tools so like what you saw with the remeshing, and what I call limited recalibration. That was done as sponsored by BBC or it was specific to this portion of the system we did the same thing for Western Everglades, five years ago when the Western Everglades needed more fidelity out of the model than what we performed. So we remesh did a calibration effort as part of that project. So the answer your question is we have two ways of doing it we do it episodically when the project needs it and has a schedule and the funding to do it, or we do it programmatically on roughly a five to 10 year cycle where we do a system I'd look and update our tools. I'm going to sneak a question here before I get to Wendy. You devoted significant amount of effort to to sort of expanding the boundaries of your domain of RSM. RSM is a freshwater model. How are you accounting for slender effects in the flow model, is it variable density now, or are you doing equivalent freshwater head. We're not accounting for the density dependence of flow. It's strictly, like you said fresh water water movement, but we're going back and forth between the bisect model which is a density dependent model, which is an integrated surface water groundwater model, and we're going to leverage the back and forth information between BBSM and bisect with the RSM to come to a version of water flow where everything works and makes sense. Right so we're not relying on strictly the RSM I know that the application mode it's RSM runs and then the other things run, but when we were developing the models we were going back and forth to make sure that the two pieces of information came together. Why is it necessary to do that coupling why wouldn't you just accept bisect the bisect model. Because the bisect model is primarily a ground water model it has some surface water capability but it definitely lacks the, the ability to put in all of our future project features easily. I'll put it that way so the, you see the note on there that it will not simulate the project features. The real strength of the RSM is that it gives us not just the physics of the system but it gives us the ability to implement the infrastructure and the operational development. So when we're doing all these things with BBSR let's put a reservoir over there let's put a pump station over there let's move water in this way and that way. RSM is great at that. And the other models don't have quite as much capability so the coupled approach made sense to us to help get to all the pieces of what we're trying to change the project. Okay, thanks. Go ahead, Wendy. Yeah, I was wondering for your future condition your future sea level change condition. So you're still measuring against historic salinity performance measures you're not thinking about changing performance measures for future sea level rise. Not sure I understand the question Wendy sorry. Well you have you have salinity performance measures that are based on historic sea level. Correct. I think the salinity and probably genic cancer is better but the salinity performance measures are informed by the IBM observations in that sense the framing of those performance measures is predicated on historical data but we're applying them in a future condition where the dynamics within the Bay are different there's less fresh water there's changes in the salinity regime, and we are seeing a sensitivity in those pms which we'll talk about in the next presentation. Okay, then I'll wait. Okay, thanks very much Walter. Thank you. Okay, so Jennifer john of the court is going to kick us off on BBC or alternatives sea level rise and resilience. So this next presentation, as Gina mentioned it's very, this is an interdisciplinary process. And the problem when you have Fred Walter and Carlos all in a single presentation is that there's too much knowledge to go through hotel walk by. We're just going to switch. And so this part of the presentation. We're going to get into some of our rounds of alternatives that the BBC or plan formulation process developed. And then some of the results, particularly the results that Fred and Carlos have worked on for the resiliency performance measure. So this is our USACE risk informed planning process. We start with identifying problems and opportunities, which goes into working on our planning objectives that Nicole described earlier. We always do an inventory and forecast which is describing the existing conditions and a future condition if no project were to be implemented. So step three is plan formulation, which is the development of different alternatives that might solve those problems. We evaluate those alternatives and compare them. And then step six is decision making and selection of things to move forward. So if you want to note that this is an iterative process, we go through this cycle, many, many times, and BBCR is currently on its fifth iteration of this. Every time we have additional information that we get to utilize and incorporate into our process. Nicole presented this earlier, but I just wanted to reiterate our project objectives for the near shore salinity improvements. Improving wetland water depth ponding and flow timing, restoring natural ecological and hydrologic connectivity. And what we're really going to focus on with this presentation is that resiliency to sea level change a climate change. The graphic that we put up here really is kind of how we start a plan formulation process because any feature that we want to put into the ground needs to meet an objective in some way. So, we have water sourcing available in the Northwest, we need to move that water through the urban core of Miami Dade County, and also uphill over a coastal ridge, so that it can finally be redistributed into our coastal features, which are in the south and the east, and the near shore areas. So, these are our round two alternatives. These were developed and modeled in February. And these are the latest alternatives that we have modeling results for. And so this is also the first chance that BBCR had where the team was looking at sea level rise and comparing a future without project scenario with an intermediate sea level rise compared to sea level rise being included in our with project conditions at 2085 Alternative 21 had features in the Northwest that was looking to hold water in wetlands and some rock mines before conveying that water and distributing it south and east. And then in our south and east areas the redistribution features in the model lands and southern blades had a couple of different orientations or materials, different types of features for seepage management. And we changed these throughout our different alternatives to find which ones would provide the most types of benefits. In alternative 21 we did have a sensitivity run, we use these features that we added wastewater reuse. Alternative 22 used features in the Northwest, but we weren't trying to hold water there, we were just trying to capture that water and directed further south and east for additional sources for use. Alternative 22 had a sensitivity run in the coastal agricultural areas, where we used one way drainage wells to move water out of the coastal agricultural area. Alternative 23 had some different features in the Northwest to try to hold water for some seasonal carryover. We wanted to use these different features to compare, which would do better versus alternative 21. These sensitivity runs in alternative 23. They were both awkward for storage and recovery. One was in the Northwest and one was in the coastal agricultural area. And then alternative 24 does look a little bit different. We didn't have any sources of water in the Northwest, and we were only looking at redistributing regional water within the natural areas. The big purpose of having this particular alternative was to compare the benefits of utilizing water sources in the Northwest, which we have in our other three alternatives. And we know that those Northwest features are a little bit more complex, they are most expensive. At least the core team is anticipating some questions from our vertical review team about being able to justify using those more expensive features. So we decided to include alternative 24 so that we would have all the modeling data and the robust of the evaluation compared to the other round two alternatives. And that would help the team be able to show and make those comparisons. All of this modeling data, thank you Walter was presented to the team and provided in about April timeframe, and the team spent a lot of time with this data. And the full evaluation, and we had a complete comparison presentation in late July to our public and our PDT meeting. And so I just wanted to point out to Gina's point that she made earlier from a question I believe it was from Helen. But when we did round two we knew we had a third round of alternatives coming afterwards. And so our focus was less on an alternative by alternative comparison. So we didn't want to say, Oh, alternative X from round two did the best. We were trying to focus on performance of the different alternatives within our zones. And that was mostly because one alternative might perform the best in the Southern Glades, but then it might perform perform the worst for the near shore. If we did an alternative by alternative comparison we would lose some of that information. And so we were looking at zone by zone so that we could put together the best pieces for the next round of alternatives which is round three. So we have the nine ecological performance measures, and we also analyze water supply flood protection and water quality. And I believe now I'm going to turn it over to Walter to talk about some of the hydraulic outcomes. Yeah, just want to start by acknowledging the energy modeling center team that works to develop all of the modeling work. The energy model centers comprised if you're not aware of, of staff from both water management district and the army for who are the federal and state sponsors but in this case we also had a very significant infusion of help from Department of the Interior Park Services has been actively involved on this project and helping with the development as tools so I just want to appreciate the you know the energy to help on this. So, I'm going to go through just to give you a feel for the, I think the topic was, what are we, what are we learning about sea level change, you know, as we do these, these alternatives. So we're learning that it's a big deal. So, so to show you some of the modeling. You know, when we typically do these projects prior to BBC or we would be doing something like this we'd be looking at a future without compared to an existing condition. When you look at this is the extent of that RSM GL model that we talked about and you can see the mesh from all the way from the everything's our cultural area down to Florida Bay. In this particular graphic when we're looking at blues we're looking at increased water levels in the condition that we're comparing on the left to the condition on the right. We're looking at whites or yellows or reds it's drier conditions essentially. So on the left would be a typical thing that you would look at for like a central everglades project clip we're putting water into the northern part of the system. It's probably getting through the system we're removing levees, right things are getting wetter through the other blades. And that's how we would normally look at things and we wouldn't really see much going on at the coast. So contrast that to BBC or where we start putting in sea level change. And now we're looking at in this case, you can see we're looking at two conditions here the future without intermediate is the future without condition that has that 1.6 foot of sea level change offset, compared to the existing condition, which is, you know, today's sea level. Sorry. And then on the right is how it would have looked if we just ended the sea level change and we didn't have all the projects so you can see on the left. That's the cumulative effect of everything that we think is happening in the system right we're doing everybody's restoration and sea level is coming up and stages are getting wetter right I do want to emphasize this is a stage map. And that is ponded water, right in fact the vast majority of the water that you see along the developed side and the urban side is still groundwater in 2085 on the intermediate curve. It may not stay that way in the high curve. But, but it's I don't want this to be interpreted as ponding or surface water flooding. Okay, it just means that the ground water levels are coming. And so, just to give you this was a set of material that was put together by Drew Coleman is the engineering team lead on the BBC your project. And I'm just going to hit a couple of the key highlight points so we're doing a lot of the things that Jennifer described, you know, we're moving water through the system. And so we came up with this kind of color code just to orient people and for the benefit of the product delivery team we've we went slide by slide through each the colors, given the time constraints today you don't get that benefit you just get the big dump of all the summary. But basically, we're looking at things all throughout the system we're making sure that water that should stay in everybody's national park and continue through the natural system on the western side, that it stays there, and that we're not kind of mining everybody's national park to create benefit on the eastern side. And then as Jennifer described we're looking at trying to capture water in the northern part of the system, reduce some of the impacts of high flow to the northern part of the Biscay Bay. And then move that water through the system and across the coastal ridge, and get it down to the southern part of the system and improve our ecosystem at the green transect which is, you know, called a mega transect here. So I'm going to focus in on kind of that area near the green transect. So this is an example of what BBC is doing so in this case we've got a serious we've got two canals actually that move through this area. There's one on the northern end here and there's one of the southern end. Today's drainage is provided by those canals, the structures open water levels, you know, get high triggers the operation discharges as a as a pulse point discharge of the Biscay Bay. What BBC is trying to do is to prevent those coastal discharges of the structure and put it on the landscape and move it into to wetland system and let it, you know, more naturally move in a distributed way, you know, toward the shoreline. So you can see that's what we're doing the these great graphics that Jennifer puts together with all the polygons on the maps we, we are putting wetlands everywhere, we're putting pump stations everywhere. I mean, this is a lot of infrastructure it doesn't seem like it, but when we start adding up, you know, what's on this, what's this, you know, seven pump stations at 300 CFSE each. You know, you start ringing the cash register there's a lot of stuff going on here. So the basic premise is that you can see this in this flow diagram, rather than discharging by gravity through these coastal structures. And again with sea level change gravity is not by any means guaranteed. We're now going to start putting pump stations in and moving the water by a pump stations into our coastal wetlands, letting the water move across the landscape infiltrate into the groundwater move through the landscape toward the shoreline. And then we'll get a mix of surface water and groundwater moving toward the near shore environment will create coastal wetland benefits by doing that, and we'll hopefully sustain the shoreline by doing that. And so you can just kind of get a feel for that from this graphic. And so indeed we see that if we look at this green line transit going back to this map. We see that the round two alternatives, you can see they're in green. So we're seeing the numbers of past what I'll call passive flow not structure flow. We're sending, you know, huge amounts more water through the passive system in BBC here. It's really a very good success story for our formulation to date. Instead of sending that water through point discharges in the coastal structures it's now being spread across the landscape. And at those measures of landscape flow, you know, we're seeing 400 500 600% increase in water moving, you know, through the system in a natural way. That's huge. We also see that the that helps us to combat the effects of sea level change because one of the things we were noticing in. I'm not sure how explicit it is here but when the sea level comes up, the natural gradient from today's groundwater to the sea level is reduced. And so in the future we actually wind up with an increase reliance on our coastal structures right so in today's system some portion of the water is moving through the ground water towards the shoreline. Some portion is going through the canal system and through the coastal structures. When the sea level comes up and the groundwater doesn't have that that gradient anymore to get to the shoreline. All of a sudden it all starts going through the coastal structures and I'll show you that in a second we start seeing a lot of flow through the coastal structures. And this not only reverse not only accounts for that and get suspect where we were but it increases above and beyond that by hundreds of percent so we're able to kind of get ahead of sea level change so we're not just combating the effect of sea level change, we're actually creating an environmental enhancement above and beyond what we're seeing in today's system. I just wanted to show you some of the alternative performance so again this is a seasonal plot of flows across that transect, and I think. I have my mouse but what you can see there the the blue traces is the current system the lower blue trace, and you can see there's a seasonal pattern of flow moving across that green transect toward the near shore environment. When we go to the future without intermediate with the sea level change that actually goes down, it goes to the gray level right you know so we're reducing that gradient, we're getting less water moving in the way that we want it. But then when we put the alternatives and you can see all the alternatives of the higher traces, we go past the existing condition we go back up to a much higher condition and that's that you know 500% increase that we were talking about right we're getting a lot more flow, moving through alternatives, both to combat the sea level trend, and also to create the restoration benefits that we're looking to achieve and I'll just mention since Jennifer mentioned all 24 that didn't have the storage features all 24 does indeed show up as the lowest trace there with the lowest seasonal carryover and the lowest total volume. So we are getting some benefit from those northern Northwest storage features in our project. So this is the story of the coastal structures and so this is just an example of one of those structures the s 20 f structure. What you see here is again a seasonal pattern flow. The future without intermediate is the blue trace and what you can see there is there's a lot of flow moving through that structure in response to the current flood system and the effects of sea level change. And then all the alternatives, I don't know if you can even see it's it's much smaller bars there you know those color bars. All the alternatives significantly reduce the amount of discharge that we're making our coastal structures because we're sending it through those pump stations instead into the coastal wetlands and so again the features, you know our take home from this is that we're able to address the shortfalls in the current system if we were just to continue when not doing anything into the future those coastal structures would continue to have their tailwater rising. They would get less and less effective right they'd have to do more because the groundwater isn't going where it's going. And we have a big infrastructure problem right this is the solution to that infrastructure problem put it into the landscape. You know build the pumps and we get the environmental benefit as well as maintaining the flood protection and the current system functionality. I mentioned that it gets very tricky and can house this is a canal duration curve for one of those structures, and I'm just showing you this to kind of give you the idea of the things that we're dealing with it in the future condition. You can see this kind of three stair step duration curve. There's actually an operating protocol that operates the system at different times of the year based on the needs for agricultural planting. This is the ag drawdown operation and so you, you lower the water levels at a certain time of year to allow for planting and then they come back up a little bit as the crop is still in the ground and then they come higher in the wet season. And you see that in this duration curve and kind of this three stair step thing. When we do BBC or we don't have that clean stair step right because there's all kinds of other things happening we're moving pumps we're got water coming in from sea level change. And one of the lessons that we've learned definitely is that the operating strategy for these pumps and the coastal structures is very specific to the sea level condition that we're seeing right so when we look at 2085 it's a different operational mindset, not just a different set of infrastructure, than it is in today's system, and I don't want to. I just want to make sure that we acknowledge that there's effort required to evolve those operations over time both in the real world and the planning to try to make sure that we capture those dynamics. Going down into the southern glades I'll just mention quickly here hydrologically. This is a transects public viewing window so if you look at this zone a transit here it's actually north to south kind of a, you know, in parallel with the direction of the flow. If you were standing over here and looking sideways. This is what you would see the ground surface slopes down with this purple trace and the C 111 canal which is somewhere around here shows up on the map. I just wanted to point this out because in this case this is the future without intermediate and the blue represents the model simulated water levels with that increase of 1.6 feet in sea level. So what you can see is on the left side here without the project. We're very dry, right we haven't achieved restoration, but on the right side we're pretty wet. And that's not because of our restoration efforts that's because of sea level change right. And so this area. In fact it's too wet. And again, it's not because we're putting water there it's because of sea level change and so when we go to our project, just to jump back and forth a couple times here on my pseudo animation. You can see that when we put water in at the upstream part of the system we do get increases in water depth and stages, but notice the right side of that graph. It doesn't change so that what we're learning is there's parts of our system where sea level is dominant, and we can increase flux toward the sea level, but we can't really do much about the water depths that we're going to achieve. And so we see that as well in other parts of the system this is the triangle area of the zone B area. Same kind of trend. As I just mentioned here we also have learned that we have a lot of capability to decide how and where we want water to move across the system. In the future without if we do nothing again and no action, sea level starts coming in and just starts taking over different parts of the system. When we do our alternatives as an example of two of the alternatives, we can reverse some of those flow there arrows, you know we can get the water flowing toward the shoreline again, right and that's a positive thing for our project. And again, depending on the infrastructure that we're putting in you'll notice these two alternatives to totally different infrastructure setups. We really have a lot of choice in our project about where we're trying to combat sea level and where we may be effective at combating sea level, and we're kind of incorporating all that information into our ongoing formulation steps as Jennifer. And just to wrap up on the near shore salinity because I don't think we've shown you anything so the all those fluxes and all the green line flow that we were just talking about that green transit flow. It shows up in the near shore environment. And what you see here, these are just some of the locations where we look at salinity and what you'll see is there's a trace here that goes. Clearly this could be read but there's a trace here that goes very high that's the future without intermediate that is experiencing the sea level effects of both higher sea level and reduce groundwater flux and so we wind up with very high saline conditions we're not in the desired as a hailing regime. And you can see that with the BBC alternatives are we were able to push those salinity regimes back down during the majority during the entire duration, not necessarily to move into the ideal range in all cases, but we're able to push that flux you know that salinity back down by increasing the flux and spreading across the landscape in the way that I showed you. And that's pretty that's true across most of the system so this is an example of some of that this game based simulation model output where you can kind of see the spatial change in the scoring category here. And just to give you an idea this is one of the metrics the integrated biological indicator, and it just shows you that on a kind of a unit scale of zero to one. The future without has a lot more variability and a lot lower scores compared to really any of the alternatives so we're definitely moving in the right direction. And with that transition slide, I'll pass it over to you for us. It's always amazing to listen to Walter. I mean, I've been part of BBC now for a couple of years, and I'm still learning from from him. So, there is two performance measures that have a lot to do with the sea level rise. You heard his last slide showed how the dis game based salinity performance is affecting the biology of this game day. What we have here is an adaptive foundation resilience performance measure, which is looking at the fact that the, the diagram on the left is the stage. You've now seen a number of times we're putting sea level rise, the light blue is point seven feet of sea level rise. And it just in a day scene almost the entire natural system as a BBC here. And the images in the in the middle is indicating the scrub mangrove type of habitat that exists in those indicator regions that are scrub mangroves. There are a lot of open space and there is no way that that scrub mangrove is going to be able to keep up with sea level rise. So, is it possible to create a mangrove transition is it is it possible to look at the factors that would enhance the ability for accretion. So Carlos and I and a number of other people published a paper in 2021 now, which looked at the data that we've been collecting in the sediment erosion tables for the last 20 years. In areas where there's high energy and connectivity versus low energy high inundation and the graph on on the left is showing that in Taylor slew in Everglades National Park we get in the scrub mangroves about four millimeters, four and a half millimeters of growth of sediment of real elevation change. And, and where you don't have flow, you end up only with the bottom figure showing two millimeters. And so the table on the right says that you can transition. As, as water levels increase due to sea level rise. If you happen to be a agricultural plot on the land use. It only takes one foot of sea level rise to turn you into an extra and water body. The more significant. Let's see how do I get the mouse. Oh, this is your. Yeah. Oh my goodness it shut down. You just, you just log me out. I don't know. All right, I will. I'll stand over here. Okay. So what I wanted to point out was, you know, we could take a fresh water cypress marsh and and see that with one, one foot of a sea level rise could transition to a mangrove swamp. But if we got an extra two and a half feet, it would transition to an estuarine water type of environment. And if, if you do no accretion whatsoever and these are on the left, there's, I mean on the bottom is two different three different sea level rise components point to seven meters point to seven, six meters and a whopping 1.13 meters and 50 years. But if you have no accretion at all, then you're going to have for the footprint of the South Florida water management just district 11,000 square miles of wetland that transitions to open water. So you're losing open water. But if you add four millimeters per year for 50 years, then it's significant. There's a significant decline of the transition to open water and a significant increase to 4,000 square kilometers of transitioning to wetlands and mangroves. At an intermediate sea level rise. There's what's really interesting, the maximum accretion rate of mangroves is about eight millimeters per year, and that's the diagram on the right, indicating that with that kind of accretion, which has been documented in Tampa Bay, for example, that even with 1.13 meters of sea level rise over a 50 year period. There's hardly any of it. It goes to open water. So can we use the BBC or operational changes and and elements of structural changes and in the face of sea level with adaptive foundational resilience, which means going out there and and and allowing the fresh marsh to disappear and become mangroves. So if you don't do that, you're you have this these zones of upland fresh marsh or transition zone a scrub mangrove here in yellow, you don't do any of that. The most of the system will become open water and you saw that in the last few slides, but if you facilitate the transition to scrub mangrove to a tall mangrove type of system, the yellow expands, and you're maintaining, you're not maintaining you're actually increasing the functional capability of this wetland to produce the biodiversity and productivity of the coastal zone. So the adaptive foundation resilience performance measure is made up of three components. It's made up of flow, a depth duration curve and a poor water salinity curve. When a salinity comes from the bisect model, the depth duration of flow comes from RSM GL. And if here's an example of for the mangrove, looking at the pita creation as a function of salinity pita creation as a function of of sheet flow or flow, and then a depth duration curve here, showing that when if it's too deep for too many days, you're not going to get any accretion. If it's too dry for too many days, it's going to oxidize. So it's very, it's a very simple type of performance measure, but it's unique in that it's the first time anywhere in the nation, we've tried to do restoration in the face of sea level rise for a wetland. You've seen where these zones are. Jennifer, I showed you those zones. I want to point out the significance of looking at just the salinity in these zones. And if you look for example at zone a, what you find is that the salinity with all the different alternatives in 21, 22, 23, 24, that they're all compared to the future without in that area, it stays fresh. But what happens with all the alternatives, the future without which is showing these red arrows, the red arrows are showing you for those indicator regions. The salinity of the future without all the alternatives reduce the salinity with BBCR. Now, the advantage of looking at the accretion which is as water depth or depth duration flow and and salinity is the ability to break it down to understand for each one of these indicator regions within zone a, which the regions are doing best in relationship to the three elements. So, all all four indicator regions for water depth in zone a are doing terribly for accretion. And the worst is indicator region 508 which is in this southern region, which I think Walter showed you didn't change sea level rise and no matter what we did it was too deep. If it's too deep, you're not going to get any accretion due to water depth, but we are flowing. And we do have the appropriate salinity. So, when you combine these three, there will be the potential by 2085 to have some accretion. We'll be able to use it as a index of a performance measure habitat unit calculation that just how well will this do these different indicators perform. Another example of a zone with three indicator regions, showing that for zone B and looking at the salinity because of sea level rise for the salinity is right on the money, but you're not seeing a good depth of accretion ship, but we're seeing great flow in in two regions 522 520 521. We need to do something in the next phase of modeling to increase the flow to increase the accretion, but I do want to point out there's a gray bar here. It allows us to look at alternatives and figure out well out of all the alternatives. The alternative is gray is alternative 22. So what is it about alternative 22 that does give you the flow that does allow for higher accretion. And that's what that's how we move into the phase three of the monolate. Now, like Gina said, we, we have to make everything. We even keel that's not her words, but we have to standardize zero to one. So, taking the, the, the foundational resilience. This is how we broke it into bins for each one for salinity bins. What you see is where the main grows between 10 and 30 you get a score of one, but you do it also for flow and you do it for depth duration. Now that standardized now what happens now that you've standardized everything to a habitat suitability index rather than accumulation. So look at zone a as a whole what you can see right off the bat blue histograms are future without. So if we run a line across future without what we see is that for the most part in zone a the big component of adaptive foundational resilience are these orange bars, which is the salinity. So, and we can also now compare what's happening in zone a, in terms of its absolute score, and you can see that the best alternative now is 21. The second best alternative is 22. The most important attribute is salinity, and the second is flow and that ends up being very different for the triangle area and zone B. Its score is pretty much the same as zone a gets its high point 75 its best alternative is 22, but the most important attribute here happens to be salinity. So we now have the the ability to use AFR to break down the different ways to distribute water in that coastal system. Now this kind of summarizes everything that we found out in round two. I'm going to skip it because we are running out of time because I want to get to this next part. And that is using the AFR to create a topographic offset and initialize the RSM for running it to 2085. The most significant thing if we look at Ross and Nader's work, what they found is that there has been over the last 50 years a movement of it already has been a transition of mangroves into the fresh marsh, and that in areas where we're not distributing fresh water, it's significantly less of a transition. East of highway one, which here's highway one. The transition has been 3.3 kilometers. And west of highway one, the transition has been 2.19 kilometers. So we're going to use this type of trend in relationship to the type of habitats that exist. And this is the habitat for the whole system. So even though we run BBC or just for this corner here hydrologically you, you, you need to, if you're going to do a topographic offset you need to do it for the the entire region where these can flow in with the proper physics. And so, based on this relationship on this vegetation type, and then looking at four different types of accretion offsets, starting with the highest biomass we could find in the system. And that is over on the west side of Everglades National Park where you have very large mangroves that the these the same patterns of of accretion rates are used there. The difference here is that the maximum amount of accretion due to flow is is 10 millimeters. And due to salinity and due to water depth it's a you take the average of that and you multiply it by 50 years, and you end up with 433 millimeters of potential elevation change or 1.42 feet in that region. You do the same thing for the scrub mangrove type of environment where we do have flow like in Taylor slew. And you have a potential of six millimeters and four millimeters due to different drivers within average of 5.3 millimeters per year with a potential increase over a 50 year period of 0.87 feet. You do the same thing for the fresh marsh. So, in the BBC footprint we also have the image here on the right is showing dense model lands fresh marsh, and that has the potential to create 200 millimeters over 50 years. And then a very sparse type of system the best it could do would be only two millimeters per year for a point three three feet. And so what you take these four levels and you spread it out over the map. And then the BBC or footprint boy flows better on my computer. We mostly point eight seven feet of offset for the mangroves point six six feet for the fresh marsh, and then further up like in sparrow habitat. The best it's going to do is point three three feet. And that is how the RSM is initialized at time zero, once we put sea liberal rise in the system. And we can talk about why that's bad and why that's good when we have the Q&A section. All right, Jennifer. Fred and Walter mentioned, we learned an awful lot about what the system was doing from our round two evaluations. And from that, we were able to make some comparisons and evaluations and then ultimately some decisions to move us into our round three alternatives, which is what I'm going to talk about next. We learned that the round two alternatives did make a lot of improvements to the natural areas and to our near shore, but there still are some additional benefits that can be realized from the project. And a lot of places maybe on a scale of zero to one we could get to point four point five up to point six, but we really would like to get all of our benefits up to that that full one which represents 100% towards our target of restoration. But our project does need more fresh water, and that additional volumes would be better able to combat rising sea levels. We know that evaluating and comparing the performance of alternatives broken out into the different zones instead of bi alternatives. The team was able to see what types of features were giving the best results of moving water, where it is needed, and then in step six, which is our decision making in our selection, we were able to see features that were not working. And so we screened them out from further consideration. In steps one and two we kind of restarted our iterative plan formulation process again. And we looked at where the round two alternatives fall short for project benefits and our objectives. And we did what sorts of changes we could make in our infrastructure for our different project alternatives that would give better results as we move forward. And so now we are back again in step three this is our plan formulation step. We have round three alternatives that were actually just turned into start being modeled we don't have results yet. But we're anticipating them soon so that we can keep going in our planning process. So in round two we had four alternatives and then we evaluated for sensitivity runs. We had screening decisions of measures that were not working. And so we are not carrying them forward. We did have measures that we wanted to keep in our alternatives but some of a lot of those needed refinement. So we had recombination of measures from our different round two alternatives to put the best options together into one. And then we also wanted to make sure that we had our operational optimization. So from round two we're moving into round three where we have two alternatives. But we are also looking at two sensitivity runs on top of those where we're utilizing wastewater reuse as an additional source of water. And we also do have our yellow book component that will be evaluated on the yellow book component are those six components that Nicole described at the beginning of our presentation. And those have already been modeled in an earlier round. So we don't need to model them again, but they will be included in our final array when we compare. So in this round our round three is our final round of modeling from these modeling efforts and these alternatives we will be selecting our recommended plan for implementation. And we wanted to be sure that all of the round three alternatives and the sensitivity runs associated with them had components that our whole project and public team want to have when we do select a recommended plan. We also want to have water sourcing from the Northwest. We, when we compared our alternative 24 that didn't have any of those sources of water, the wet season benefits were okay. But the dry season benefits were very limited. And the dry season benefits are very important for what we would consider our project success. We wanted to look at the maximum amount of rehydration in the natural areas, which would then go to help the near shore. In some previous rounds of modeling's we looked at some varying intensities and amounts of rehydration in our natural areas, but we do want to have the best amount and the most amount that we can to put forward for the largest acreage of benefits as possible. We want to know that we want to be a little bit more nimble and adaptable with some infrastructure so that we can be resilient to sea level rise. And we want to make sure that we're balance balancing our objectives for rehydration, while also protecting some critical habitat. For example, for the Cape Sable seaside sparrow that has a subpopulation within our footprint. So this water reuse is being added to both of our round three alternatives, it is being added as a sensitivity run, and will be continued to be evaluated. This is a more higher cost and a higher risk feature, which is why we're adding it in as a sensitivity run and not a full part of our alternative. We want to try to walk through our different geographic areas and kind of just describe verbally how we're doing some differences between these two alternatives and how they are included to to address sea level change and some climate change while also going towards our project objectives. So this is the Northwest in alternative 31, which is one of our round three alternatives. We recombined and revised some features to try to hold some more water in the Northwest, so that we could get dry season carry over. And then compared to our other alternative all 32, we are looking at being able to tap into those Northwest water sources, but without the holding of that water. These are still aiming to get more water out of the Northwest and bring them south across the coastal Ridge and East to be redistributed into the coastal wetlands. And this additional water will work to combat the rising salinities in the natural areas due to sea level rise. Next is wastewater reuse we are adding this as a sensitivity run again to both of our alternatives. This is a direct source of year round freshwater that would be made available to the project. And it does have the same purposes as additional water from the Northwest. We know we need more water to be able to put the salinity into a more estuarine system instead of a more marine system in our Biscayne Bay near shore areas. Next just touching on our conveyance and our operations. In previous rounds we had looked at again kind of different levels of conveyance routes through the regional and the regional canal system. A couple of additional canal conveyance pathways. Not all of the alternatives had looked at every pathway, but again we are working in a little bit of an uncertain situation. And we also don't quite have the information for varied precipitation yet so the team really wanted to make sure that we were utilizing every single possible pathway that we could to maintain the maximum amount of flexibility within the project. So our redistribution and rehydration features. We really wanted to maximize in this last round of alternatives, we weren't looking to have only certain features that were working in one alternative versus another. We also didn't have water as Walter described on to the landscape and maximizing the green line transect and passive flow is really what can help put water into those lower salinity areas in the near shore. And so we put them the most amount of redistribution and rehydration features into both of our alternatives. In the next round we are looking a little bit more at some adaptable features in the southern Glades were proposing to do some backfill of a canal that discharges at the very, very southern end. We're looking at doing more of an incremental backfill as sea level rises to prevent some of that saltwater intrusion. So a recommended plan eventually we do understand that we have some culverts and some conveyance features from western wetlands into eastern wetlands and gravity might not particularly be our friend in 4050 years. So we're looking at some small pump stations to be able to keep that gradient moving from west to east. And then finally and Carlos is going to come and talk a little bit more about this but we are looking at putting thin layer placement on to the landscape. And this put small amount of materials into some subsided areas to keep the vegetation from drowning. And so Carlos is going to come up and talk about the Emma project which is Everglades mangrove migration assessment. Did not log off just don't touch. Okay. Okay. Okay, thank you very much. Good morning everybody. My name is Carlos Coronado and I've been working at the district for many years. And there are reasons behind this idea of thin layer placement is based on what Fred was explaining earlier today. Using as it is in the field as it is as you know, helps to for us to understand how fast there is a change in elevation in the system. And the thing that we have learned by doing that kind of studies in the field is that elevation capital is very important. So we have in the in the area of BBC we have more than 20 different independent sites where we've been measuring elevation change for more for more than 20 years. And one of those studies, what we have seen is that areas where mangroves are below the mid means for the levels, those sites do not agree very well. In contrast sites where we know where they are a little bit elevated relative to the mean water levels, those sites, I think much better and increase the elevation in a very good way over the last 24 years that we've been measuring elevation change. So using that information, we decided to test this concept of thin layer placement, the layer placement placement is a technique that has been used in many different mangroves, marshes in the United States, except in mangroves. If we go to this Emma project, it will be one of the first projects applying to label placement in mangrove ecosystems in the United States. So the basic question of the label placement is the label placement is a viable method to maintain ecosystem of mangrove ecosystems. That's the basic question of Emma. So we want to try to understand whether or not we can use this technique in mangrove ecosystems. In order to do that, last year, with the help of Gina Ralph, we went through series of different workshops at meetings with different people with different expertise, including engineers who explained it to us how thin layer, the, the, the rich material in this case can be used as a, as a sediment, new sediment into the system. So those, all those workshops that we have, we learn how difficult is to move the rich material from in the ocean on in the base and move that material and place that sediment into the coastal marshes. So that's something that we learn from these series of workshops and these workshops produce a very good report that I think is available for everybody. And in that report, we explained very well everything that we discussed and all the other results that we obtained by doing all these workshops that report really includes everything in a much, much detail way. than this presentation. So one of the aspects that we learned the map on the right showing Florida. Every single yellow dot there shows the different places where we were considering bringing the rich material and move the material into any study site in the BBC footprint. And they have all the pictures on the, on the left shows a different methodology not using the rich material for using material that is next to the sites where we want to apply this, the thin layer placement. So we were, we were looking at different ways to place that sediment from either the rich material or from our material next to the, to the, to the study sites. Based on those workshops, we went into the field looking for different places where we can carry out this project. And we decided that there are there were two really good sites where we can really apply the neighbor placement and the picture on the right shows the Charlie site. That is at the very end of the C111 the L the C111 canal and it shows this the particular site where we were considering applying the thin layer placement, the picture all the way to the left is the C111 canal that we call the pocket site. That's the other second site where we were considering what we are considering applying the thin layer placement. The main difference between those two sites is Charlie site is divided into public lands and private lands, and we still don't have the whole ownership of the site so that we can apply the thin layer placement. In contrast, the pocket site is owned by the district, and we know we can we can give us permission to do anything we want in that in the pocket site. So we have less problems instead of applying the label placement in the pocket site. So those are the two different sites where we are considering doing the thin layer placement. And the material for those two particular site is coming from the material next to the, to the two sites. So it will be very easy just to remove that material, pulverize the material and apply the material next to the next to the site, making the project less expensive also. So this is a closer look at Charlie site and Charlie site something that we realized that for Charlie site, there is a really big difference in the macro topography. And based on that we, as all the workshop that we had, we decided that based on the macro topography that we observe in Charlie site, we will apply the thin layer placement at three different, three different layers. One point five point 25 feet. The other one point 25 feet of sediment and the deeper side, we will put one point five feet of sediment, which is a lot of sediment, but based on the, on the material that is next to Charlie site. We considered that the material is enough to apply into into these three different sediment groups. In contrast, in the pocket side, which is lowering elevation, the material will come also from the material next to the pocket side, and we will apply only one food of sediment. And in this particular site, we have a control site where we will not apply any sediment, and we will see the difference between the sediment and the control site in the response of the other of the mangrove community. So where are we today with Emma, Emma has completed we have a really good understanding how we can pursue this project, and we have submitted the project to different agencies for funding. And also today, we still don't have money to carry out this particular aspect of Emma, but we are still applying and we are hoping that we will get some money sometime this next year or sometime in the future. So the other aspect, very important aspect of the thin layer placement is, can we apply thin layer placement within the BBC footprint. If their answer is yes, the question is where we can do something like this within the BBC footprint, as we can see, there are three different zones, a B and C. And we are looking into those three different zones, where we can apply the thin layer placement. So zone A has four different indicator regions, going from the freshwater area 509 all the way to the coastal area 508. And what we can see in the figure in the middle, all the indicator regions are circulated by the red color. That means, based on the three different parameters that Fred presented for the Resilience PM, those three indicator regions do not have the conditions, proper conditions in terms of water depth to apply the thin layer placement. In particular, the indicator region 508, as we can see, after water presentation, fresh presentation, this is a site that is inundated even today for very, very, very high water depth. And it will be very, very, not really good idea to apply any kind of sediment and indicator region where we see today, the conditions are not conducive for any successful thin layer placement. So that's why those three indicator regions in zone A are unread, because conditions are not conducive for any successful thin layer placement. So zone B, zone B has three different indicator regions, and the one in red is the freshwater zone indicator region in zombie, zombie, and that indicator region doesn't have the conditions either for a successful thin layer placement. Indicator region by 20, which is close to the bay, using water depth flow and salinity that indicator region has the conditions to a very successful thin layer placement within this particular zone. And moving into zone C, some Z, there are two indicator regions, which are in green in the figure in the in the middle, 516 and 514 that have the conditions in terms of water depth flow and salinity where we consider a thin layer placement project within those two indicator region could be successful. And those are pictures from the week to when we were looking for sites where to carry out this project, pretty beautiful from the air. And if you have any questions, please ask Gina or Fred. Thank you. Thank you, Carlos. I think we had a q amp a scheduled for this, this time, but we're going to skip that we'll hear from Eric and Bonnie and then we'll take up with the q amp a with everyone from this session. So, next is Eric Stabenow, the National Park Service, and he's presenting with Bonnie Irving. And this is DOI perspectives on an adaptive process for BBCR for the Cape stable seaside sparrow, considering climate change issues. But while we're getting started. So I'm Eric Stabenow with the National Park Service, been doing this work for the federal government for almost 20 years now. And here today with one half of the DOI perspective on this so when we do get the slides up and running we're going to see some things here that are repeats of some of your slides with some new context brought into play about the way DOI is thinking about this and my partner here is And I'm Bonnie Irving with the US Fish and Wildlife Service Everglades program supervisor and ecological services. Born to keep my hands just on the keyboard part for paging. See, or not. And here we go. Alright, so I'll run through just a real quick overview on this and then hand it off to Bonnie to get things started so what we've really got here is kind of five main points, throwing down on the page that that bring together a lot of the concepts in the last hour and a half or so, and that is that we're trying to bring more water into the coast with these projects, and we have this generalized idea inside Everglades restoration about fighting water with water when we think about sea level rise we'll put more fresh water in on one end and holding the salt water back from the other end, but recognizing that that's going to elevate the waters on both sides of it and that gives us a bit of a pinch. So the DOI issues and regulations and land management concerns that we have there are, there are portions of the system that are going to be very challenging for us to manage. And this BBC your project is give us an opportunity, kind of looking across the set to think about particularly this one tiny birds wonderful little habits that we're trying to protect. And live up to all of our regulations requirements associated with that, while we're also trying to meet these other kind of project objectives and we're having to having to think our way through how do we do that how do we meet our mandates and get through this process. So, last point on there is recognizing and responding to anticipate a future conditions and just as a pitch to what we're talking about here is I'm going to express some things about the uncertainty that's coming. And we're not going to do this in a numeric sense I'm going to do this in a generalized sense talking about what we understand from the modeling and what we expect and see level rise and these other issues. And we're going to talk to that uncertainty in some of the physical parameters we deal with results and fairly large uncertainty and turning of the temporal steps that we're working out so we get that kind of cross walk of those two issues and so that's what we're going to be heading with this to give you the heads up. Thank you. And so one of those key components is that there is a critical habitat area within the project footprint, and it's known as keep stable seaside sparrow population D. So one of our staff did a quick graphic, just to indicate the hydro period, kind of on a sliding for your average. And that's taken from 1995 to 2023, it looks like on here. And from basically from this slide, what we can see is in this critical population area, or critical habitat area. The hydro period is actually a little bit high. It's, it's running a little bit wetter than what would be optimal for the needs of the capes able seaside sparrow. Got the right button. Alright. So the key takeaway on this graphic. And just to show that Jay saw does vegetation surveys in these critical habitat areas and in 2011, we had a lot more kind of dispersed vegetation types. I would say look to the orange and the red and the pinks, but that's not really the case. So one of the staff and I were looking at this and cladium is actually also part of that orange dark color. And that's freshwater marsh, but it's actually a little bit too wet. So keep stable seaside sparrow we'll see in another slide, it kind of needs this Goldilocks zone, and that's not really being indicated in that recent vegetative survey which is on the right. And that's showing that really the trend is moving wetter. The mule grass is kind of dispersed and really you just don't see it anymore in the recent vegetation surveys. And so we have this lovely graphic. This is one of kind of a series of graphics that we have is just a cartoon to kind of depict kind of the ideal habitat range that we need for this particular species. And it kind of indicates that Goldilocks zone that I mentioned of mule grass. So the hydro period that we're really trying to target is between 90 and 210 days. Again, if we look back at that earlier graphic it showed that it was really at that upper limit and over that limit, quite a bit of the time, and that is kind of borne out by that vegetation survey that indicates that it is transitioning wetter already. Transition back to Eric. All right, so, so here we have this idealized. I'm going to borrow your slide. Here we have this idealized habitat that we're trying to reach for recognizing that it's a bit too wet and we're trying to protect the habitat. And so we had, you know, National Park Services talking about increasing water level and flow through particular areas in the southern end of the project. And the Fish and Wildlife Service is speaking up and saying, hey, but protect mule grass, protect this 10 centimeter little free space that they need for the habitat. And that seemed to go successfully. And the Army Corps of Engineers wisely wrote a letter to us that said, can you two please get together and tell us what do we want to do? What do we really want to do? And we spent some time on that because it was communication issue. We felt that we were doing a pretty good job on communicating internally, but we weren't necessarily getting it across into the PDT and it translating to how we wanted to look at the project features over time. So we really, we really spent some time thinking about how do you protect the habitat and protect the bird and yet allow for this future resilient condition with sea level rise. And so this is really what we're going to be talking about a little bit here. This graphic was up a little bit earlier. So I turn this mic a little bit for us. And I'm going to kind of borrow it in a little bit off-table use for it. So there's a line drawn on this page at zero. This is not to be equated with ground surface elevation in the habitat of this Cape Sable Seaside Serial Sub Pop D. But it should be thought of as a ground surface elevation and the fact that as sea level rise occurs over time, there will be a moment when we cross that water level crosses, not just that ground surface elevation, but that critical period that's that 10 centimeter depth. And then it starts to cause us these very long hydro periods on that. So in the intermediate curve, we're looking at the current conditions and then modeling again at the 2085 conditions so we don't actually have a midpoint modeling assessment that's hitting us we weren't thinking of that project in this way we're doing really new modeling here but we're not doing that so in some point we're going to cross that. So we have to evaluate based on that intermediate curve at 2085. We have to have some flexibility in the project to recognize that we could be wrong, and it could be running at higher or lower rates than that. And if we go up to some of those that streams we have to start thinking about what does the project look like in those extreme situations such as the highest curve at 2085 and coming back through time on that. What does that mean for us in terms of this this habitat we're trying to protect. This plot, again without this Cape Civil Seaside Sparrow habitat was shown in an earlier part of the presentation today as well. So now we're looking at where sea level rises influence the landscape we're looking at where the accretion rates are anticipated spatially across the landscape. It's a little more uniform than we'd actually expect on any given specific plot right we would look at some of those images and spoke about the sparse landscapes that are in the coastal system so at the best. These are the highest accretion rates for each of the areas we're dealing with in kind of an optimized condition and so even there when we look at it you can see the round outlines the little red outlines are the Cape Civil Seaside Sparrow subpopulations and the one down in the bottom right that looks bit like a starfish is sub pop D and you can see that it's setting across multiple accretion rate zones and impacts from sea level rise and impacts into project so it's a it's a really critical piece to look at. The second part that stands out to me when we look at this is that the soil type is critical to get newly grass to get the right habitat, we'd have to have the right conditions to get there. And we don't necessarily know that that's going to happen with the project so we have somewhat optimistic look at the total accretion rates on the page. We have a little bit of a call it an optimistic or questioning view, looking at the type of habitats we might create over time, and recognizing what that might be for the sparrow in that area and so we on the department side and fish and while I say we had to think about National Park service, what we were going to do for that bird in the future how can we do our best for that. And we started thinking of it in this way I've inverted the graph for us right now we're looking at curves that go down to the right and that is the free board, the depth above the high water level that we're looking at so you can see that we lose free forward over time. And depending on which one of the sea level rise curves we're looking at, it makes a big difference when sea level rise comes into a critical height for us a critical elevation for us. The second thing that stands out on here so first let's identify that the green line on the top right is the intermediate sea level rise curve. There are heavy lines and there are thin limits associated with the green curve is a thinner line that is that curve with accretion. We get to the case that in the habitats that we're interested in, we could potentially have surface elevation that's very close to you know getting us to 2085 without going underwater substantially on the alternative, you know, most optimistic view on the most pessimistic view, the things happen a lot faster. So, our approach to this has been in this project something really unique, most of our projects if we have really different conditions and different phases. We would be thinking of the project as one project for now and then we would put the other projects whole planning modeling every other effort off to another time or another effort to look at. In this project we're looking at both pieces of it and thinking about a phased implementation. So, going to the little blue bars at the top of the page you'll see that there's a time period when we want to maintain the current sub pop habitat. And in fact we have to. That's our mandate by law. So we're going to protect that habitat as long as we can at some point that habitat gets impacted by sea level rise and our capacity to maintain that habitat is no longer in our hands. And then we have to go to a different phase we have to think about what the connectivity and accretions could be at the other end of that, and somewhere in between the two we have some sort of a transition state that we have to get across where that transition state is going to be a critical piece that requires us to be watching the data, making an adaptive type of choice along the way with the project so I think this plot really, really draws it out the data on the plot is queued together to the SM element that's the triangle which lines up right inside the northern pieces of the habitat population that we're looking at. So what we decided to do to address this is come up with a two phase there's an adaptive implementation phase where initially we would look at the southern end of the C 111 canal so that canal is in the red line, going down to the coast. So to think of it for the water management district for flood management as the major drain the big plug that you can pull to get water out of the system. And we would like to maintain as long as we can as much of that flexibility as we can but over time there's a partial backfilling that comes into play, and eventually a complete backfilling of that. When we get to that stage we need to really be making adjustments on where the water goes. So back to the, you know the features of our SM we can look at the whole water management system and all the features. We can look at what the outcomes are likely to be as we adjust between different spreaders and different solutions there is one interesting piece on here looks like a distribution line and blue on there I think we've moved away from thinking of pipes right now but it's. I left it in place, it was in the presentation at the time it was given to to us and it is a way to think about how we have to adapt our approaches how we have to change over time one and be flexible again with the process. And I would anticipate that we'll see a lot of changes with how we do that we are doing something really unique here, and that we have this kind of stage implementation it's trying to protect the sparrow down to this end. So, again, just kind of sharing one of these last spots on it. We're going to meet the current heads that be good stewards of the adjacent lands hold it as long as we possibly can give the sparrow that opportunity to to move or to be moved or whatever that is going to be over time, and we're going to manage the areas in the future the water management for in the future. So I think that's us for today correct. Thank you. Thanks Eric and Bonnie. Now I think we'll move to a Q amp a with the panel with a panel discussion. So if we could have all speakers from this session up in front. Yeah, it might be a little tight. Okay, thanks to all the panelists that was a really great set of presentations. So I think we'll start with Matt. Thanks for all of that time. So I have just sort of two high level planning kinds of questions and, and maybe this is for Jennifer. I've heard the phrase hold water for dry season carry over. Is this storage, the way we talk about storage and other parts of the system. Is that the same thing. You're on your on that was working. So at the beginning I think yes that our intent was to create some sort of long longer term storage. And it's also what was thought about in one of our yellow book components the North Lake about storage was looking at lining rock mines. And we've come to realize that one that's not actually engineeringly feasible. And the geology of the Northwest region is really making it very very difficult for us to provide that long term storage. So we're looking at different options to, if it's not going to be wholly long term, if we can at least slow it down enough to move some of that water. At a later time frame, we still consider that to be a benefit which is why we're trying to look at some of those rock mine is more flow through and the wetland flow through to kind of slow it down a little bit more. So within a within annual cycle is what you're talking. Okay. My second question was Gina mentioned that water quality evaluation was to come down the road and from a different team. I haven't heard anything about any needs for water quality treatment. Is there any needs for water quality treatment for this water going into the natural system. I could probably take that one. So there are a couple things water quality is not an objective of the study but it is evaluated as a constraint, along with water supply and flood protection so for water quality we cannot degrade the existing water quality. Some team did perform an evaluation on round two. Moving forward there is a need for the wastewater reuse obviously that would have water quality treatment component to it. And then we do need to meet water quality criteria or at least not degrade it from existing water quality. So the team did evaluate it relative to numeric nutrient criteria in the coastal waters and the existing water quality. I could add just a little touch on that one. And I think that in water quality and we talked about being a use as constraint. I appreciate in general and make the argument for continuing to do evaluation so sensitivity style runs on things where water quality is indeed a constraint something we'd have to consider over time be that groundwater use recharge be that the wastewater reuse program that this listed in here in this round of modeling right now. So we, we have that ongoing interest in it and we've recognized there's a really hard cost there and there's a really big lift that we're already seeing out of the projects in a few different places. So not to be a mark against the project but I'm always looking for a little opportunity to do a little better so the sensitivity runs to keep us looking at that are really great too. Yeah, and there will be ancillary benefits to like the water preserve areas and rehydration features, even though the objective may not be water quality improvement. They will offer nutrient uptake. Thanks, Margaret and Casey Ellen, and then John. Thanks for the presentation. My question is for Jennifer. So Jennifer on your two slides you've had stakeholder involvement at the center. What is the purpose of that? What is the purpose for involving stakeholders and how effective is it in defining alternatives? Yeah, no, our stakeholder involvement is critical to the success of this project. So we do have about monthly PDT meetings I'm sure Nicole can talk a little bit more about that. We also have eight or nine different sub teams that can work a little bit more specifically at things that we do have a plan formulation sub team, ecological modeling, engineering, water quality, all that sort of things. And those are weekly or bi-weekly depending on what kind of process we're in at the time and what process of the plan formulation cycle we're in. So we have utilized many different ideas and features from our alternatives that have come directly from our stakeholders. And so it's kind of become like a mishmash of different people's ideas that get combined by other entities and then work together to create a full alternative. It's very much a group effort. Also, Neva, that Gina said. So as part of the National Environmental Policy Act stakeholder engagement, we do have scoping meetings. We do have a comment box in which we'll take anybody's comments and then at the eco sub team or at all of the sub team meetings as well as the project delivery team meetings, there is not just the engagement by the project delivery team, but there's also an opportunity for public comment. We have done several workshops between the alternatives, which also allow for group interaction as part of that gathering of the data, reviewing the data, taking the information from the modeling and then turning it into the next round. So we have had those types of engagements that are both agency as well as members of the public can attend. Casey. Thanks, Jim. I have a couple questions just stopped me. Thanks for those presentations really clear tons of information really appreciate that. We were just talking about the savings clause constraints and I was curious. Flooding seems like it might be an important one with the changes, especially in the flows to the coastal structures changing and so I'm just curious how was the change in flood risk evaluated and how does how do those constraints factor into decision making between the alternatives relative to the performance metrics. Yes, me. Yes, so for flood savings clause we have to honor both flood protection and water supply criteria. It's actually a different phase of the project so we're in the formulation phase right now what we're trying to answer is, what do we want to build eventually, and what does it look like the 2085. In the last selected plan we move into a different phase of the project, which is known as the project assurances phase, and that's where the savings clause analysis performed. The mindset there is we will move to 2035 and Eric slide actually kind of showed one of those check in points at 2035. The idea is that as we build the project, we will continue to look at the savings clause and the flood risk assessment will occur at the action when we're actually turning on the features in the field. And when things are built because there's a lot of moving pieces as you can imagine between now and 2085 BBC is not the only project trying to address resiliency. We don't know everything that's going to happen from a flood risk, you know infrastructure perspective of what the county is going to do what the state of Florida is going to do what the federal government is going to do. So we put in all the information that we have that's available in our 2085 condition but when it actually comes to the check for savings clause. We get a 2035 condition which is much more certain, and we make sure that when we turn on the features when we turn on the pump that we're not creating those adverse impacts. And so we're looking at it as is infrastructure capable of providing flood protection, adding a bunch of pumps to a system that isn't going to work and gravity seems going to be a good idea. And then specifically how do you set up the operating plans, how do you operate those infrastructure will be analyzed 2035. And then incrementally, as things continue to get built, and as other project features happen that the process continues to update those operating vehicles of those, those, those features over time. Great, thanks. Yeah, that makes sense and then as you envision doing that. I'm curious. Maybe we'll have new precipitation scenarios that might be used by then, and I'm just curious you don't have them now but from a thought experiment perspective. You know what happens if this, if it gets 5 to 10% water, let's say, do you think it's what happens to performance metrics how robust this plan just the thought experiment to like 5 to 10% water. I think it's interesting because I think that the performance measures now you're talking about the metrics themselves I think they're built that they would capture the changes in the ecological system when that when that if that would occur so I don't think that we have to go back to what we're sampling or measuring or how we're tracking that both in the project funding and in the recovery process of, you know, tracking I think that those are are solid in place. I think that related to the last answer is that there's this periodic process of looking at the combined operating plan not officially just that one that we're doing now but in general the combined operations of the water management system throughout and I think that that this gives us space to capture. If we're seeing climate related changes and increases of precipitation or maybe we're getting that shortages because we're having some of the battle transpiration type of piece that's affecting us and it could be spatially explicit these things that happen to us we are talking about Lancelot sticking down here in Florida so we have to think about that as well so I think that's in the operational plans that that is where that would be being addressed. Yeah, and I'll just add from a technical perspective on the on the modeling side in particular, there's two kind of elements to climate scenarios right one is extreme events, and the other is really longer term changes in, you know, drought precipitation you know drought periods things like that right. So we have a lot of regional modeling tools suite these daily, you know long term simulation models, when we talk about the climate scenarios that you've heard about from Dr. Opsicara last time and that we're trying to get that group together. Those are really focused on adding things beyond the current climate variability that we have in our 52 year climate record right so we have a lot of droughts we have multi year droughts we have really wet periods those are already built into our analysis that climate we're getting to like the really, really, really severe drought that could happen in the future climate change scenario, you know so this particular project to answer your question about robustness. As we said, the reality of the system that we're dealing with is that it's not a multi year carryover system. It's seasonal at best, you know, so I think we're in very good shape for being here in terms of that robustness. And, you know, as we do the savings laws assessment as we do the Miami data and we do have some tools to do the event based, you know, as you heard from Kelly Moran and others last time that we have some tools to do those types of assessments, and they will be applied. So those longer term climate scenarios I don't feel like we're missing them for BBC here but they would be very critical for Central Africa, it's Western Africa, it's, you know, larger landscape. Marsh. Okay, thanks. Okay, we'll go to Helen next. So I'm Casey asked one of my questions. The other question I have is so I'm an ecological model and in the fields that I work in the results of my models are never used. There's a report written, and it all sounds lovely and then it's put on a shop and it's never used so I'm very curious, because I haven't actually ever seen it with my own eyes, how you go from the alternatives and all of the scientific information that you've presented here through all of the stakeholder groups. You know, and scientists and so forth to and I know this is a long winded question and probably a long winded answer and I don't expect a long winded answer but two recommendations and that get put forward. And how fundamental disagreements or disputes over the handle. I don't know who can answer that. I'm going to pump this somebody else in the room, certainly at this panel real quickly, but I will say that in our team we recognize that this area of connecting between ecology and ecological modeling and making decisions that that process needs to come together a lot stronger in the process of putting staff on board to do that to help us make address this exact issue so I think you're seeing an issue that we were also seeing a long way. But again, I'll punch others on how the decision making process is not Gina. So I think that's me. I've been around four of engineers. So, as I showed in my initial slide habitat units are one piece of the puzzle. So the habitat units are what take all of that scientific information from the performance measures that we've developed, and we roll it up we Jennifer showed how we can alter how we can look zone by zone so that we can match the ecological performance and hydrologic performance we would like to see roll that up into or connect it with a specific management measures specific engineering solution that we can then mix and match, pull it together until an alternative. All of our rounds are vetted to the multi agency project delivery team. They're also vetted with the public we collect input we collect feedback. We try to do consensus based recognizing that you know different agencies or different communities have different desires or ecological goals within their region. So if we take that information that we get as part of the habitat, that's one piece. We then have to also apply those savings plus constraints where that's part of the assurance space. We also have to come up with a design of preliminary engineering design, and we have to cost it out. So for each one of those features there is a price tag, a rough order of magnitude cost associated with that feature. That then we take the costs from that estimate with the benefits that we are showing from the habitat unit calculations, and we plug that through that economic model, the cost effectiveness inner incremental cost analysis tool so that we can tell you that each alternative per habitat unit is going to cost X amount of dollars. In addition, we also take those tools that the joint ecosystem modeling group, we apply our constraints such as water quality, we look at the other ecological benefits that are captured as part of those habitat units. All of that weighs into the decision making to lead to a tentatively selected. That tentatively selected plan is put out for, again, stakeholder engagement stakeholder comments it's all documented in a national environmental policy act document. So in this instance, it'll be an environmental impact state. We then collect comments from the public, the public gets a 45 day review period. They provide their comments we incorporate as appropriate. And at the same time, while all of this is going around in the background we are coordinating all the way up to our vertical team in Washington DC, so that they have. We're moving out with in that national environmental policy act documentation so there's lots of discussions there's lots of pieces of the puzzle in which we make our determination. We strive for consensus based and in the core of engineers we always say if everybody's a little bit angry with us then we've done our job effectively. Okay, we're, we have more questions more time but I think we can get to a few more. Okay, so I wanted to just come back to Matt's question about water quality issues and ask if there's if the water if there are there any water quality predicted linkages or impacts on accretion or other vegetation responses that you know that could be incorporated into the models. Currently, there is no water quality. The, the accretion measurement is strictly looking at elevation change. And like Nicole said, there, as we move forward and we start looking at reuse water. And if we start putting combining reuse water and areas, also that we would think about 10 layer placement. We are going to have to come up with some estimate of the downstream runoff of nutrients from that kind of system. Currently, there are, there are no estimates of such such an interaction. I had to found a little bit about this science, you know the disconnect between not the disconnect, but that the academic community tends to produce really important information, modeling information that goes up on the shelf. One of the important things that we have been doing for the last 20 years is making sure that the those type of products are understood in our modeling efforts and and trying to direct the scientific effort at academic institutes to focus on applied products. There, you can't get NSF money unless you have a really good theoretical framework right, but that we don't work on that level we work more on an applied level. And so we helped scientific community direct their models to respond to what a management activity restoration activities, and usually doesn't take all that much shift in the modeling activity. What it takes is running a particular scenario that we currently do in the Everglades, it's, and showing upper management that has an impact. And then we cover the scientific wing can bring those scientists into into the fall to help structure the big picture of the six, the evolution of restoration. Okay, Bill and then Jeff. So thank you those were great presentations so I think my question is for Jennifer Walter. If I understood correctly alternate alternative 23 involves aquifer storage is that right. sensitivity run. Oh it was just a sensitivity run okay I was going to ask about feasibility of that, given that it looked like the asr locations will be pretty pretty southernly and whether that would be challenging long term but it was just a sensitivity run perhaps it doesn't matter. So, the asr we did look at to try to figure out a way to improve our storage, which we knew was the most difficult part of this project in general. We tried it in two different locations one was in the Northwest area near one of the Miami Dave well fields. And then the second was in one that coastal asr area. And we did have some initial conversations about feasibility of that especially long term, perhaps with some salt water intrusion. But we really were trying to focus more on if there were going to be significant benefits. And, and that was what our evaluation was based on and I'll turn it to Walter for anything else. No, I think we have seen that the asr has a benefit in the modeling right we're seeing a carryover storage. We're seeing improvements in the dry season. It also comes with a little bit of an impact in the way that we do as our because there's an efficiency loss in the bubble. And in this part of the system, every drop of water is really critical so that at least in the way we apply our performance measures. When we lose a little bit of water, we get a little bit of a ding and when we carry it over, we get an improvement I think the net is still an improvement. So as far as the technology I think the well even the panel and I think it's viable in this part of the system. I think that it synergistic with what we're doing. I just don't know if it'll be part of the BCR at the end of the day. And the big picture cost benefit analysis. And so just clarify for me. It's still viable even if you're that far south feeling sea level rise. That's our take right now yes that we think it is. Thanks. Yeah, I'll echo everybody else great presentations learned a lot. My question is for Brett and Carlos. What does scaling up then layer placement to the project level look like seems like there would be big challenges and actually being able to do it on a large scale and also getting it added to BCR as a part of the project. Thank you. Thank you for your question. So we think that Emma, the thin layer placement component is the physical model of the actual doing something like this within the BBC footprint. We believe that Emma never played a project by doing it, we will, we will use whatever we learn from that small scale project and apply that into a much larger scale. As of. Is it possible. I think what we learned by the all the different workshops that we, where we participated. All the engineers were part of these workshops, they were already good explaining to us that how difficult it is for also the post that it was possible. So you're asking if it is possible. Yes, it is possible. The all the other difficulties that something like that. Carry us carries out. But yes, I do believe that it is possible. I've seen it in many other different parts of the United States using this technique and working very well over the long term scales 10 years 15 years. And I think if it's working in those environments, I think in my work also here in South Florida. Thanks. Thanks Carlos and thanks to the panel. We're going to juggle the agenda a little bit. We're going to go to lunch now. Okay, we're going to return promptly at one o'clock, where we're going to go into session to on adaptive management. We'll go to okay we'll come back at 110. Then we'll go to our adaptive management session, and then we'll swing back after completion of that session, and we'll hear from Laura and Stephanie on vulnerability assessment. Okay, so what you have to keep in your mind right now is be back here by 110 after you enjoy a good lunch. Each of the panelists introduce themselves. Maybe starting with you, Eva. Right sound check. Excellent. Good afternoon committee members and members of the team. Thank you for having me. My name is Eva fellows. I work for the Army Corps of Engineers the Jacksonville districts. And I am the chief of the ecosystem branch in the programs and project management division. What all that jargon means is that I am the person responsible for executing the program on behalf of Colonel booth and the Jacksonville district. So I'm essentially their lead integrator of all things ever glades. Thanks. Hi everybody I'm Larry Williams I work for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. I work in Viral Beach, and I supervise the ecological services program for the US Fish and Wildlife Service here in Florida. And that includes most of our endangered species Act consultations and our Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act responsibilities. Thank you. Good afternoon. Can you hear me okay. Great. My name is Leslie walk. And I work for the South Florida Water Management District here in West Palm Beach at our headquarters. And I am the section administrator of our group that's called the ecosystem restoration planning and project management section. It's very little words in that but what I do is lead a group of project managers that are responsible for the planning and implementation of our search projects. And we work alongside with our counterparts at the Army Corps of Engineers on a daily basis to implement. Hello, everyone. My name is Adam Galver. I'm the director of the office of Everglades restoration initiatives for the Department of the interior. It's great spending the day with most of you yesterday out in big cypress got to know some of you and look forward to other opportunities to speak with others. I work for the with the Department of Interior again report directly to the assistant secretary of fish and wildlife and parks in Washington DC. And the office of Everglades restoration initiatives is the administrative branch to the South Florida ecosystem restoration task force. We have seven federal now state and now currently as a result of the most recent word a six state and two tribal to convene to chart the course of Everglades restoration. One of my other responsibilities in the office is to work with folks like great folks like Larry and others in the room here to try to coordinate our government to government. And how we're researching and how we're working across landscapes and multitude of threatened endangered species and how we can work towards, you know, achieving our shared mission and healing healing the land, like we heard yesterday, right, important. Right, so anyhow, I appreciate the opportunity and having this conversation with you all and the other panel members. Thank you. Thank you for working on getting your video up and running, but you could audibly introduce yourselves starting with Angie. Good afternoon everyone my name is Angie done I'm the chief of the planning and policy division for Jacksonville district. We all of our planning and environmental compliance efforts for all mission areas within the state of Florida US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. So that does include the ever important Everglades restoration mission, as well as our flood risk management and navigation mission. Thank you for allowing me to be here today. Good afternoon, I'm Debbie sure no I am with the office of water project review at headquarters at the US Army Corps of Engineers. Our office reviews projects from all over the nation on both ecosystem restoration as well as our other business lines, like navigation, coastal storm risk management, and etc. I have seen ecosystem restoration projects from across the nation, though I did get started in ecosystem restoration down in the Everglades. So, thank you. And now it's a camera, it works now. Angie does your camera work. There you are. Okay, we'll turn it over to the committee for questions. Jeff. So the question I'm going to ask is basically the first of the questions that was on the list that we sent you ahead of time with a little introduction for some context and one addition I want to make to it. So the committee is very interested in hearing about how more learning more about how you're going to close the loop on adaptive management, how you're going to actually make changes. And alterations insert based on new information and unexpected events we've seen. We've seen the four boxes of the original adaptive management plan and action at the planning stage and with assessment and now it seems like you've reached the management science integration box where your act that involves how you go about developing options for making alterations in new knowledge and unexpected events. In looking at all the documentation about the process that's come out that's mostly come from recover. So what it looks like, at least to me that the design coordination team has a lot of is a really key decision making body for for this process for making changes so the addition is I'd like to hear more about like who's on that team, and how much authority you actually have, and then that specifically and then more generally is the process sort of up and ready to go and all you need is an issue that requires an options report to go to the design coordination team or do you are there still some challenges and and constraints that you see that you need to deal with before you're able to really put that plan into action in closing the loop. Anybody. Okay, I'm going to, I hate having my back to Angie and Debbie so I'm going to try to be sideways here. Okay, great. I'm, I'm going to give the program managers perspective of this. But I think it's really important to hear Debbie and Angie's perspective because they bring something super important and different in their roles. The way I look at this as this is an area of growth for the program. We have spent many years preparing for the peak of implementation, and that's what I'm experiencing as a program manager is your lead program manager I'm experiencing the peak of implementation of the projects and to give you some context of that. The program construction, when I say peak of implementation that's what I mean, you know in the core that's we're looking at dollars spent in construction. Actively we have 13 construction contracts about a billion dollars worth of construction actively right now that we're managing in an FY 24. We are scheduled to award $3 billion worth of work just on the core side. So that's what I mean when I say we are at the peak of implementation. When we are very, very focused on making sure that we have that ready to go and all of our field teams are ready and our planning and engineering and everyone is ready to go to do that. The next area of growth is the adaptive management piece the and I look at that in parallel with readiness for operational planning. Meaning, when we built something we have operational testing and we need to have an operational strategy related to that that's fully integrated with science, the doctor Ralph's team. I'm looking at Gina right there. And so she and I are very closely synced. And what kinds of questions will I have as a program manager that I need to tell Gina now that I will have in 2025 six seven eight nine 30 so that the team is ready. So I see this as an area of growth and an area that's quite frankly really hard. At the moment, we're not all the way smooth sailing to implement adaptive management yet because we're very busy building stuff. And so, that's the first piece there's a lot more to say, and I don't want you to think that we're not thinking about it but I'm just telling you that that's an area where I am looking. Where's the program going in five years. That's where it's going like that's the next big growth area. Once we make it through this peak of construction implementation which is 22 to 2030. It's super high construction, but we need to be ready for that as each facility comes online. So it's very incremental. And then what uncertainty has been realized that we need to manage with science, then comes that. So that's how I think of it. Angie, do you want to go or Debbie, go ahead. Yeah, I was, if you don't mind Angie, I was just going to do a broad overview. So, for the core, the way we do adaptive management is it is part of the project when the project is is authorized. And there is a method that is laid out for how monitoring will be done. And if things do if they project does not perform as is expected, what will what actions can be done in response. So it happens post construction, and it happens after some monitoring has occurred in our traditional ecosystem restoration projects. I think the interesting part with this project is that it is so big and there is so much monitoring that there. Usually we don't change the adaptive management plan as we go along. But I think that that is where your other teams come in where maybe we thought we needed a specific performance measure and now we're figuring out it's a different performance measure, or a different way to monitor. And so I think you're not only doing adaptive management of the project but you're also doing adaptive management of the adaptive management and monitoring plan. And that's where it gets a lot more complicated. So I'll, I'll build on what Debbie said, because she didn't completely still my thunder. My thought is this, our challenge is, is learning. So we first started looking at adaptive management after word of 2000. And so we started putting together what we thought were good adaptive management plans. And as we've constructed projects, we're seeing that those adaptive management plans didn't consider all the potential effects or all the potential pathways that might stop a project from performing as originally intended. So now, and this gets into challenges which may be jumping ahead a little bit, but now we have to figure out what authority do we have within the limit of the course project in partnership with South Florida. And in the limits of the federal project, what flexibility in authority do we have to make changes without having to go back to Congress for additional authority. And so what I'll say is we are learning and as we look at new studies such as Western Everglades and DBCR, we're thinking about adaptive management and what that means in a more proactive approach, so that we can develop adaptive management plans that are more holistic and might provide us more flexibility in the future for responding based on what we see with monitoring. Anything else in the panel. Yeah. And just from our perspective of, you know, I think definitely agree with with the core on their perspective and the adaptive management, especially for operations and after construction but I think there's also, you know, opportunities now in the phase that we're in with this lot of design and construction going on is, you know, what can we look at prior to constructing and I think that's been a big question, especially recently with SEP and other projects that are in design. So that has been a challenge, trying to say, okay, well, is there a place for adaptive management and design. So it's we're currently working through that right and it's it's been a challenge and then working within the flexibility, we've heard that a lot right I remember that from the last meetings, the meaning of a mother to a go right flexibility is a big term. It's finding that flexibility in the process that's currently there I think there is some. There's some authorities where you can make some changes to the project without going back to Congress but there's a limit to that as well. So that's, I think, is our current challenge for me anyway. My perspective is how do we apply it to design before we even put something into the ground. I'll add a little bit from the perspective of the Fish and Wildlife Service. My experience has been that Everglades partners have a lot of a lot of willingness, a lot of enthusiasm for doing adaptive management and trying new things. But I have seen where we run into impediments. And most often the ones that I've seen have been where we complete some kind of an analysis. So from my agency, Endangered Species Act analysis, you know, an ESA consultation on a project or on a water control plan. Or similarly, the, you know, the court completes NEPA analysis on something. And when we do those analysis, the, a lot of times those are really big undertakings that they result in big documents and they get kind of locked in. And if we want to deviate from those things that becomes hard, you know, and sometimes when we're doing those analysis is proposing the project proposing the, you know, the new control plan. We can write some latitude in there, but you can only write them so with so much latitude because if they become vague, you can't really analyze it underneath the or the ESA. And I've seen some court cases where agencies were found deficient because they weren't explicit enough about what was being proposed and therefore what the analysis translated into. So to me, that's one of the challenges that we have to balance is, you know, trying to write the flexibility into these documents, but at the same time, not be so vague that we kind of open up a vulnerability or, you know, people don't understand what you intend to do even, you know, that could be an outcome. But I feel like, again, that's that's kind of a legal limitation and I've seen it with NEPA and I've seen it with our ESA consultations. But again, my experience is the team is very willing to do their best to write that that, you know, to do the balancing act there. But, but we know that there's, we can only go so far because we get, you know, we just open up some vulnerabilities. Yeah, so in addition, I've taken that pause as a break. Lots has been said here, you know, my brain just starts cranking over about this this topic is pretty broad, almost as broad as presentations this morning and data and information. I think we've had to take all that information and adaptively managed along the way and get consensus and where that moves through. I think that there's a willingness, but some of the things that I see or run into is that that authorization, right in that process that legal framework that has been built up around this process that is, is the pathway now and I think that's maybe why you are here to help us find a way to quickly move when we see those opportunities. You know, I see small little crumbs here and there that have some benefits of projects that are ready to go but we just can't do it. Right because there's not appropriations there's not a, you know, it's a job costs accounting line item that's the money's there, right and it's years out right and so how are we able to move to strike out and do these other small or other. All in the evidence other relatively speaking right, how do we go in and take care of those items along the way that bring the benefits. When the taxpayers, you know this is their funds right and it's got to be reported back appropriately, and that you know and putting on my hat the other day in our buggy, you know, you don't want just anybody coming in and redirecting that adaptive management to meet that there one need, right. So I think there's there's a willingness it's just, there are legal framework when you put NEPA and other whole bunch of everything into the into the pot, and then try to pull it out it becomes challenging from I guess on a, on a spur of the moment item that may kind of change like a more programmatic longer term adaptively managing I think, you know, from, from what I see inside the agency interior is, it's, you know, adaptively, but adaptive, make budget management, right, and I having to move money from one to another to compensate to move where you're seeing the that's going from year to year, right, and not and having some of those constraints to try to forecast where we want it to go, or at least, at least tracking that science and being ready for that specific component of that project you know that I believe that there's a lot more happening on the fishery side, right, that fisheries would tell us a lot more about what we're doing. And, and again, it's just, we're not able to kind of move in that direction right now. Anyway, just some thoughts off the top. Thanks. I just to follow up for a second. So my interpretation is that it's not as simple as it looks in the plan that it's not going to be an options report and the design coordination team said go for there's a lot more people that are going to be involved in making decision and it's going to be a more complicated process than that. So I want to be really responsive to the who's on the team question, if I may, the scientists are the ones at the forefront of telling us. And I mean specifically, Dr. Ralph's team on the core side. Which she works for Angie, right, so it's Angie's team. There, they are the ones that are telling us this uncertainty has been realized. And so I've learned to be very disciplined to make sure that when we're talking about adaptive management that the scientist team is the one that's saying this specific uncertainty has been realized, or I see it coming. And I need your help in addressing it. So it starts with them in my in my world. And then sometimes I get this from outside folks that say I see this uncertainty. It could be Adam, it could be Larry it could be Leslie it could be anybody that's in this room and as I'm looking around the room. And from that perspective, who's on my team on this issue, I go to Gina, and I go is this uncertainty realizing on the ground or do we see it coming, or have we built something, it could be in any of the phases. And then we bring in the other members of the team that need to help flesh that out and that usually means engineering H&H, what are resources folks. They are the other members of engineering that have to make a plan in the planning side, who's in the team. It could be do we have NEPA coverage for this action. Did we already write it in our adaptive management plan, we have to check that right so that the planning team has to help us with that. That's people on the team. And go so there's, there's the scientists as first. We look at the water resources side, we may layer that with engineering. Maybe that's a little too early, we check whether we have, did we already plan for this uncertainty. Hopefully yes. If the answer is no, then the team gets a whole lot bigger. The answer is yes and we go check do we have NEPA. And then it comes to someone like me that says, did we plan for this to have money. And if we, if we did, while we got lucky if we didn't. I do budgeting two years ahead. So right now I'm in 25 budgeting. That's the reality of my time scale to be able to implement something that Gina brings to the table with her team that says this, that's why the conversations always have to be forward looking. That's why I said what I said about anticipating questions. Because the reality of me being able to bring money to the team to execute that change has to be something I thought about two years ago. And I put it in a plan. And I got it covered, and I found a way to fight for it. And the Congress then gave the authorization as suit or the appropriation assuming the adaptive management plan already had it in there in the first place. So that's all the members of the team. Not all at the same time, but those, that's the reality of making a change to a project that's already been authorized and adapt and being able to adapt it. I hope that helps. Jump in and just make sure we're all talking the same language because I heard Leslie say they'd like to move adaptive management more into the design phase. I heard you say if it's in the plan, then great, but if not the team gets bigger. So, so I think we'd like to think about it as new information that may suddenly say, Well, if you don't do this you've got a problem or if you do do this. That's your answer. Is the core. Is there a process within the core that allows that outside the formal adaptive management plan that's written the PIR. How do you think about that outside of that plan, because it does seem like there's lots of new information coming. And if it doesn't hit it exactly the right time then it's lost. It's 10 years to then say, Well, let's construct it to show that what we thought was going to happen did actually that is the challenge. Very, very clearly that is the challenge and Leslie when she said during design and made me smile because we've been dealing with that and set the team said I really, and I'm looking at Fred who's who's back there, you know, who's like hey I'd like to do this thing. Over there checking all of our tables in our plans and saying we may or may not have coverage or I may or may not have the funding for that this year or we have to wait for certain things. It's a challenge. It is not easy to change the adaptive management plan. It is challenging. I'll let I'll ask Debbie and Angie to add to that, but from a program manager's perspective, it is very challenging. Yeah, so this is good. Go ahead Debbie. It's a very good question about you know what is adaptive management. So for the core adaptive management only happens post construction. So if you're trying to make a change in design that it, we can make some changes in design, but they have to be within the bounds of what has been authorized. And if it's not within the bounds of what's authorized and that starts another process, often kind of called a post authorization change report. And then we'd have to incorporate that new information into the post authorization change report. It also can mean a change as Eva said in the adaptive management plan itself, which might mean that they would have to bring that plan back up to headquarters for re approval. And the ways that we can do it is just during design, but it's not called adaptive management at the core. It's called design refinements, or a post authorization change report, or something along those lines. Debbie got it. Exactly right. Thank you. Hey, then Matt, then now. So, first off, I'm a new committee member. So you're answering questions for somebody who's still drinking from the fire hose. So we've talked about planning adaptive management and planning and in design, and my question now is adaptive management and operations. So I mean we know that the rain doesn't fall exactly when we expect it to fall and sometimes it falls harder or it doesn't fall at all. And so where's your scope for adaptive management at the operations level when you close things when you open things that are so I'll let Eva say where it is, but I think in general the system operating manual provides a wide variety of cases and that we follow that system operating manual. If we find that something doesn't work in the system operating manual, and we need to make an additional change, that would be a change to the operations manual. But I think that system operating manual gives you a pretty good variety of things that you can do and our water resources engineers are pretty good at utilizing that wide range of possibilities as is the south Florida water management district. And I'll add on to with that system operating manual. We try to write them such that they provide us some flexibility to react to different climatic opportunities. And so within that flexibility we write our NEPA analysis to also account for, you know, a range of potential environmental effects dependent upon if we're operating strictly by the system operating manual or if we are using some of that flexibility. But if we're finding during operations of the project that it's truly not performing the way we expected that's when we come back and we bring the scientists that Eva brought up we bring them together we bring fishing wildlife in the water management district in to say what do we need to change and then we look at updating that system operating manual and getting that approved with updated NEPA documents. I want to just because she said she's new so I want to try my best to de-organize. I may not succeed on my track. So, SIR is a modification to the central and southern Florida system which is the original federal project. That system has operational manuals associated with them that we break up into seven volumes and there's a map on the back of the integrated delivery schedule with these orange lines and orange regions and numbers. That's what they're talking about. So there's seven of those. Think of them as piece geographic areas that we think about together and develop operational strategies for those, and then we make sure that they fit together into the larger system. So the manual, the system operations manual says, this is my big picture understanding of this region, for example, volume three is Lake Okeechobee in the northern estuaries and the EAA. So this is what we know about that area. And then as you go further in, there is a specific chapter on the operational strategy, the instructions to the operators for Lake Okeechobee for every locker on Lake Okeechobee for the locks that go to the estuaries. All of that is written in there. So that's what the SOM or the volumes are. So we do those even when we don't have a SERP feature. They're called something a little different, water control manuals. The system operations manuals is the construct of SERP, but it's the same region. Okay, so we have those because we have a system from the 1940s that has that. We modify the system when we add storage, or we move a structure or we move a levy or whatever it is that we do there has to be a specific action. We go through the process of how do we incorporate that feature into the system. And then we try different alternatives. Always though, with what is the purpose of the system, which are given to us by the Congress. And then how did this new feature change what we can do within those project purposes to maybe do better for the environment, or do better for water supply or do better for whichever one of the, the project purposes that we're thinking about or do better for water supply. Okay, so that's the really big picture. Part of it. What happens then when we add a feature or change a feature and we modify our operational strategy, we then say, here's our new operational strategy. Here are the uncertainties of things that may happen. I'm worried that I may not have enough fresh water for the Caloosahatchee until the C 43 reservoirs built in the dry season. For I have a goal of getting fresh water across Tammy and me trail, which is a different volume volume four. And I know I need to get there. And I have a water budget that is currently limited, because I haven't built the reservoir yet. I haven't reconnected they go to show me to the central Everglades yet but I know I'm getting there. I just have the bridges which are amazing. And I'm getting a lot more water across the trail. Okay, so, so whenever we're thinking about this big picture ideas, we identify certain uncertainties there. And so we actively work on those depending on the, there's a timing element to that to answer your question. Now I'm finally getting to the answer. How do we do it, how do we do adaptive management and operations. It is, it is informed by the timing of your decision. So, if I am right now in September. And I'm thinking, my uncertainty is the lake is actually in a beautiful spot. If I don't get a storm. Like so my uncertainty is, do I have to start shifting for the next season for water, not me personally for water conservation because we have to think about that water lasting through the coming dry season. And we come up with ideas for the commander to consider. The lake is, is could be well within the ecological envelope that's good for its ecology and that we're doing well and we can give good water the close to hatchee and meet water supply needs. Right. That could be where we're at, or we could get an Ian late September. And then we have other concerns about the lake. And so the time of year matters to the way we adaptively manage what's happening. And what. So there's this forecasting that happens at that any time of year but there are some key moments. So, the peak of the wet season is a key moment. The beginning of the dry season is a key moment. The end of the dry season is a key moment. The time of the year and the season matters what your objective is matters. You have to set that operational objective for the coming season. And then we go to Gina and the team and say, I'm worried about algae on the lake. Can you please go talk to the, can you please go talk to the scientists and tell us what they think and give us recommendations about how we may adaptively manage the lake within the confines of what Angie said within the confines of the need for process that we've already done. That's a lot of words. Hopefully that helped. Great, even thanks very much. Kind of just add something there for a marvelous perspective and I'll be very, then we'll move on to the next. Yeah. So it's my system operating is these operational plans take somewhere in the order of three years, right to develop those just put that into perspective and that ability to move with changes in the system it does take quite a can take even longer than that it probably could take even the shorter period of time depending on the complexity of the matter but, you know, for our for staff water control plan it's we're looking at 2026. So there's some things that may need to be done. Thanks Adam. Go ahead Matt. Yeah, so I had a question as a follow up to something that Debbie mentioned and it was the phrase was am of the am and monitoring plan. So two parts to that question am in that context is adaptively managing which may or may not be the same thing as adaptive management and I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Are there examples and so the other part of my question is are there examples from other parts of the course national restoration portfolio of doing am on the am and monitoring plan. I don't have one right now but that doesn't mean that they're not out there. Usually what happens is that we figure out something we thought was a goal performance measure is not quite what we thought so the first time we really came across. Do we need to change an adaptive management plan was when with was when we started doing the design for set. And we started to think about where some of the performance measures that we had during planning a set. Actually what we want, or there's some other things that we need to change. And I think there's still some consideration as to what we'll do with that I kind of lost track of that when I moved from SAD up to headquarters. But you know that is this. We hope that when we put together an adaptive management plan that we understand the system well enough to come up with good performance measures, a good monitoring system and other things, but some things crop up. For example, invasive species may crop up at a project that we didn't expect them to or a new invasive species might come in. And they might have had a specific response for a specific invasive species, but maybe they don't have a response in the adaptive management plan, or this new invasive species. And so we may have to revise a plan to deal with that new invasive species, or to deal with a performance measure that perhaps isn't exactly what we thought it was going to be, or we didn't quite understand what it says in our guidance is that if we make a change to the adaptive management plan, it's supposed to go back up to headquarters because that plan is authorized as part of the project authorization. So that's how we usually deal with them. Most of our projects are just plodding along doing fine, but you know the Everglades is complicated. And I'll just add on to what Debbie said real quick too, because one of the pieces of adaptively managing the adaptive management, it is utilizing the data that the recover team, both from the core as well as the larger interagency recover team where they're helping us look program wide through SERP and Everglades restoration and then sharing those lessons learned and helping us incorporate them in the individual project. And so I think a big benefit to the core learning to adaptively manage better and put together more robust adaptive management plans is utilizing the scientists on the recover team to help us understand the larger system because you've got the project planners and the project biologists that are very focused on their piece of Everglades restoration and not always incorporating the larger program piece. And so I want to put that plug in for the recover team because they are looking program wide and incorporating the data and the lessons learned and sharing it with each of the project delivery team as part of the recover review but also as part of their integration into those project teams. I was going to add that I just thinking about AM on AM. I might have an example of that that's on the horizon. This was just something that came to mind so one of the endangered species in the Everglades is the Everglades and a lot of the agencies help monitor snow kite populations. And for the past few years there's been a declining number of snow kites south of Lake Okeechobee. In some ways it looks like their range is kind of expanding northward but they're sort of disappeared in the south part of the Everglades. And I think this year there was maybe no nest recorded from 3A south which would be kind of a milestone, a disturbing figure. But so monitoring the status of a listed species as we proceed with restoration, that's a version of adaptive management. But what we're starting to think now with the snow kites is it looks like the problem might be that the apple snails aren't there. So, you know, there might be a change coming up in the future where we start to monitor the parameters around apple snails. And I'm just saying that, you know, that might be in the future but that's, you know, that could be a way that we're learning about how the system works. But our original adaptive management wasn't calibrated the way it needed to be. So there might be a recalibration coming up in the future. So I just wanted to share that because that came to mind maybe it's an example of this. Okay, Al. Thank you. Thanks for the very pragmatic descriptions you have of adaptive management. I have an observation and a question. The observation is appreciating the fact that the core has a very strict procedure associated with adaptive management and looking at it from somebody who is a non core individual. You know, we think of adaptive management, at least as a scientist as being a more temporarily trying to be diplomatic here, which is not my strength. We had something that's just more dynamic and having a two or three year timeline for you making sure that you go through the chain of command to get all the approvals to do this, to me, seems inane. And, you know, sometimes you need to be more responsive so I realized that within your within within the procedures that you deal with, there's constraints that you can't change, I get that we all get that. The question is, why do we continue maintaining that system. Why don't we try and change that system so that we can adapt on timeframes by which ecology works. So that's the observation and you know sort of trying to be provocative. Matt, you know, following Matt it's easy to be more provocative because that leads that way. The question is to get back to Jeff. And, you know, my confusion here is, you go the core goes through this process the district goes to this process the other agencies go through their processes, who has authority. Right. That was one of just initial initial questions. And how does that decision making be done to decide yes we're going to change the plan to start doing something different. Thank you. And I really do appreciate you'll believe me I appreciate where you're going through being a former district employee. Yeah, I don't worry I, I didn't start at the core. I had a shorter timeframe at the core than most people so I understand that that confusion as to why our processes are what they are. And I can tell you that we often have more flexibility than we give ourselves. For example, there are several occasions where Gina Ralph sent me a document on and water resources that we needed to make an emergency deviation. And she worked very closely with Larry's group to figure out how to do this emergency deviation and I think we got some of those done and in like 14 to 30 days so we can move quickly, when we really need to move quickly. But in general, the core does move slower because we do have a lot of policies we need to follow. Congress trusts us with a lot of responsibility. And we have found that our processes work to to fulfill that responsibility in a way that is documented. I have a question. When you ask who has the authority to accept or adopt a change that results from a recommendation. What kind of change are you thinking about. That would help me answer who has the authority because it matters. I understand that but you know I wasn't necessarily thinking about a specific change as much as something more generic in terms of the way that the operations are done as a process associated with these with multiple agencies, all trying to work together to make these decisions. You know, I could point to, you know, short term changes or long term changes, things like how do you decide that you're going to change how the STA's function, or on a short term basis, you've got a harmful algorithm or wait, forget harmful. You got water levels that are too high like Okeechobee and I'm going to open up an emergency, you know, open up the hurricane gates because we're going to send what's where do we send the water. Got it. So there's a short term. There's a long term in this probably really longer term but that's not what I'm worried about the really longer term because that folds within the course process. Okay, I got it. The approval authority in a change of an operational strategy that's seasonal to answer your question is the commander. He receives recommendations from us as his team technical team and the us is a representative from PN which is usually me representative from science, which is Dr Ralph, almost every single time that's her job representative from operations, the people that are actually open and close the locks. The primary advisor is the water manager for the particular water body. Although we do have a head water manager. And we have counsel we have all members of the team, every single week without fail. We prepare a recommendation to the commander. So it depends on what's happening. And he will tell us, I want to know your thoughts for this week's decision. And I want to know what should be our thoughts season Lee for the coming season, and then for the next season after that. And we make a lot of adaptive management changes. And that is the commander. The changes. The someone volume. Right. If it has a significant change, which was Debbie's point, a deviation. And there's a lot of a lot of flexibility, but there usually comes a point where we don't have it and we find ourselves in need of a change. We go through an operational planning change, which could be a deviation or another planning like losam. But the decision authority for that change is general Hibner, our South Atlantic division commander. For the core, it's very clear who has that decision authority. How do the, excuse me, thank you, but how do the, how do the other agencies feed into that process like fishing wildlife, or the district, or do I any case. So for the, for the water management district who is the operator of the system with very few exceptions we've retained only certain structures where our lock operators actually are standing there, the majority it's Leslie, right. So in that case, we receive a weekly operational position statement that's available to the public. A written document from the South Florida water management district that says, these are the ecological conditions and these are our recommendations for this time period sometimes it's a week sometimes it's two weeks and sometimes it's seasonal. So we receive very clear opinions and recommendations from the sponsor for the system, and we very rarely differ, meaning differ are different from them. Mr Bartlett and Colonel base who make those decisions week to week month to month season to season within an existing operational plan. We go to Angie goes to Larry when we have a question about whatever's happened and under the confines of an existing biological opinion and I'll let Larry and Angie talk about that. We talked to Adam when he's got concerns about, hey, I don't want you to slow down your flows across the trail for whatever reason, right. That's what happens, but that's a ongoing conversation but the principles. Adam, Larry, Colonel booth drew Bartlett, that's who's making those decisions week to week month to month season to season. You're welcome. I'll follow up and ask, if it's not an operations if it's a change to a design, who has the authority to do that and if it's changed to construction that doesn't require NEPA that it's, and within the 20% cost to as the authority to do that. Please jump in. Please. Yeah, on the general level to how a process would work for a change right a lot of times it starts with the suggestion, right, somebody's, maybe at the staff level is making a suggestion based on science based on what's going on on the ground. And there are, we are in constant coordination with the core, like I said, you know we coordinate with them on a daily basis our project teams coordinate regularly our design teams coordinate regularly. So if there is a suggestion for a change, then it really just needs to work its way up through the process, what is that change, what's the significance of that change, and it works its way through management works its way through leadership enough and then it really just depends on what the changes make and that changes as to what level of authority or authorization it needs at that point so you know we're we're doing it all the time, whether it's design construction or operations. And, you know, that's just kind of a general way to think about it right it just has to work its way up to the chain and then depending on what level of approval and needs to be done or if there's additional paperwork that needs to be done like NEPA. I was, you know, I was thinking about like examples of where we've had to do that and, you know, the curtain wall at the eight and a half square mile location to me as a great example of that because you know we were, we were all working to get the L 29 canal higher. We had had some success and then we were trying to get the S 33 could quarter control structure expanded so we could get more water through it. And as that happened, we saw the problem starting to happen with flooding there in the eight and a half square mile area. And I got to say the district was like lightning on that I mean you they moved fast and to me that's a great example of. I think that change had to happen on the integrated delivery schedule and a lot of other changes have to happen to make that, you know that project by bill bill quickly. And all those other changes that had to be implemented with it were made pretty rapidly. Can you clarify was did the district take the lead on that or was that a jointly funded core. No, okay, so the district has flexibility in the court. They're spectacular. Honestly, they're amazing and their flexibility I'm, I'm always like doing this. So what they can do. Great. Yeah, there's definitely some. The state definitely has some other opportunities to do things. I'm not going to say outside the process. It's just a different process that we can follow. Right, but we do take risk with that. Right, we may not get culture at the end for spending that money it's it's a risk on our part but we do believe that that risk is is worth it so we'll we can move out and construct things ahead of the core and a lot of instances but it's just a risk when we do it but. But again, you know, we have that great partnership to work with the core to be able to get whatever documents that we need in place to be able to move out ahead ahead. And the core is, you know, great at working with us to do that. So there's, there's its own process and us doing that. And then in doing work ahead of the core, but, but we work together to get that done for sure. Yeah, I'll try to give you a very specific answer. Stephanie. Let's say we're in design. That means feasibility level analysis done on the Congress. It's approved for construction and we've gotten an appropriation so let's pick IRL. Okay, let's pick one of the C23 C24 complexes. Let's say we are in design for the North reservoir C23 C24, we have the North, they have the South. Right. So if all those things are true, we have authorization, we have appropriation, we know who's doing it. You know, one is black on the IDS, one's blue on the IDS. Let's say the teams have to work on how the reservoirs connect to each other. Just a good example. And there's some kind of canal in the way or some kind of change. Those changes are every single day that Leslie and I talked about. Every single day our teams are looking at it as they're advancing design. Her engineering design team and my engineering design team are in rooms together every day. Day in and day out and the program managers are as well trying to keep up with what the team is changing saying, hey, are we still within our scope. Those are our decisions that if we have all those top things covered. Those are decisions Leslie and I make. We have a budget and we're in scope and I check in with Angie's team and the NEPA is good and we're good. Those are the kinds of decisions Leslie and I make as long as we're within our budget and it's within day to day stuff. Does that make sense. I hate to do this. We're going to give Jeff the last question and then we're going to have to move on. No, no, maybe I put that in the wrong order. No. We're going to give Jeff the last question. And my question is pretty straightforward. I'm going to stop, which I know is not sir, but I'll get back to sir. They produce these buying by annual reports to go to Fish and Wildlife. What's about endangered species measures and every one of them has this long big table about decisions made from periodic science calls. And a lot of those are, and this, I'm impressed it seems to be really effective science management integration. The decisions you could say are just a way of getting assessment really quickly to make a short term decision. But some of them you could call a yeah because some of them are like we've been doing a, but we learned something from now on we're going to do be. So my question is, do you envision like a similar sort of informal process that could produce some adaptive management at the operation stage for a certain project. I mean, you have calls like that or you're planning to do something like that. Short version is yes. Unequivocally for the quarantine. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Even though that was a very brief response. We're going to move on anyways. Thanks very much to the panel. Very helpful. Okay, so next we're going to hear from Laura de Kunto and Stephanie Romanos from the USGS. This is a presentation vulnerability assessment analysis and how these could be used to serve. So Laura I think is with us in person and Stephanie joining us virtually. Hey, I'm Laura de Kunto and I'm an ecologist at the USGS. I'm also a model developer within the joint ecosystem modeling lab at USGS. I'm going to talk to you today about assessing system wide vulnerability in the Everglades about this project that everglades vulnerability analysis, but that's not the only modeling tool that we use at Jeff and so I can talk about some of the other ones later as well. So I first wanted to talk about barriers that we have probably worldwide into using predictive ecological models to make decisions to help us with restoration. One of the things I see is there are different spatial and temporal scales associated with different models. And so we might have something that's on a very small scale small temporal scale and something that's landscape wide and how do we integrate those together to get a decision made. So we're trying levels of uncertainty associated with those those models based on the structure model so some models may not have any measured uncertainty associated with them and some may have measured uncertainty and then some may have more uncertainty than others and so how do we sort of combine all those together to have a good understanding of how the uncertainty is going to impact our decisions. So maybe these models are they're created and then they're not really updated with new knowledge as time goes on and so we have a bunch of models that get built and maybe they're used over and over but they were built, you know, five to 10 years ago, and the system has changed tremendously so if we're not updating with new knowledge we might be losing some of those responses from the ecological community because of the updated model. And then finally, sometimes the model output is just actually inaccessible to its users that are making decisions so maybe the maybe a model is on a daily timescale and how do you look at output that's on a daily timescale at a 400 meter resolution across decades. That's a really hard thing to summarize and so we need to focus on making model outputs that are accessible to the people and are giving information in a form that they can use for decision making. So my, my suggestion is that I'm not suggesting that the Everglades vulnerability analysis addresses all these barriers or takes care of all these problems, but it's my suggestion for how we can overcome some of these barriers to be able to combine models together and get output that is usable for decision making. So Everglades vulnerability analysis or Eva for short, basically takes hydrology and salinity information from the, the hydro models that we heard a lot about earlier this morning. And currently we're looking at four indicators of ecosystem health so how these indicators of ecosystem health respond to changes in salinity and hydrology. So indicators are the vegetation type presence of alligator nests sawgrass peat accretion rates and waiting bird colony sizes. And so this is a, the way that we implement this is through a series of connected modular Bayesian frameworks. And because the outcomes are in a, in terms of probability, we also have a common format for uncertainty within the model so everything outcomes and probability and so we output uncertainty in the same format for each module that we're predicting. And then using that uncertainty and a user defined statement of where where we want to go on the landscape so what is our target or what is our desired outcome for these modules. For these indicators we can generate a vulnerability surface and that surface is basically telling us how far away we are from the desired outcome that the user defines. So I'm going to go through. Obviously this is a lot of stuff and so we can produce lots of different outputs from the Eva model. So we can use the predicted outcome so we can produce maps of predicted outcomes and this is an example of the vegetation module and so it's showing the most likely vegetation type on the landscape based on the hydro scenario that we have fed it. And so the next output that we can create is a measure of uncertainty on the landscape and so this is showing the amount of certainty we have with that most likely outcome from the model and so the darker blues are going to indicate more certain areas and the lighter blues indicate less certain areas and so we can look at where on the landscape we might need more information or maybe there's so much variability in that area of the landscape but it's really hard to predict that outcome. And then finally we have our predicted vulnerability surface so this is going to show us where on the landscape we're straying furthest from our desired outcome that we input as the user. And then here you see darker reds is higher vulnerability and lighter reds slower vulnerability. So when we are in the next couple of months we are have been asked to run the Eva vegetation module through the BBC your baseline and alternatives to look at how vegetation type may be changing from these alternatives and so what you can see here is actually results from a sensitivity analysis we did. So just to make sure that the model is sensitive to these changes. And what you can see here is that as we make the landscape weather, we're actually seeing more freshwater long hydro period vegetation types appearing in that box there. And so we're confident that with the sensitivity analysis we're getting that model sensitivity to see predicted outcomes based on these hydrologic scenarios. So one of the things that we're thinking about using Eva for is looking at sea level rise or sea level change in in these project scenarios so this is currently just showing a baseline scenario so like current conditions of of hydrology and then a 2050 high sea level rise scenario. So we're seeing the probability of mangrove vegetation type on the landscape. And so the darker blues indicate a higher probability of mangrove. And I know this is a little bit hard to see the differences so I took the debate, I subtracted the sea level rise scenario from the baseline or current conditions. So here we have reduced mangrove probabilities in the Browns, and then increased mangrove probability is in the blue. And what we can see here is that we are seeing some evidence of some mangrove migration which is what you heard about earlier today. And so this model is capturing that with looking at sea level rise scenarios. And also look at sea level rise scenarios in terms of vulnerability so here we have the same scenarios a baseline and a high sea level rise scenario. And we're looking at the vulnerability of waiting birds on this landscape and so from here you can see that with the sea level rise scenario we're getting darker red so more vulnerable. And that's the level rise scenario using the AVA model. So one of the things that we've been doing is we're trying to figure out how the decision makers and recover can best use our models. So I know that one of the committee members earlier talked about like, oh I make models and they just get left on the shelf, never to be used again, and we've experienced some of that a little bit too. So one of the things we're really interested in is what do decision makers what do doctors recover need in order to feel like the models are giving them useful information. So we teamed up with a social scientist at the University of Florida, and we're surveying recover to ask them some tough questions about what they really need from models in order to better understand the system wide perspectives. We've been asking some questions like if you could have any information from ecological models that you wanted without constraints. What would you like to know. We've also asked are there certain aspects of modeling tools that prevent you from fully considering the impacts of sea level rise on Everglades restoration. And we also asked how do you think SERP restoration targets should be adjusted, given sea level rise. So the answers to these questions are going to feed into our ability to adjust the visualizations of our tool in order to give them the best information to, to assess how restoration projects how SERP is going to impact the Everglades system So based on feedback that we've had already this will likely be in some kind of time, some kind type of interactive tool. Maybe you've heard of something called like ArcGIS online, basically where you can go into a web platform, and you can load up all these different outputs as layers. You can use sliders to look at when things are popping up based on different certainty levels, zoom into interest areas and toggle across time, and then also download tables and charts from that information. So this is a more dynamic way, and it's not like the static maps and tables that we've historically been providing. And hopefully this is going to help decision makers and recover, really understand all of these different intricacies with the different alternative scenarios, sea level rise scenarios, and through the decades of time that we're looking at. So, as mentioned before, this is an ever growing process this is an ever growing model so we're constantly updating the Ava tool we're constantly developing different things but the Ava tool, and it's not a model that's just going to sit on a shelf. So, some of the things that we have planned for the next year are, we are implementing vegetation succession dynamics into the vegetation model and so we have gotten some additional data to be able to build in vegetation probabilities that rely also on the availability of the vegetation the year before. And so we're hoping to get that done this year so that the vegetation switches in the model reflect more reality than they do currently. We're going to be adding a small fish density and biomass module for the wet and dry seasons into the Ava tool. And so we are currently working to solidify the plans for that and work with some of the principal investigators that collect small fish data in the Everglades to make sure that it's reflecting the drivers that that drive small fish density across the landscape. So, I just wanted to touch a little bit on some limitations that we have in building the Ava tool. The big thing is that, you know, we need spatially explicit water depth and salinity information that reflects anticipate anticipated future conditions which includes climate change includes operations, and it includes restoration structures. So, we can work with a lot of the three big hydrodynamic models in the Everglades Eden RSM and bisect, but each of them has some spatial and output limitations that really prevent us from using just one in the Ava tool. And so, one thing I just wanted to note is that some some of these models don't go all the way down to the coast. Some of them don't have a really straightforward way of looking at climate change. That's not just sea level rise but also changes in temperatures and changes in rainfall. And then there's also some models that don't have a very clear way of integrating water management operations and so we have to really piecemeal things together from these models in order to get the ecological responses. And so, we are currently in discussions with hydrologists I have a meeting tomorrow with the developer of bisect to figure out what we can do to get this information streamlined so that we can make our ecological models better. I would just like to say if you need any other information about Ava we have all of our publications on gem.gov slash modeling slash EBA. I'd also like to make sure that I think the whole project team for Ava so it's not just me it's a whole group of people that we work very hard to create this tool and so I want to acknowledge them. And I am happy to take questions. I have time. I have time for a question or two. Go ahead, Matt. So I'm glad to see you pushing the envelope on on moving from from data rich but information poor to get to the useful and usable both both of those right part of the science discussion. For the BBC analysis you mentioned that's coming up. Where do those results go. Are they going to end up in the environmental effects part of the puzzle analysis that Gina mentioned, it's going to get written up in the documentation. I have a question for the core for Gina. We are being asked by the core to run the scenarios through the Ava vegetation module but I am not sure where where that information is going like which which report or where it's going. Yeah so they're asking where like where the vegetation information that we're running for BBC year is going like, if is it going into a report or around core of engineers so the information that will be generated from the Ava tool, as well as all of the gem tools that we will use for the BBC year and other search projects. They go into the environmental impacts of statement. There is a section on environmental consequences of the action. And so we have an evaluation of the ecological effects of all of the alternatives. So you'll see each one of the tools you'll see the description of the tool and then you'll see a comparison of the output among the different alternatives. Helen. Thank you for that presentation. So, when you show results of comparisons of vegetation classes, I can interpret that I can understand it when I'm looking at it and I can even vaguely understand and interpret a map of mangroves with different colors on it, but how do we interpret the vulnerability maps so those red maps when there is so much dark red across them. What what does it mean what does what are the different colors mean and what exactly does vulnerability mean in this sense. In this context, vulnerability is measured as a distance from a state that the user defines and so we wanted to build flexibility into this tool to be able to have the ability to change what might be our ideal state and so what it does is the user defines the outcomes that they prefer, and then it generates a couple thousand simulated sites to compare to based on those based on those those outcomes that the user wants and then it uses an ordination process so vulnerability is a distance from the state that you desire. So a darker red is more distance from that state. So for the waiting birds is it like projected population size or what is it for the waiting birds it's currently just a level of foraging quality foraging habitat quality. We would like to get to the population part, but we haven't been able to get there yet. Bill. Thank you for that I want to applaud your efforts are reaching out to recover to try to get feedback on what's actually needed on the ground. I'm curious in that effort if you add some common themes that emerged in terms of when your information gathering and if there were any surprises. The common theme that we got was that people really want more control over the visualization process so they want sliders they want buttons they want to go back and forth between different layers and so that's why we've decided to move towards this more dynamic approach, because I do think that that'll help people understand how the model is working. And also to be able to look back you know, okay so what, what is this indicator doing what is that indicator doing, and it's all in a common now a common framework and so everything's on the same spatial scale everything's on the same annual temporal scale. So I'm hoping that that will help with that. I have it. I can't say that there's anything that has surprised me yet, but the social scientists are still working through that data analysis so maybe there will be something that comes up. Bill. So thank you I've looked at some of your papers and but it's very helpful to have a high level overview. I'm curious as to why you call this vulnerability, because to me ecosystem vulnerability is essentially the lack of change of what's currently in the system as the drivers change underneath so how stable in the sense is the current system, which is something different than your what you're quantifying, not that what you're quantifying is useful, but in the context of a predicted model to achieve a certain goal, not what I would have called the vulnerability analysis. Yeah, and that's a valid criticism. I think this has evolved a lot from the beginning so it was called the vulnerability analysis at the beginning and then it's sort of, we realize that it was really hard to define what is vulnerable and what are the workloads. It's such a dynamic system it changes all the time there's so much variability that defining what is vulnerable was really hard and so my approach was okay, where do we want to be, and then define like whether we're there and how far away we are from that and so that's the approach that I took. Thank you. Go ahead Casey. Thanks for the presentation, which I really enjoyed. I have two questions. The first is regarding the spatial distribution of the model and sort of related question of how many parameters does the model have. And so is it. Maybe that's enough. I'm just curious, you know, how you are. Are you estimating parameters for every grid cell. I'm just curious how the spatial distribution works. So the model is predicted across each grid cell. And so each module has different amounts of inputs that go into it based on other. So I will say that Eva is not trying to develop new mechanisms or learn new knowledge about how the system works. So we're taking what we know how the system works and putting it into this common framework in order to get a more high level idea of what's going on. And so we know what impacts waiting bird foraging habitat we know what impacts alligator nest presence and so we build that into the network, and then predict that across each grid cell. Okay, okay, God. So single model, and this distributed based on the inputs. Yes. And then I was curious, how did you implement the sea level rise. So that sea level rise is actually we combined. We looked at the bathtub inundation model in the course sea level rise calculator. And for each year we looked at whether the, the sea level rise for that year with reach a certain cell based on its elevation, and that up as we went. And so that's like something that we just did on our own, it's not how the alternatives are being set up in like BBC or anything like that but that's how we approached it without any other information so great. Thank you. Thanks very much Laura. So, we're going to have another shift in the agenda so that we can make time for our third session have flexibility there. And so we're going to move right to public comment and this is where the members of the public are given an opportunity to address the committee and in a period of three minutes. And we have one person who signed up today, and that's Newton cook. You knew what these lights for do to my birdie go you know how long walk it was. I'm Newton cook I'm the president United water followers, and I have a lot of hats. The National Forest for the state I'm on the advisory commission of WC on the deer management advisory. But what I want to talk to you today about is when I was on many years ago, and it was the lake of which will be rack for the South Florida water management district for about five years. When the lake was destroyed by a couple of three hurricanes, and why you do have a new diet today, and why we're going into a new management plan. Now we talked today about things that might happen. See level rise. Nothing we can do much about it. And I'm telling you right now, decisions have been made are being made that are destroying. Lake Okeechobee and the water coming out of Lake Okeechobee is going to be the dirtiest water you've ever seen in the history. Since SERP or anybody else. When the loathsome was put together. The core God bless them and I know them all friends of mine. The selection that they made it said right there, not best for the lake ecology. The other selections didn't say anything about being bad for the lake ecology but we selected the one that's the going to keep the lake too high. Too often. And we're down to less than 2000 acres of SAV on a 450,000 acre lake. Guess what cleans the water going into Lake Okeechobee. Yes, have that water is going to be dirtier when it comes out. Guess where it's going to go. Today, people are pushing buttons and pulling levers. Maintaining the lake too high. Today, we're destroying the heart of the everglades. Consciously made a decision. I can tell you why. Politics, not science. I love these meetings. I go to them when I have this group of people like this, these people are scientists. I happen to be a chemist way back, although I didn't do much of that. I didn't like standing at a bench. But I'm telling you, everything you do here today is being destroyed. As we said here, the lake is 15 and a half feet. At 15 feet, vegetation starts dying. It's been over 15 feet for months. Two months, three months. It takes five years to recover. That's the core. They'll tell you, they have a recovery program. When was the last time the lake was under five year recovery? Irma destroyed the lake, hasn't been fixed yet. That's six years ago. And we are sitting here allowing the heart of the everglades to be destroyed. And all that water's got to go to the everglades. To the Calusa Hatchey, to the St. Lucie. And sooner or later, it will. Thank you. Move into session three now. And this is session three's focus is strategies to better incorporate ITEC in the SERP. And we're going to begin with a presentation from Jenna May of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers working with Recover. And this is the Southwest Florida Recover module. Just let me share my screen. Can I just get confirmation you can see my screen? Looks good. Great. Thank you. So appreciate this opportunity. And thank you committee for allowing me to come and speak about the Southwest Florida Recover module. My name is Jenna May. I'm a biologist with Recover. And I work with the Corps and again, appreciate the opportunity to come and talk to you about our newest Recover module. And so just an overview of what I'm going to talk about today. I wanted to give a little bit of background about the Southwest Florida module, the justification for its development and some of the things that we've been working on and plan to work on. And because this is part of the Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge session, I wanted to highlight some of the ways that we're working within the module to intentionally and authentically incorporate some of the tribal perspectives, values and knowledge into our Recover processes. And so just some background on exactly why we have Recover modules in the first place. Recover modules are physiographic regions that provide us a system for organizing similar landscapes for the purposes of identifying restoration options and challenges. We currently have five Recover modules, Lake Okeechobee, the Northern Estuaries, Greater Everglades, Southern Coastal Systems, and now the Southwest Florida module. As I mentioned, because they allow us to organize these similar landscapes and processes, they really serve as the basis for our Recover evaluation and assessments, which are used to support SERP and allow us to track it as we're going through the planning and implementation processes. And so some of the justification that went into why we decided to develop the Southwest Florida module now, I'm going to present some different reasons and they're not presented any particular order. But in general, we recognize the need to systematize our application of knowledge to this part of the system. And the catalyst for a lot of the work that's been put towards developing this module came from a lot of our stakeholders and partners, especially the tribes they're very interested in projects occurring in this part of the system, particularly the Northwestern and Western Everglades Restoration Project, which is currently in the planning phase. And so because we recognized the importance of this area, the importance of these projects that are online or in the process of coming online and planning, we really wanted to make sure that we had the Recover framework set up in order to apply some of our processes in this area. Another reason why we felt the module was needed was basically to take advantage of the opportunity to increase our extent of Everglades knowledge to this part of the system. So, historically, Recover has spent a lot of more focus in the ridge and slew system, the eastern part of the system within the water conservation areas and down into the southern coastal system. But the Big Cypress system, which is a separate watershed in the Big Cypress basin is a little different. So we couldn't just in all cases apply everything that we were learning from the ridge and slew system to this part of the system. Although they're ecologically and hydrologically connected, the higher elevation of the western region creates a different kind of landscape. There's mosaics of cypress strands, prairies and upland pine flatwoods. And so we warranted these really key differences. And again, we wanted to make sure that we were understanding what was happening in the system as we're seeing some of these other projects come online. With respect to our tribal partners within Recover, we really understood that they saw this development of the module as an opportunity to provide more focus to the region. And as I mentioned before, they're very invested in the CERT projects happening within this area. And so with the development of the new module, we've been trying to take a more intentional step at trying to involve, get through the tribal tribes perspectives, fold it into our valuation and assessment processes. And this is important because just from conversations that I've had and I've been a part of, I understand, you know, they really want to be part of this restoration process. And so because Recover is the science arm of CERT, we're providing the information that's informing a lot of the decision making by getting the tribes perspectives folded into our processes. We can help to, you know, build that trust and build that support for our CERT projects. And so what's included in the Southwest Florida module, this is just a map of what the boundaries are. This was primarily informed by two criteria. First being that we wanted to make sure the areas that we were considering, there was some sort of CERT nexus or CERT connection. And so we've captured, you know, the two larger CERT projects that are happening in the area, picking strand restoration project and work. We also wanted to make sure that we were considering the hydrologic connectivity as it relates to these projects. And so using the U.S. Geological Survey hydrologic units as a guide to understand that connectivity and identify the sub-water sheds. We hone our focus into the areas that we wanted to really look at with Recover. And so what we have planned for the module, so we have, the module was approved by our Recover Leadership Group back in November 2021. And since then, we have formed a module team, a group of subject matter experts and scientists to help us with pulling together a lot of the technical information that will support our evaluations and assessments. We figured out, you know, the spatial scope of the module. We talked about and got on the same page, just shared understanding of what CERT would look like and the restoration would look like within this region and developed our restoration goals. We have gone through the process similar to some of the other modules with their conceptual ecological models. We have gone through the process of updating the big Cyprus conceptual ecological model, which is what is applied to this module. And really, in general, these conceptual ecological models, there are communication tools that capture our current understanding of the system. They identify and describe stressors and biological linkages and biological attributes that surface design to affect. And so there are really a foundational piece of how we figure out what we need to monitor and kind of capture our best understanding of what, of how those different processes in the system are working. And then we've also conducted a monitoring workshop that focused primarily in the Southwest Florida region. And what we were really trying to understand was the different science and monitoring efforts happening in that area, understanding what data would be available, opportunities to collaborate with other folks that are working in the area, and meet those folks that are working in the area and help to identify what monitoring that this module would want to consider as we continue to figure out some of the foundational pieces of it. Next steps, we're going to look at the Southwest Coast, which is part of the module boundary, focusing on the main growth estuary conceptual model that captures a lot of those coastal processes. So we'll be looking to update that with the most up to date knowledge that we've collected over the last 20 years since that conceptual model was developed in the 2005 timeframe. We'll also look to develop hypothesis clusters and performance measures, which are key for us to understand or determine what we exactly we need to be monitoring in order to best track certain performance and inform certain planning. And then in terms of how we plan to continue to engage with our tribal partners and members within recover. We're really again trying to incorporate them into that evaluation assessment process that means including their principles and beliefs perspectives into those conceptually logical models to hypothesis clusters and performance measures. So we're going to cover recover employees this applied science strategy where we sort of map it sort of maps out how we inform certain planning and implementation through the development development of those conceptual models performance measures are monitoring, and then those predictive evaluations. So by incorporating some of the knowledge that the tribes, you know, want to want to, you know, provide to us when they want to provide it how they want to provide it. We're hoping to, you know, better capture their interests and get them incorporated into the at this restoration process. And then one other point I wanted to make was just as we fold them into this process more intentionally being more cognizant of their processes and practices to make sure that's done in a respectful way, allowing them to take the lead and share with us, whatever they they want to share with us. And so, with that, thank you for your time. And I'm happy to take questions. Thanks very much Jenna. We have time for a quick question is any. Go ahead Casey. Oh, okay, Casey's a rabbit. Any other question. Okay, thanks great presentation Jenna. So, what we're going to do now is we're going to take a five minute break. And then we're going to move to the ITEC panel. The stop is listed as 345 but we're going to extend that is needed. So, but we thought we wanted to go into this last panel, giving people a chance to to get a little refreshment before. So we'll see you back here in five minutes. Thanks very much. So perhaps we can begin by having Phyllis Armando in Cindy introduced themselves because I don't think they've had a chance to yet. Good afternoon everyone my name is Phyllis Claremann. I'm a senior scientist in the Applied Sciences Bureau with the South Florida Winter Management District I work with Fred, and others on his team. And I'm Gina's counterpart at the water management district as recovered program manager. So thanks for inviting me to be here today. Good afternoon my name is Cindy Thomas, I'm the tribal liaison for the Jacksonville District Corps of Engineers. Well, let's let's hear to Armando and then. Good afternoon. Thank you. Good to see you all again. Armando Ramirez. I'm, I work with the South Florida Water Management District. I'm the tribal and federal affairs liaison for the district. Thanks for going out Kevin we're going to turn it over to you for opening remarks. Thank you. And good afternoon again everybody it's really nice to see you. I recognize it's been another long hard fought data, heavy presentation driven PowerPoint meeting. Okay, so I'm hoping that even here at the end of the day that you got enough mental strength and stamina to hopefully engage in what is what I intend to be an objective, open and honest conversation. Now, I first want to thank all of you again for taking your time yesterday to tour Mikosuki lands. I want to acknowledge I've got members of my team here today in the audience who were part of that. And I also want to acknowledge Miss Betty Oceola, who was in the audience today. And to remind you all the things that I'm going to offer or share with you. I'm doing so in my most sincere manner to bring forward issues of concern from the tribe. I am not a tribal member case you all didn't necessarily guess, but I wanted to say that. Okay, and so I am not explicitly speaking for any individual tribal member. I'm speaking from a place of the knowledge that has been imparted upon me and the direction received from the business council, and from the Everglades advisory committee, of which Miss Betty is a member and helps to advise myself, and the members of the Mikosuki Environmental Protection Agency. That all being said, I really appreciate that Stephanie worked with me on this because initially her, her invitation was that I come up and speak to you on my own about how to incorporate IK or Indigenous Knowledge into SERP. And this is something that I've been thinking about for two years, since the Office of the White House issued a memorandum saying Indigenous Knowledge should be considered in federal decision making processes. Very, very simply said, upfront and top, top heavy, not in the in the weeds or details. I thought about this a lot when the invitation came to address you today. And I thought that it maybe wouldn't be as valuable for me to come up here and speak with you. I think what needs to happen and the folks who are here at this table are a testament to it is that in order for Indigenous Knowledge to be considered, it needs to be a two way conversation between tribes and the federal agencies, state agencies, stakeholder partners, general public, who are all involved in Everglades Restoration, who all have a personal stake, a professional stake in otherwise in Everglades Restoration. It's not enough for me to come up and say how things should be. I want to have a conversation about this that gives opportunity for different ideas for people who are in support of this, and to hear some of the criticisms or some of the potential reasons why Indigenous Knowledge cannot or should not be incorporated in federal decision making. And we're speaking very specifically here with respect to CERC, which is a federal process here, right? And so I had suggested to Stephanie, a list of folks with whom I've worked with, some that I know have direct experience working with the tribes here in Florida. And I hope that I was going to be able to capture that spectrum of, well, positive and critical conversation, okay? So that's why I wanted this to be more of a panel discussion. I wanted to involve all of you, obviously, at the forefront of this, because in your roles as CISRA committee members, and what you're going to be writing up in terms of your recommendations going forward for how folks here at this table are going to be expected to move forward with CERC planning and implementation. I feel that you have an extremely important role and an extremely important opportunity to help all of us here to come to a place and be an example. An example here within the United States of how and where federal decision processes and in decision making can incorporate Indigenous Knowledge in a way that is substantive and works. And that's my sincere desire and intention, and that for which I feel that I'll be best doing my job to allow the Mikosuki tribe of Indians of Florida to have that voice, that seat at the table, and that degree of acknowledgement and respect that is served for all of these well-intentioned efforts to make improvements, to make restoration work, to borrow again from Miss Betty's words, to allow the land to heal. So I want to start off by first saying, and again, thank you, Stephanie, for giving me a chance just to make some opening remarks and I'm trying to be very directed here. I think that it's very difficult for a lot of folks to understand or contend with what the notion of Indigenous Knowledge is. I can understand that, okay. I've worked in and around here in South Florida within Everglades Restoration for over 20 years. I'm working with and within state agencies, including time at the Water Management District under Fred's direction and leadership. And so having been on the other side and understanding to the degree with which science professionals, policy professionals and advocates, how they are going about their business is of course valid. This is based in the scientific method, right? The process by which we are seeking to obtain knowledge. And we've heard that word said a lot here, in particular this afternoon, knowledge. There are plenty of ways that we all acquire knowledge in our lives. Okay, professionally as scientists, we are acquiring knowledge by a specific method, a robust, a reproducible, a peer reviewed and validated method. That's why it is supposed to be leading the efforts here when we're talking about CERC, the largest effort to perform restoration on an ecosystem like the Florida Everglades in all of its complexity, in all of its diversity, and with all of its challenges. Of course, science has to be the leading way or the leading knowledge base with which we proceed. Getting back to my point, there are different ways that we obtain knowledge, we share knowledge. Scientists have had that experience as human beings. We learn things in our lives every single day. We learn by things we see, by things we feel, by things we taste. You don't need somebody, you don't need a panel of scientists in a peer reviewed paper to tell you when you put your hand on a hot stove as a child, that that's a bad thing. You'll learn that pretty quick. Now you've got that knowledge, your experiences, the things that cause you pain, the things that cause you elation. These are the things that we acquire in our lives and produce wisdom. Wisdom is an accumulation of knowledge from different sources, knowledge you learn in books, knowledge you learn every day in your experiences and knowledge that you proceed from in a scientific manner in a lot of cases, for a lot of us. One of those ways of knowledge is through Indigenous people's experiences, where through their lives, through their abilities or through their livelihoods of being in a place, gathering information, making observations, trying to understand status and trends of the resources and the land around them, making predictions about how things are going to change, continuing to evolve and question as their surroundings change. These are not matters of academia. These are not matters of applied science or purpose. These are matters of life and death. And I put forward here that Indigenous knowledge, learned, refined, evolved attitude and passed down generationally is every bit as valid, a knowledge base and a method that is analogous in my opinion to the scientific method. Now, I don't want to get too far in the weeds and debate one knowledge base versus another. We're here to talk about where we have opportunity to try and bring them together. And that's where I want to engage with the science professionals here, the folks who are in position to help put forward consensus, positions for decision making processes, and for all of you to hopefully ask questions that you need to ask in order that you can do your jobs and provide the best level of recommendation to help all of us chart a new course and continue to work together. So I'm going to stop here. I would love an opportunity for anybody here at the table to make similar statements. I don't want anybody to be afraid. I'm not going to be nobody's getting judged or, or, or, you know, nobody's going to be harassed or losing a job over this. That's why I want this to be open and honest. All right, so I will turn it over. Love the opportunity as a word to say this. Did I interrupt you. It's okay, I can, I can pause. Oh, look at this. You give me a lot to think about there. I'll throw one small example of just how new to the process we are here and then kind of explain what I'm feeling about this in a moment so we've been using itech it in the explanation for some time and just now we shortened that to IK it happened to me. I don't know five minutes ago. This feels very much. Let me first off say, so I'm a national Park Service and I've been doing this for about 20 years and I'm fairly well known for being able to stand in front of a crowd and talk comfortably to people. All good stories about the science and the language that most people to understand and recognize that we're passionate about what we do. And I don't get too nervous in those situations, but I do when I'm speaking with the tribes. And it comes from respect, it comes from really deep respect. I feel that it is a privilege to get the opportunity to learn from and feel fairly new at the table. In the Park Service we talk about being in the forever business you know we're looking at preserve and protect these spaces unimpaired for future generations we're proud of our 100 year history. 100 years. You know and looking generationally into the future. And you can you look at what the tribal knowledge brings to the table. It's humbling. It's a it's a different scale than what we've been working out for a very long time. So it's going to take real work. We do strongly hold to the scientific technical approach to our work we want as we like to call ourselves and some of the groups that do all the numbers along the way and the modeling. And the fact that it's so transparent and so reproducible. And there's this unique pull it back to the map and find a solution, but to pull it back to generations of not much being shared. And in some cases being shared in terms of a direction to go without necessarily giving us all the details behind that. That also takes a good bit of relationship building with us. We have to spend our time to get to know each other and learn to trust each other. And we've had enough problems in that latter category for all of us. So, I think that this is a really, really big opportunity and I'll throw one last item down. There's been a couple of mentions just now in the opening and earlier today about the scale of this being pretty phenomenal on the planet and being these opportunities in the United States. Working syrup and working Everglades National Park we have to recall that we are also World Heritage site so the types of things that we do here that influence the outcomes the conditions and World Heritage site are establishing some standards that recognize the scope. So, these opportunity is really precedent set really phenomenally important. And again I'll say humbling to be at the table even have the opportunity so I think I think the tribe. Okay, I got it. So I, I'm, I think one of the people that Kevin identified as one of the scientists with concerns about indigenous knowledge. So, I'm not as good off the top of my head is Kevin. So I had to write it out. Mother Earth grows our planet, our plants where soil, light and water come together. We all know that the foundational vegetation of any wetland is based on the organic sediments derived from the plants themselves. And the inorganic sediments leached from the Earth's crust. But we also know that man can play a pivotal role in either creating an ecological disaster or sustaining ecological harmony. Most, but not all of the indigenous population of the Western hemisphere have known for thousands of years, how to sustain ecological harmony. The current economic systems of the world are only now beginning to realize that the ecosystems of the world are out of balance and nowhere is it more concerning, after we considered the CO2 problem, than in our aquatic systems. In the Everglades, we are faced with a terrible paradox. How does one restore the waiting birds, fish, and the foundational vegetation in a system that has been sequentially drained, oxidized, flooded and drowned over the last 150 years. America's indigenous populations know that the Western civilization must adopt sustainable practices. Landscape and wet and watershed ecologists have been preaching this for decades. However, sustainability does not mean sitting back and letting nature do its thing. It means working with nature. What was sustainable practices 200 years ago may not be applicable today. As groundwater is diverted, eased supply water to an increasing coastal population, as nutrients must be processed by SDAs before entering the Everglades, and as climate change creates new ecological and biological trajectories. Western civilization needs to understand the scope and scale of indigenous influences on the land. For example, how was fire used? What was the waste disposal practices? Will a multitude of tree island types and elevations sustain the ecological foundation, foundational vegetation? Recent studies in the Amazonian reveal that the current dark earth fertile soils used by modern and indigenous agricultural sediments are largely due to the I quote, deliberate enrichment of low fertility tropical soils through the deposit of household food waste by indigenous communities. Did such practices also evolve in the Everglades? If so, does this help to explain the diversity of relative tree island elevations in the Everglades? I thought it would be interesting to ask if the chat GPT AI app could answer some of these questions. And I found that no matter how I asked it was the answers for all the same. I quote. I quote in AI, I cannot provide specific ITK about the floor and for the Everglades for restoration. However, these six points are crucial. And I think that these, these are the six points that I thought Kevin would say, which he has been saying for a long time one. TEK is accumulative knowledge of indigenous community interactions with the environment. Check. Indigenous indigenous communities have often demonstrated sustainable practices for managing ecosystems. Check. Indigenous communities possess extensive knowledge about plants and their traditional uses. Absolutely. The restoration of the Everglades should respect and incorporate indigenous cultural values and practices. Absolutely. Engaging indigenous communities as active partners and stakeholders in restoration project should be based on mutual respect and trust. A key point which Kevin brought out and Eric just brought out. And indigenous knowledge can be shared through education programs and outreach activities. Indeed, these six points are crucial. But they really do not educate the Western scientific and engineering communities to a level that might be operational. We need help. A national masterpiece that has become required reading through the Department of Interior in Washington DC is the book Brady and sweet grass by plant biologists and citizen of the but one told me nation. Robin will come up. This book points out the many paths for collaboration and understanding. Hi to mommy. Is that in Michigan? That's how you know that. Okay. Slate in the afternoon. There are many pearls of wisdom in this book when I really like says science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observation of traditional knowledge hold. So in response to the three questions that social gave us. Very brief. Number one describe a specific example of an effort to engage make a second seminal traditional knowledge. The answer to that is in an attempt to prevent the spread of Laurel will decide across the Everglades killing red bay trees. There was a discussion of pesticides and introduction of an insect predator. I take it by T. E. K. said no thank you. I T. E. K. and genetics combined teaches us eventually that there will be red bays that survive and their resistance will propagate next cohort. Second question looking forward what best practices could strengthen the capacity to include I T. E. K. which serve processes. The answer for that is from a scientific perspective it would be great if we all could agree on a way to measure and implement a comprehensive tree island elevation change monitoring program. Number three because the surf is pivoting from planning to operation how could I T. E. K. be useful for adaptive management. And my answer is my recommendation is understanding places and times when control burns of the Everglades can be most effective. And when practices can be used to prevent tree islands from naturally society, which they are Kevin are we good so far. Thanks Fred. I was not quite the route that I thought you would go but I do appreciate those comments and pausing me to think about how to respond. I would say that as we're, you know, one of the things that that we, we do in science and certainly within all of the discussion of procedure and policy is there is a lot of box checking, right. There's a lot of check boxes for this in order to verify and do this and move on to the next thing where we are going to verify and go on from there. And there's a lot of great discussion about adaptive management. I'm not sure that there are a lot of great solutions as of right now. I want to hone in on on this as a way of of continuing on on this full box checking thing where I K I tech. There are a lot of different definitions. And that's part of the problem. First, we need to speak together and languages, or the same language, so that we can be actively effectively communicating. At the same time, there is a parallel here in that the expectation is that the indigenous knowledge has to somewhat adapt or adopt some of the western manners of doing that. Firstly, we don't speak the Mikosuke or some of the languages. Okay, and we're all here being educated in in western based systems. So, I think where the tribe would agree is needed is that we speak to each other on a way that lends more to the tribe coming to the western side of how to at least approach this. Okay, let's be clear on that. Secondly, we all know here, follow how science is performed, how questions are asked hypotheses are tested. You've got your experimental design you collect your data. You interpret that data and debate that data amongst your peers, and then go to publish it in another peer reviewed process. So, this is a process by which we a credit that information now and call it knowledge subject to, you know, further knowledge that comes down the road where we may have to rethink what our current is. And so, I think there's an opportunity here to give an example of where the Mikosuke tribe feels that I K could intersect and synthesize with western based science because we have a recent example of where we did this very process with a letter that went out to the federal agencies about the operations of the s12 a and b gates, something that the Mikosuke tribe has been advocating for different operational actions on these gates for decades, and for which, as you're all aware from the adaptive management discussions today, there is an incredible amount process that goes into making any sorts of changes. When we're talking about operations, and when we have endangered species and when we've got other myriad concerns you name it put it on in there. And what the tribe sought to do is to make a case and share why the tribe wants this and the knowledge by which the tribe is putting forward from history from understanding of the area from understanding of the status and the trends of the pre base, in other words, the other wildlife that have been responsive in a negative way to dehydrating the western part of the greater Everglades and big cypress base. Okay. And the manner that we did this is we went to the information holders. The members of the Everglades advisory committee. Please forgive me miss Betty is not quite there yet, but generally made up of tribal elders who are keepers of knowledge. They discussed back and forth. They debated, and then they shared that knowledge by way of written statements that were internally vetted amongst all of us. That information was then taken, and it was compiled and exerted excerpted properly for proper context. On the science side tribal scientists also consider this information to ensure that there was going to be a degree of agreement about what the, the ecological knowledge that was being shared from the Everglades advisory committee was not for example directly to what our current understanding of the system is based on the science. Okay. That information then was taken back to those knowledge holders and said for peer review. So this is the second level of peer review and say, is this capturing what you want to say, because we've put some extra comments in here from us as your technical colleagues to serve you. How does this all look, and that peer review process comes to its conclusion, then it gets passed on for tribal leadership, the tribal leadership considers this and signs off on it. And at that point, that knowledge is now ready to be shared. It has gone through a rigorous process by which the knowledge holders have their opportunity to put forward the information that has been gathered that has been obtained that has been passed on that information is vetted amongst a technical team as well. It is then repeat peer reviewed by the knowledge holders, and then further peer reviewed by the tribal leadership, all of which are checking the boxes that the subsequent direction from the office of science and technology planning, as well as the approval on environmental quality and the DOI Department of Interior have since published after that initial White House memo, in order to try and provide some guardrails by which indigenous knowledge would be considered. And in a way that it is provided with a level of verification, consensus and peer review, etc. etc. Now, I say all of this with the very important notion that indigenous knowledge should not be subjugated to Western knowledge. Okay, should not be dominated by that Western knowledge. But there's always the, there's always the barrier that this kind of knowledge can be considered, not science, or junk science, or the ramblings of people who don't know what they're talking about. The tribe is seeking to use its information or bring forward the information from the tribe not to be in direct. Not not to be going against the grain, not to be contradicting, not to be saying, you know, the sky is blue. No, it's not it's it's yellow. The tribe is seeking to bring forward this information in order to help guide and fill in some of the information gaps, and to enhance the body of knowledge that has been acquired here over the last couple of decades by folks here at this table, and all the work that's seemingly going to be coming down the road over the next many decades. So let's be clear, this is not to be against anything. The tribe is a partner in Everglades restoration, and the tribe wants its knowledge to be utilized for the greater good. I'm going to hold off there I want to obviously give chances for people to just like to take a pause and, and see if our committee has any questions for. For the panelists at this time. Thanks, Jim. I actually just want to take a deep breath and digest the comments that have been made here already. This is already I think an extremely productive conversation and very informative for the committee. And I want to thank you, but I want to thank everyone of you for being up there, and for being willing to share with a good heart and with a good mind, the people who have been doing what you have encountered that is challenging and productive in this effort to include okay thank you so much Kevin for liberating us from the label of itech. I don't know who came up with that right. I used to be a fed and they didn't ask me when I came up with that label. So I don't want to stop the conversation, unless it stops on its own. And if it stops on its own, then let's go back to these, these questions, and I also want to say that while everybody looked at me on the committee. We have a subgroup on this topic is people who stepped forward and said, I'm interested in this. I want to work on it. And that subgroup makes up approximately a third of the full committee so that gives you some idea of how important it is to the committee in, in this 10th biennial review. So with that, I carry on. No, I would just, I hate to say this but Jennifer and I have to leave it for so I just want to just provide a really quick response to some of the questions that the panel had asked with regard to Indigenous knowledge and how we're applying that through the recovery process. And here I'm speaking as the recovery program manager and Phyllis please feel free to, to add. But if we can look back to the graphic that Jenna had put up with regard to SERPs applied science strategy. The very first box is societal values. It's very important to society. And when you look at the makeup the composition of recover. It's 10 federal and state agencies and two tribes. So we are in the process, or we have always been in the process of consensus building and listening to all voices as we develop our performance measures. With the Western Everglades module that Jenna spoke about, we are now in the process of developing performance measures, refining conceptual ecological models, and looking to thoughtfully engage the tribes to bring to the table the Indigenous knowledge that they are prepared to share through whatever process each tribe has, you know, in their own tribal councils to bring that information to the table and share as appropriate with the group. And to give an example of what we did. When I first joined the Corps of Engineers back in 2009 with the Everglades Restoration Transition Plan, we were with Cindy talking to the Seminole tribe of Oklahoma, and the Seminole tribe of Oklahoma had some native plants that were very specific to their cultural practices very important to that tribe. We didn't ask the names of the plants. We simply asked where do they live. How can we figure out a surrogate to protect the environment in which they live by not altering the hydrology so that it affected that environment. And one way I see moving forward, acknowledging it's going to be challenging. There's going to be a lot of conversations that have to be had a lot of Western science meeting up with the traditional knowledge. To pull together something that makes sense in order to again protect something that's of importance to the tribe and to society as a whole. And so just wanted to share that briefly before we rudely leave at four o'clock. So thank you and Cindy, thank you for the letting me go first. No worries. What time is it now? So I wanted to say this. I wanted to get back to what you were saying about recovery and what you were saying earlier, Kevin, but I wanted to address this with Gina. So whenever I first got here, I didn't really understand what recover was. That was three years ago. Well, the second time I got here. And so Gina explained it this way. She said it's pretty much all the agencies take their agency hats off and they put on their scientists. And they are scientists. And that's, they're not necessarily representing an agency. So now with the IK for the for the represented representatives that are, you know, from the tribes, they're now going to have to go to us, because they're going to have to be a scientist, and they're also going to have to represent the tribe. So, one thing does, you know, we need to figure out is, how do we know, or it needs to be announced somehow on when Kevin, you are, or anybody representing whatever tribe is representing the tribe, or are you being the scientist during the recovery. I think that's one thing I'm seeing as a, as a, something we need to work out. Another thing, first of all, regarding the definitions, Kevin, you and I have already started that conversation a little bit. And absolutely we need to come up with definitions and that's going to be the hardest, I think, normally is the hardest part of the entire conversation, because everybody's got their own ideas, I guess. We do need to work towards that. Now for the small print. So, last week I went to Missouri and met with we have a tribal community of practice. It's put on by the headquarters, tribal liaison, and all the tribal liaison within the nation come and meet there. And for a week, and we discuss topics that are, and in this specific one. When are we going to get the implementing guidance from headquarters on how to incorporate IK into everything you say. Normally whenever we get a policy or a memo or something like that we get that from headquarters it comes down normally it takes about a year. And so I've been telling both tribes. We don't have it yet guys we don't have it yet guys well found out yes, or last week that we're not going to get it. So, um, they are going to have some type of language in the up and coming tribal consultation policy this being updated by the Assistant Secretary of the Army's Office, Civil Works. Probably sometime in November they want to have it. The final done right now this is in draft form. We haven't seen it. The tribes have. So, um, the final supposed to come out before the White House's tribal summit that occurs in November that's what their goal is. So, supposedly there's going to be some type of language in there regarding IK. And they're also going to have what they're calling best practices, which is sort of like what they're thinking of is going to be our guidance. So we're looking forward to getting that in the meantime. I don't know six months ago, at least with a seminal try. I started. We started having discussions about having groups or meetings to start the discussions about indigenous knowledge. I wanted to know from the tribes perspective and both tribes actually didn't have y'all if y'all have ever provided IK to the Corps of Engineers, and it was not either a utilized or B, you did not receive a response on why it wasn't utilized. It's important because that's going to let us know, hey, where have we fallen short and then, you know, falling short on things because sometimes you can't learn until you fell right. I want to set up those working groups. I would like it for, first of all, to come together as per SERP specific, but you got to understand we've got regulatory we've got mil Khan, we've got other divisions within the core that we've got to think about to but for SERP specific to have our and those staff as well as the tribes and recover and all those other people that, you know, have worked with the tribes to sit down and have a workshop, multiple workshops and start working through the bare bones the skeleton, if you will, of how this is going to look, and then start diving into the details, and it's going to take time. But during those conversations, we can talk about where we have fallen short, because I don't doubt we have, I'm sorry, I don't doubt that we have not. Another thing that has crossed my mind is a problem that I see, and I brought this up during the tribal community of practice meeting is the core. So, okay. The core has a cost cost engineering center of expertise and walla walla. They're the ones that come up with the numbers for project cost, and we've got to get them involved, we got to figure out how do we calculate project benefits, not only in the number eight, but also in habitat units or whatever the scientists do you guys know more about this than I do. We got to figure out how to do that. So we've got to bring those groups in to have those conversations, there's a lot that has to be done it's not going to be easy but we can get there together, right. But another issue I see or not issue. Opportunity, I see is IK is also cultural resources. The archaeology. I do know I did find out today that, so I'm going to have to read my notes here this morning, which it might have come out two days ago I haven't checked my name on forever. The advisory council in historic preservation's office of tribal and indigenous peoples is currently working on a definition of IK for them. So that advisory council of historic preservation if you guys don't know they are an advisory council to all federal agencies all federal agencies give them a little pot of money. And they advise us on how to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act and implementing regulations section 106. Section 106 for 800. 36800. So anyway, and they're also working to develop means to explain the role of IK and all four steps of the National Historic Preservation Act section 106 process. So, most cert projects. Not most. We have a lot of cert projects. Now that we have the smart planning the three by three by three process fall, we're not able to complete section 106 within that three year timeframe and with that low budget so we have to go and what they call a probe or develop a probe. Saying that hey, once we get into planning and design phase. That's when we're going to complete that, you know, we're not going to have 106 completed by the time NEPA's done we're going to complete it during the planning and design phase. So, the definition and this how IK is going to roll up into 106 is going to help us is going to come out before hopefully we get into deep into the section 106 compliance part. We're already in it on stuff I get that. OK. But at least we'll be there, should work be authorized and appropriated. So the advisor council for stored preservation is also developing policy statement to further inform how IK should be integrated into the 106 process of okay. the White House's guidance that was provided November 2022. Oh, one other thing. So lots of these projects, especially when, in some instances, sometimes SEP or SIRP projects have to also have a regulatory permit. We also have to figure out how IK is going to be utilized as part of the regulatory process, as part of the permitting process. So there's a lot we've got to work on. It isn't just SEP works. It just isn't constructing the project or planning the project. It is everything. I think, aside from all of the process components involved in federal processes, you know, all of that, I think at the heart of it, the tribe's desire to have IK synthesized with Western science in a more comprehensive level of parity and respect for manner is to help ensure that that vision of a holistic restoration that can provide for a resilient and robust ecosystem replete with all of the components of that ecosystem, wildlife, the plant communities, all of the and all of that are cultural resources, all of that that factors into the ability for tribes to continue their culture and their tradition. If we can incorporate that in a way that satisfies the tribes, guess what? We're going to achieve SIRP success for all of us. 16 million plus who live in South Florida and beyond and who come here for the opportunity to experience these resources here in Florida. These needs are not exclusive. They're the same. And to provide a degree of information that can help set those targets can help assess how we're doing in terms of all of the dirt turning and canals and levees being degraded and 15 new pump stations for BBCR and et cetera, et cetera. How are we really doing? Well, there's a lot of knowledge that can help us make those determinations in a scientific way. That's what the objective is, not to protect to protect core processes with all due respect to section 106. It's much, much bigger than that. I just don't want everybody to think that it's just science, right? Safe travels, guys. One thing that we have recently done went down a lot of rabbit holes to get there. And I have been pushing hard, very hard, even at the ASA level, to try to get some kind of way, easy way, that we can go to the Mexican tribe. Go to the Seminole tribe. You're like, hey, guys, we want to contract you to do monitoring prior to adaptive management. Right now, there is an authority that if all this was occurring on core property, we could do it in a heartbeat. But it's mostly on state lands, right? It's not on property that we manage or we own. So what we did find out is we did, finally, find a contracting mechanism that we can use. We are working with Dr. Craig Banner-Heiden with the Mechazuki tribe to get that in place for, I do believe invasive species monitoring Berset. Okay, I'm going to thumbs up from Craig. Hopefully that is going to be finalized or finished or that contract is going to be led to you guys by the end of this calendar here. All fingers crossed. And the way we're going to do it is we are going to hopefully have that ability to keep adding to that and extending that contract because who better knows the land than the people that lived on it forever, right? To do the monitoring, to know where to monitor what is normal, what isn't normal, and in those areas. So we're getting there. We're just having to find, think outside the box in a lot of ways, to find out how we can work with the system we currently have and beg and plead to change, to make adjustments in the future. But how do we get it now? So I'll throw one small thought in there along the way on this. So we've started having some meetings talking about brass tacks of how do we really interact with the tribes? And we started some smaller meetings to initially just say, we're here together. Are we really working together? This is a thing that we're going to be doing and doing better and start that. And then my phone rings and I get phone calls and it's the technical stuff that you was talking about. So you'll have a lot of structure going on inside the tribe with the review processes that we were talking about. There was a lot of structure inside the core. At our ends and sometimes I feel that we might not be working with the kind of the broad bench that some of our partners have. But my phone rings and I'll have people call and ask the question, do you have survey grade GPS click? Who should I be talking to in your fire management so we can coordinate on fire management efforts? Or I'll make that phone call that says, hey, we've got visitors coming into town on an event and we'd like to spend some time together. So maybe we're going to coordinate on air boats or something of that nature and try to get a fueled event going that works. So some of these smaller efforts I think are really probably right now a core of how we're developing that relationship and getting familiarity with the names and the faces and skills that each brings to the table. And so I think that on a small way, that's the base. That's where you're, you know, that's the first nail that you're putting in to try to bring these things together. That's that's my take up. And again, it's reminded to be responsive to what we were trying to get out here. So hopefully that helps. Phyllis and Armando. You might want to be left out, but I don't want to leave you out at all. If anything, you will probably learn from me and I know the tribe has, too, is, you know, I'm very attentive, very patient. I listen a lot because I have learned something from the tribe members is to listen. A lot has been said and obviously you more than verse on the processes you've been talking all day about it and how intricate and difficult it is. So this is not going to be a small feat. It's a, it's a, it's challenging because it's culturally very different. You know, IK is not in competition with science. If anything, IK is the challenges for us to find that linkages between the two and, you know, enhance each other. But no, it's been interesting to hear what everything has been said. My experience with the tribe has been for many years now, both tribes. And I can tell you that from both tribes, there's some differences. And that's even more challenging. I agree. I certainly never would pretend to speak about IK unless I think Kevin alluded to it at the beginning, you know, you learn it from tribal members. And that's the part that we at the district, at the state level, we have different approaches to it as well. The federal government is bound by the trust responsibility in government to government. The state does not. The state tries to build a relationship with the tribe and coordinates with the tribe. But one thing that it's got to be clear too is that at the end of the day, when the projects are completed, the district is the one that manages them, operates them, and maintains them. So the district has to be an intricate part of this discussion all along. It cannot be at the end of the day. But I, like Fred, have prepared, I write my speech, not a speech. The difference between the two of us when we shared them was he wrote more of a speech and I just keep my notes. And interested enough, we were very close on the notes. But no, there's several examples and if we can jump on the questions, that's good. But I appreciate the opportunity to be here, to hear the message from the tribe through Kevin. And again, I'll thank you. I would like to note the questions or the answers that you had. I would like if I could get those from you or maybe you can be in the working group because I mean, it's going to take everybody to get it right and we're still going to get it wrong and we're going to have to go back to it. I mean, that's just the way it is because we are, you know, yeah, I just think that a lot of it has to be a significant level of respect. It's a delicate matter just even for Betty, it's a delicate and very close to their heart because it's something that it's not shareable through tradition. And again, we're accustomed to all this paper and the tribe is more, you know, the storytelling. Basically, when I started this job, I found myself in this difficult time to kind of follow up and understand because when I would listen to their chairman or the vice chair or an elder, they will start with the story and it was lengthy and if you weren't concentrated and listening to it, you knew that at the end, they will come back to what you were looking for. That's one thing that needs to be patience and it's a different way of understanding or looking at things. Where I come from, it's very much like that. Gina had to leave but my reason for being on this panel is, again, I'm program manager for recovery at the South Florida Water Management District and my involvement up here today is not because of my breadth of experience in this topic. And so when I looked across the panel and saw all the folks I was talking with, first just want to acknowledge the level of expertise here but then I was also wondering, looking at the panel discussion, potential strategies to incorporate IK and to serve, I'm thinking like how far can we get into that conversation with a panel of mostly white non-indigenous people? And so I just wanted to recognize that in my role in recover, I've been talking with Gina a lot and then Gina and I have also been talking with Cindy and Armando about the learning curve that we have in figuring out how to engage with the tribes better because in my mind, we need to hear from them ways that recover can do better. We have both tribes representatives on our recover leadership group, which again is recover is made up of 10 federal state agencies and the two tribes. And up until like in 2018, I think there was a period of time where the recover leadership group didn't even meet for over a year. And so Gina and I tried to get us back on track with having regular meetings and then we started to engage with Kevin and previously Gene Duncan on wanting to bring them back into the fold in a meaningful way and meet my professional experiences in urbanized sesuaries in the northern end of the system. So I'm already learning so much about the Everglades itself, but then to this other facet of it, I'm learning so much and I was able to finally get for the first time onto into Water Conservation Area 3A with a field trip that Craig at Vanderheiden had led. And just I'm humbled by the type of work that we have ahead of us and just wanted to say that within recover, we're trying to keep that invitation open for those engagements to happen. And I could speak a little bit more to the specific details of that. You've heard some from Jenna May just a little bit earlier on how some of the technical team members from the Tribal scientists have helped support updates to the Big Cyprus Conceptually Logical Model. We've talked about performance measure development. How do we develop performance measures that are meaningful to the tribes while recognizing that there's a lot of sensitive information that rightfully they don't want to share. So just acknowledging the fact that I feel like a new kid on the block with everyone up here, but just that I've expressed to Kevin that I want to ensure that recovers engagement is not we're just checking off that box, but what can we do to have this be as meaningful and interaction as possible. So I just look forward to further opportunities and I'll stop there. I see I see thinking back I'm thinking about some of the challenges again. And so some tribes, you know, this is a one stop shop, you know, or a one man shop, if you will, sorry. They have very limited staff. And they've got every federal agency, some state agencies, sometimes multiple state agencies, reaching out to them. And they're in triage mode. So I'm thinking for SERP adaptive management plans, especially. So, you know, you've got to get these metrics. You know, what are we going to what, what are going to be the key species out of what the people talk about, you know, what's what's going to be, what are you going to measure, you know, to be what species you're going to measure to see if something is is working appropriately. And we need to buy such and such time. But the tribes are having to not only the tribal staff, the tribal representatives are having to go to the tribal council for that information, the tribal council has to meet and discuss it, right. And there could be reasons why they can't get back in a certain amount of time. So sometimes time constraints can can gum up the works a bit. Or just the tribe isn't comfortable with sharing even. Yeah. No, very good point, Sandy, because another thing that we tend to forget too is the tribes has a bureaucracy as well. And sometimes is just as complicated as we may have an hour side, but they do have a bureaucracy and they have balances check and balances that they need to go through. So expectations sometimes are like, you know, and usually it happens with us that in regulatory, you got 30 days to answer, well, guess what, the tribe doesn't the tribe may not follow that. So that's a challenge as well, because as long as we do, we have to incorporate all that into our equation as well panel committee, excuse me, any, any specific questions that you all might have. There we go. Thank you. So this question is directed to the tribal liaisons. Um, there is a the battery style. Yeah, there you go. I can reject. You can project that for sure. Yeah, we can hear you. We can hear tribes on this project and happen. Right when I got here right when COVID happened. So and I think November 2020 was whenever the first White House memo came out. Is that correct? Yes. So I'm like, wow, you know, this is great. And that was just saying that, hey, we're going to get together and we'll come up with something. So that was when the Seminole, for instance, wanted they have a native area in work is on the western side of work. And they have a native area that is part of Kissimmee Billy slew that they want rehydrated. But there was concern within the tribe about the quality of water and the amount of water. Of course, there's mistrust for logical reasons with, you know, non native folks. So I saw the memo and I saw the EJ directive and I'm like, why can't we use IK and let the tribes operate gated culverts. And they can open, they can dictate, if you will, when those culverts are opened or closed to let water in based on their indigenous knowledge of how the habitat is responding to that water. Because yes, we might, you know, they there is, and I'm not a water scientist, but there I know that there's a lot of other things that the tribe monitors outside of just the things that we monitor in the way of water quality. So that is one way we incorporated IK before it was even a legitimate thing, if you will. Another way is, of course, whenever we were talking about backfilling the L28, L28 I within the triangle area, which is on Mexican reservation. I believe Dr. van der Heiden suggested that instead of filling it all in, we, you know, plug it put, no, not plugs, we put the pools, we leave pools for, for, you know, the alligators and what have you. That also saves us in the way of not having to truck in as much soil, which lowers the cost of the project, which is good for taxpayers. But also is incorporating, you know, what they want is their land. And they know that, you know, the alligators needed those areas, if you will, and also the plugs going in, the height of those plugs within the canals. I think at first it was like two feet, and I'm probably going to get something wrong here. And they're like, well, it really needs to be three feet. So, you know, we make them three feet. Whenever we are going to restore, or I wouldn't say restore, rehabilitate, I don't know what word to use, McCormick Landing, which is a tree island that was utilized by the Mexican tribe, tribal members, or a specific clan, if I'm not mistaken, Otter Clean, I don't know. It was impacted in the 60s, I think 1963 is whenever L28 was put in, and it went right through the middle of the aisle. That was before NEPA, 1969 was NEPA, National Preservation Act, 1969. So there was no consultation required by law then. So during the planning, engineering, and design phase, we absolutely intend to get with the tribe and say, hey, what vegetative communities can we put here? Should we put here? We're going to utilize that in like the proxy plants, right? So let's say they're having a digit, or they have a medicinal plant that grows in the same type of environment as a red maple. So they're going to say plant red maple here, and it needs to be at this elevation, why have you, why have you, and then they can come in later and plant other plants that are culturally significant to them. The location of the tribe has wanted additional culverts along Loop and Tamiami Trail to move more water south. That's being incorporated into the project. Yeah, more specific, I mean, on the question of work, we, and I don't know if it, the panel, or I know the panelists, but I don't know if the committee realizes that so warp, the genesis of warp was the two tribes, the Seminole tribe went to the task force and the Mikazuki tribe went to the Everglades Coalition through Congress. Ever since then, a pseudo IK has been, you know, because it drives interest, it's really restoring, for instance, what Cindy was describing, a native area. One thing that you then mentioned that as part of everything, it was the high stages on the southwest corner of 3A, and at the same time how dry the northwest corner is. So, and the Mikazuki tribe has always been an advocate that, and the letter that was mentioned, that by Kevin about 12A and 12B, it's specific about that high stages on the southwest corner of 3A. Therefore, the implementation of this structure that you may see on the plan, that it will be bi-directional to try to move water from that area to the preserve, and also the same way. As a result of that, the culvers on Tamiami Trail and Looper Road as well. And the key of those culvers that Cindy was describing and the native area is really that proxy that Gina was talking about. We must find a proxy to be able to find out and protect their knowledge in a way, but at the same time, being able to come up with attributes to be able, performance measures to be able to incorporate into the plans. I don't know if we answered your question. I think we went, yeah. Stephanie, could I take you up on your earlier offer to bring other folks into the conversation? As Betty would like to make a quick statement, if you can, the committee will grant her the opportunity, please. Thank you for, it's good to see you all here today, and thank you for opening up this conversation for the tribe's perspective. And I think if you all would have listened to the tribes many years ago, we wouldn't be in this situation to begin with on having an ill Everglades. We would have a healthy Everglades, but I think you for taking that opportunity to start realizing that you need to have more tribal input is what I said. And while I was sitting in the back of the room and appreciative of this panel and appreciative of you giving your time to the tribes and extending that time yesterday to spend that time with us by airboat and listening to us and having these one-on-one conversations, I thank you for that opportunity. And I hope 10 more years from now that we see a change. And you know, when the Tamiami Trail was being constructed, they needed Seminole and Mika City guides to guide them through the Everglades to show them where the roads need to be routed because their original route wasn't the best route. And unfortunately, you know, we assisted with that and hindsight is 2020, maybe we shouldn't have helped them out. And the road never got built. So, you know, this indigenous knowledge has been used here and there many years ago by different agencies. And, you know, and to borrow some words is that unfortunately, unless what we have been seeing as tribal people, unless we have a PhD or MS behind our names, our voices aren't heard. Because apparently, unless you have a master's or a doctor's degree, nobody listens to you. You know, and as indigenous people, I might have self have seen an elder save a life from a person being bit by a real penny rattlesnake. And nobody has to go to the hospital because they had that knowledge. They didn't have the DR behind their name, but they saved their life. So knowledge as Kevin eloquently put it is gained in different ways. And it's quantified in different ways. And in my culture, the piece of paper you get from a university doesn't mean too much for us. Because in everyday life, it's how we survive in that environment before we had the cities. We didn't need all that we knew how to live in that environment and adapt to that environment and respect that environment to live in harmony with that environment, to understand that you have to let the water go where it needs to go. Because we know the interior waters of the Everglades help cool the oceans, but because we keep storing water and wasting water and not letting that water go to the oceans, not just in the Everglades, but all across this continent of the United States, we're helping exacerbating the water temperatures, because we're not letting that water get from the interior lands to our oceans to help cool it. That's part of indigenous knowledge. We didn't have to have a paper degree to know that. That's through observation. And so I would hope 10 years from now, in addition to the PhDs and the master's degrees, you have tribal elders on your panels as well. Because our university is our life experiences and we're always going to school with the environment. But science is important, because as our tribal scientists acknowledge, and we're appreciative of them for the sciences, is taking what we know, the stories we share, the experiences that we know and understand about the environment, which we live, is they're using their science backgrounds to prove it in a science form, so the scientific community can understand it, because that's all you understand, is those numbers, the graphs, the piece of paper. So they're proving what we're saying to be true, as how we always understood it. And I appreciate that of our staff is putting, matching what we say to the science to show that the Everglades was abundant in wildlife. It was abundant and healthy in its plant communities. And the little changes that we saw was hurting those communities and doing that science and research to say, okay, this is what the elders are saying, this is what it used to be, this is what it's now, let's find out why, and let's put it in that data to show why. So we can start presenting it, because for many years, what the tribes were saying was taken as anecdotal, not as science. Our knowledge is a form of science, because before you had the universities and the papers, you had an understanding of the natural world. And science evolved out of the natural world and progressed, but science kind of forgot that a little bit in that quest to have explanations. So that's the two cents I wanted to put in, is that just because we don't have degrees doesn't mean our knowledge is useless. Because obviously we knew how to live in harmony with the environment. And there's a lot to know about that. And one thing I wanted to point out that wasn't mentioned here is that indigenous communities, the tribes, not after a project has already to be designed and planned and appropriated for, we need to be brought in at the beginning, not at a section 106. We need to be at the very beginning of that process. And Armando and Cindy have known our concerns, that don't consult us five years down the road while the ball has been rolling that long. We need to be at the beginning, because there is one project that is in the works that has some significant cultural resources right in the very center. And we still haven't got an answer of how we're going to address that. And they're already constructing it. Because that process of involving the tribes was brought in later after the construction and the appropriation of this project has started. It's a state project. The core has kind of withheld from that. And the tribes have been more happier with the core process, the federal process, because they have those mandates to consult with the tribes and to implement that process with the tribes on their consultation. They're very much more respectful to tribes. The state does not have that process. And it would be great if the state did because the state doesn't have to respect tribes. We hope that they would, but there's no mandate that they must respect the tribes. So therefore, we have some burial mounds inside of an EAA reservoir that is a controversy. And unfortunately, the state meant reduce the footprint and the agency is stuck with building a reservoir that really isn't going to help the Everglades, even though they say it will. So here we are. If it would have been a bigger footprint, which they originally wanted to build, they would have been able to protect those resources much better and not inundate them. But they still have to contain the same amount of water volume in a smaller footprint and go up. So how is that going to clean water when you're storing water vertically in more massive amounts versus if you could have a shallow reservoir over a larger footprint? That's what's not understood by a lot of the public and someone alluded to politics and decisions. That's where politics got into a decision that handicapped an agency and directed an agency to build this reservoir vertically, which it would have been much better if it would have went the other way and more shallow and worked as a filter marsh instead of accessible their building. So those things that, unfortunately, the health of the Everglades ecosystem, I always say, quit managing the system for people, manage it for the ecosystem of the plant communities, the animals, and then you will benefit the people of the ecosystem much better. So that's what I wanted to put out there. And I appreciate the work that Kevin and all the other partners of our tribe and departments put into it and it's very hard because I will never know how he understands his life, just like he will never know how and understand my life because we live two different lives. So thinking of that, I would never go to China and tell them how to build something because I'm not Chinese. I didn't grow up in China. I don't understand that ecosystem, but they do. So that's what we're asking is that when you come into our ecosystem of the Seminoles and Mikosuki, that try to understand and strive how we understand that ecosystem because none of you live there. I do. And your decisions impact me in my tribe every day. So that's why we are asking that we be a part of that process from the beginning in any tribe would ask that because you're coming in and impacting their lives and to be respectful of that. And it was alluded to earlier because I'm thinking of, Cindy, you brought something that it was an Army Corps project and someone else I think was in the National Park Service during that meeting made a comment because one of the projects was going to impact the Mikosuki tribe with more dry days of water. I think it was the mod waters. It was you're doing the planning and how to move that water. And the modeling was showing the Mikosuki tribe was going to get more dry days on its reservation because it was Robin Peter to pay Paul with water, robbing water from the tribe to put to pay Paul the National Park. So we were asking, you know, how can you budget that differently quantify the impact to the tribes and the resources. And the comment was made, well, we have, we have to think about the farming community, agricultural community, the urban areas, and we know how to put a dollar sign on farmland revenue lost, you know, a house code income loss, home values, we can put a dollar sign. But for the Everglades itself, they didn't know how to, you know, weigh the options. Okay, we have, you know, how many millions of dollars here, but we can't figure out how to dollar, how much, what's the value of a tree island? What's the value of the loss of snail kites, apple snails? They didn't know how to put a dollar value. So this dollar value of agriculture and household income, real estate loss outweighed the value of the Everglades itself. They couldn't understand that actually this, the Everglades had more value than the agriculture and the house and all that, because that can't exist without this. So that's something that we were asking them. And I don't think they figured it out yet, because I haven't heard answers, how you put a value over here, because how that system is designed, your cost analysis, I guess. And then part of that modeling y'all do is they look at that, but they don't know how to value the Everglades loss, the wildlife loss, the plant communities lost, they don't know how to quantify that with a dollar sign. So I didn't hear that mentioned here though. So that's, that's how we think that they have to have that balance and the resources and the understanding. So what I think you would go much further if you really take that initiative to incorporate that indigenous knowledge, you'd save a lot of money. You'd save a lot of money that could be used somewhere else with your projects if you would just listen more to the tribes and the people of the land. Thank you. I don't think there's anything more to add on this session personally, unless there's any burning questions from the committee. I think ending on Ms. Betty's thoughts and things I hope that you will all go away and think about and take part of this conversation with you as well from us up here. Again, all of us, all of us in this room want to do good. We want to do good things. So let's do it. Thank you. We were just looking into yet another change in our agenda, but this is a good way to end. So I agree with kind of Kevin. Thanks very much to the panel and to Ms. Betty and Beanie and adjourned. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.