 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Stephanie Johnson with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Thank you for joining us for a webinar on our report that was just released, Progress Toward Restoring the Everglades, the eighth biennial review 2020. You can now download a copy of the report and other supporting materials at nap.edu. The recording of this webinar will be available on our website in the coming weeks. For those of you not familiar with the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, we are nonprofit private institutions that provide independent objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science technology and medicine. On the topic of Everglades restoration, this is the 16th Academy report since 1999 and the eighth biennial report under the congressional mandate from the Water Resources Development Act of 2000. For each study committee members are chosen for their expertise and experience and they serve pro bono to carry out the study statement of task. The results that result from the study represent the consensus view of the committee and must undergo external peer review before they are released. So before I turn this over to the committee chair, I want to go over a few reminders. Please note that this webinar is scheduled to last one hour. We'll start off with an overview presentation from four committee members summarizing the report, and then we'll open it up to any questions you may have. To ask a question just click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and type your question, and you can submit questions at any time during the presentation. Now I'd like to introduce the chair of the committee that wrote the report Charlie Driscoll Charlie is university and distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering at Syracuse University. Thanks Charlie. Thank you Stephanie and good afternoon and thank you all for for coming to this webinar. So as Stephanie said we're going to talk about the report of the Everglades Restoration Committee or CISRUP. So this report on average comes out every two years, and there is a statement of task associated with this which is carried through each of these reports. So this is shown here there are four elements of the report the first and fourth first and fourth elements are covered in each report, including an assessment of progress and restoring the natural system and independent review of monitoring management protocols to be used in the evaluation of CERP progress. The second and third elements vary depending on the report. And generally they address issues that are very timely concerning the overall restoration or problems that have come up and that would make sense for us to focus on. And the other elements vary from from report to report and include discussion of significant accomplishments and restoration and discussion evaluation of specific scientific and engineering issues that may impact the progress towards receipt, reaching the restoration goals. So I have been very fortunate to work with a very talented committee. They're here and with their affiliations, and we have a number of them here that are going to help out in this webinar, including to give parts of the presentation as well as to address questions at the end of the session. So I'd like to just go through this in order and ask them to introduce themselves and indicate their institutions and we'll start out with Casey. Hi everyone, I'm Casey Brown from the University of Massachusetts. Hello, everyone. I'm Ehab Nisalli with Tulene University. Thank you, Ehab. Next Denise Reed. Hi everybody. My name's Denise Reed. I'm a coastal geomorphologist, University of New Orleans. Okay, thank you. Next, Jim Sears. Good afternoon. I'm Jim Sears, hydrologist at Yale University. Next, Martha. Hi everyone, I'm Martha Citula, Southern California Coastal Water Research Project. Next, Jeff. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Jeff Walters in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech. And last but certainly not least, Denise Waldrop. Hi, good afternoon. Denise Wardrop, a wetland ecologist in the Department of Geography at Penn State. Is there anybody else from the committee that may have come on that I missed? Okay. In addition to the committee members, we also have very capable staff from the National Academies. You heard Stephanie Johnson at the beginning of the presentation. Stephanie has been with the Everglades restoration through the academies since 2002. She knows a lot about the Everglades, very capable, and she was instrumental in terms of completing this report. Okay, a little bit about the study process. We started this activity in May of 2019. We had four in-person meetings. In addition to those meetings, we had a series of web conferences with various experts to seek information about things that we would consider and address in this report. In the in-person meetings, we heard from a number of individuals and we also received public comments. We got very valuable information that helped us address the issues that we'll cover in this briefing. In addition to those presentations, one of my favorite activities is the field trips. We had five terrific field trips, which was really great to see the restoration in progress, talk with people who are working on that, and we got a lot of insight as through those field trips. So we're really grateful to the effort at pulling off a good field trip. Then we were faced with COVID so we transitioned to virtual meetings. We had a few additional full committee meetings as well as subcommittee meetings focusing on individual chapters to wrap up the report, which was done in the beginning of the summer, 2020. The report then went out for peer review. As Stephanie said, we got the reviewer comments. By the end of the summer 2020, we responded to those comments and revised the report. We were anticipating that we would give this in the other briefings and the release the report in the fall, but there was a contractual gap that caused the delay. And so here we are in March and the report has been released. Then we're giving a series of briefings, including this webinar today. Okay, a little bit about SERP or the comprehensive Everglades restoration plan. It's a very large restoration effort in South Florida. It was initiated in 2000 so it's been going on for a long time and it's projected to go a long time in the future. It's a state federal partnership with the tagline to get the water right. The cartoon here showing South Florida and to illustrate sort of the dimensions and complexity of the restoration effort includes more than 40 major projects and 68 project components. It really is doing a lot to move water around in South Florida, in some cases minimizing flows of water to the coast, improving storage capacity that has lost been been lost through historical development to try to encourage water moving south and to treat that water so it's adequate quality to move into the protected area to provide barriers against seepage along the eastern side to try to reestablish the sheet flow that has had gone on historically. In addition to water there are a number of other elements associated with it, not the least of which is addressing invasives within the region itself. As I said it's a very complex, long standing project and very, very interesting and important effort. So for this, this report, we have four major focal areas. I think this is really an important report, SIRP is pivoting from planning and advancing individual projects to operations and management of a partially restored system. And in this regard, science and particularly system thinking is going to be very important to support decision making. So there are sort of four elements of the report major elements of the port, and this is what we'll cover in this briefing. So the first is on restoration project and SIRP has several ongoing project and some of these are showing responses to increments. The next is the combined operational plan and that is going to be handled by Jeff. It's a really big, it's a huge step for SIRP, and it shows with modified waters delivery to Everglades National Park and the C111 South Dade projects there'll be substantial deliveries of water south and both the projects and COP have provided great opportunity for learning and adaptive management. We are going to cover estuaries and previous reports the committee has touched on estuaries but not provided much detail. So we wanted to do a deeper dive into estuaries and we did. There's a lot of interest in estuaries because of major projects that are being constructed, as well as releases of water from Lake Okeechobee and the adjacent watershed that are contributing to water quality problems and haps. Martha is going to cover some some important elements of the estuary section. And the last section is going to be covered by Casey, and this concerns science to support decision making and because of this pivot that I talked about. It's really critical that for improved tools and the use of data are available to support the analysis for future projects and decision making. And this idea of science to support decision making is sort of a critical theme that is woven through the report. So let's get started. And as we start I'd like to sort of orient you towards the ongoing projects there are seven SIRP ongoing projects and you can see them here in the map on the right. The two shown on the map in four and eight are two very large reservoirs that are under construction. The C-44 reservoir shown in four and the C-43 reservoir along the Kaluta Hatchee River shown in eight. These are very impressive. We had the opportunity to visit this and talk to folks during one of our field or during two of our field trips, excuse me. Next pick you in strand which is shown down here and to pick you in strand is the site of considerable restoration progress and we'll talk a little bit about that. Next there are two elements of the Central Everglades Planning Project new waters shown approximately here in 12 and south shown here at 11. Next there's Biscayne Bay coastal wetlands which is shown about in this area around the symbol seven. And then finally at this symbol where it says six is the location of the C-111 spreader canal. So as I mentioned, we're starting to see progress. This is very exciting. Part of this has to do with the timing. There's been a lot of planning design building and now we're starting to see things happening and that's great news. The committee is very excited as the people are who have been working on this for a long time. An important element is significant increases in funding. For the first time, state and federal funds have exceeded $200 million from both sources. And this is this is big. This level of funding. What was is the level that was envisioned when the yellow book was first developed at the start of SERP. So it's quite exciting to see this level of support and with increases in funding, SERP projects can completed more quickly, resulting in faster restoration and increasing the mitigation of the degraded system. So it's important to point out that even though progress is being made, the system is highly degraded and is susceptible to further degradation. So time is of the essence and it's good that the progress is happening. An important component of this report addressed issues concerning the integrated delivery schedule or IDS. The IDS shows project sequencing and budgeting as important communication tool. IDS can be used to demonstrate the effects of increased or decreased funding on SERP implementation. The 2019 IDS presented the fastest possible construction schedule by assuming optimistic budget projections. It might be assumed that if less funding is available, then the project sequences would remain the same but just be delayed. But this is a false or a poor assumption. It's important to realize the ecosystem degradation is time dependent and given the situation, the priority of projects may shift depending on the funding available and the time required to complete them. Okay, as I mentioned, there are signs of significant restoration project progress, excuse me, from three SERP projects. In addition to Pick-Yoon Strand, which is shown in this photo sequence here on the right, this upper panel shows the before and the lower panel shows the after of restoration, which is great to see. In addition to Pick-Yoon Strand, there are also increments at the C-111 Spudder Canal in the Biscayne Bay coastal wetlands. The limitations in monitoring, analysis, and communication of results have hampered quantitative assessment and communication of restoration benefits. Monitoring in areas that are operational such as the increments in Pick-Yoon Strand and Biscayne Bay coastal wetlands have provided qualitative restoration progress. However, the assessments are a restoration progress have been stymied by a lack of systematic analysis of quantitative results from early indicators of restoration relative to expected outcomes. As a result, important opportunities for learning and improved management are being missed both at the project and system scale. So before I hand this over to Jeff, I want to talk about two additional areas that were emphasized in the report. The first is the Lake Okeechobee Watershed Restoration Project. And delayed implementation of the major features of this project will help accommodate numerous uncertainties associated with an important technology, aquifers storage and recovery or ASR. This technology remains unproven at the proposed scale of deployment. To address critical unknowns while moving forward with restoration, installation should proceed in increments of two to five ASR wells with post-monitoring, post-installation monitoring conducted to address questions that concerning the quality of recharged and recovered waters, ecological effects, and recovery efficiencies. The other area I wanted to touch on was actually an area that I worked on in the report and that concerns stormwater treatment areas. So stormwater treatment areas are large constructed wetlands that have been used to remove phosphorus inputs to the Everglades Protection Area. However, STAs have not proven capable yet of achieving water quality conditions that are necessary to send waters to the Everglades Protection Areas. Everts are underway by the South Florida Water Management District to analyze and optimize STA performance and hopefully then avoid delays in meeting the water quality criteria and delivering the new water to the central Everglades. The other item that is exciting is to look into the potential for STAs to remove nitrogen. Primarily STAs have been used to reduce phosphorus, but as we will learn from Martha on the estuaries, there's also a lot of concern about nitrogen. And so research is being conducted by the South Florida Water Management District to improve understanding in nitrogen retention and loss in STAs. And if there could be enhanced nitrogen removal, this could prove to be an approach to mitigate nutrient releases to estuaries and mitigate harmful algal blooms. So with that, I would like to turn the program over to Jeff Walter and he's going to talk to us about COP. Thank you, Charlie. COP is a new water management plan for the central Everglades governing operations for water flowing through the water conservation areas into Everglades National Park and on to Florida Bay. It replaces the ERTP, the Everglades Restoration Plan, and employs for the first time infrastructure from the recently completed pre-circ, modified water deliveries and C111 South Bay projects. The COP epitomizes the pivot from restoration planning to implementation that's the central theme of our report as it employs new infrastructure to create significant changes in hydrology compared to what preceded at ERTP that are anticipated to produce significant changes to ecology. Many of these changes represent restoration benefits. For example, although no new water is added to the system under COP, COP will greatly alter the distribution of flows of existing water. It promises to restore the historical distribution of water in shark river slough, for example. Such the two-third of the water will flow through northeast shark river slough to the east and one-third through western shark river slough to the west. Since the 1970s, the flow has been reversed with only a third going through the east and two-thirds through the west, resulting in overly wet conditions in the west and overly dry conditions in the east at times, and a myriad of undesirable ecological changes and many restoration goals for CERP involve reversing these changes. It's been an objective to redistribute flow in shark river slough since the 1980s, so restoring it under COP is a big deal. COP will result in a variety of other significant changes as well, such as increasing flows to Florida Bay. As we're talking about a small increment toward the ultimate objective, not the full Monty like COP is promising for redistributing flows in shark river slough. Now, one point that we wanted to make was that it's going to be important to communicate the benefits of COP to a public that's eager to see returns on all the investments in restoration. Toward that end, we recommend that changes that constitute restoration benefits and restoration success be measured against the ERTP. During the process for selecting the preferred alternative for COP, many benefits of COP were quantified, but relative to the no-action alternative baseline, which was not ERTP. And that's because in development of COP, managers tested the capabilities of the new infrastructure, resulting in significant change to water management, and operation at the conclusion of these field tests was used as the COP baseline. So actually two increments to the benefits of COP, first from ERTP to baseline, and then second from this baseline to the full COP. So using that baseline was fine for the purposes of developing the COP, but we suggest that when measuring restoration success under COP, measure changes relative to ERTP, not to the COP baseline. Next slide, Charlie. We found the process for arriving at the final COP to be systematic and comprehensive, but we did have some suggestions for improvements that could be applied to future planning efforts. The analyses in picking the final COP compared abilities of various alternatives to meet planning objectives, which were mostly ecological restoration benefits, but incorporated other things like constraints, especially maximum flood risk in two particular areas, concerns, which were things like water supply and recreation, and planning considerations, which included things like opportunities for enhanced flood mitigation and compatibility of the COP with SEP, the next big project coming to the Central Everclades. It's not clear how trade-offs between these different things were handled. For example, did selection of the preferred alternative involve sacrificing some planning objective benefits to achieve more flood mitigation or more water supply benefits? It's not clear that we think that trade-offs that are made and the rationale involved in them should be transparent in these kind of planning efforts. Also, there needs to be more information about model uncertainty. As the COP is implemented, it would be critical to determine whether what is happening on the ground matches model projections. We need to know what range of outcomes fall within the bounds of model uncertainty to do that and in which ones do not, because if they don't, that indicates a need to improve the models to incorporate new understanding of hydrology and ecology that emerges as the system responds to restoration actions. Also, the expected performance of COP was evaluated based on historical conditions, basically how COP would have performed in the past. It would be useful in these planning efforts to evaluate how a plan is projected to perform over a range of possible future conditions, given that we know that with climate change and sea level rise, we cannot any longer count on the past being prologue for the future. It appeared to the committee that flood risk for the 8.5-square-mile area was the biggest obstacle to restoring historical distribution of flows in Shark River Slough, as it has been in previous attempts to redistribute these flows. And there have indeed been problems with flooding in the 8.5-square-mile area since the report was written. The committee was encouraged to learn recently that plans are already under way to address this problem so that it doesn't prevent COP from achieving its restoration goals. Next slide. The COP also epitomizes new opportunities for learning, resulting from the pivot from project planning to implement mentation and to use new knowledge to manage adaptively. There's a lot of potential for adaptive management within the COP and there's a detailed adaptive management plan for the COP that will enable managers to learn from system responses to operations and use that information to make adjustments to the COP. But the committee is even more excited about opportunities for system-wide adaptive management provided by the COP. The implications of differences between expected and observed hydrology and ecology go far beyond the operations of COP. COP provides an opportunity to test many of the hydrological, ecological, and conceptual models that have been used in planning the Everglades restoration. And the resulting improvements could be relevant to many CERP projects, enabling adjustments and improvements through the adaptive management process. For example, the COP tackles one of the other biggest challenges along with the 8.5 square mile area for restoration efforts and that's integrating recovery of the endangered Cape Sable seaside sparrow with restoration. The COP is projected to impact the sparrow significantly, producing new habitat in some areas and resulting in loss of existing habitat in some places where sparrow currently live. Much will be learned about sparrows from what happens under the COP. For example, does the redistribution of flows and shark rivers loop reduce the kinds of changes in vegetation and thus redistribution of suitable habitat for sparrow is expected. If there is new habitat, do the sparrows move into it? Do they colonize it? If they won't go there on their own, can we move them in there and will they stay there if we do that? Does nesting success improve in areas that it's projected to improve in and therefore those populations increase? What is learned about the sparrow from COP will be invaluable to planning and implementing CERP projects notably the CEP. The sparrow case is just one of a multitude of examples for system-wide adaptive management resulting from what is learned as the COP gets underway and under operation. But the ability to benefit from opportunities for adaptive management depends on having adequate staff. The pivot from planning and modeling to implementation analysis of system responses requires having the right staff to accomplish the latter. There will be increased demand for scientific support right away with the COP to compile, analyze, synthesize all the monitoring data coming in, evaluate restoration success, and get the right information to decision makers to enable system-wide adaptive management. And with that, I'll hand off to Martha Setula who will talk to us about estuaries. Next slide. Thanks, Jeff. So as most of you know, CERP was actually designed originally to really help address the issues with water inflows to all the estuaries, understanding that this would be only part of the solution to the challenges that they're facing these important habitats. CERP ecological restoration goals cannot be met though without addressing some of the major environmental issues that these estuaries are facing. A good example is for the northern estuaries in Biscayne Bay and their issues with water quality and alga blooms. If water quality impacts and other environmental issues are not well understood, our concern is that CERP may be unfairly blamed for failing to meet the expected outcomes of this restoration program. Next slide. So the committee wanted to take on providing recommendations, you know, and thinking a little bit more deeply about this issue. And the first thing that we found was that you have existing data and tools now that are underutilized to inform estuary restoration. For example, in the northern estuaries, you have watershed loading and water quality modeling capabilities. Now that can be used to begin to understand the linkages between hydrological restoration and quantities of flows, their inherent water quality and how that results in alga blooms. In the southern estuaries and particularly in Florida Bay, you have a much improved understanding and tools that can be used to revisit and clarify CERP goals in terms of what can actually be achieved. So we think that strategic use of the science now can actually help to point to the critical data gaps and modeling needs that really help to clarify the key investments and monitoring and model development for the future to give you the toolkit that you need to really inform how the restoration program goes forward. But we did actually spend a fair amount of time evaluating available monitoring data and your models, and we made some specific suggestions that could be considered with respect to what is needed to examine alternatives and look at the tradeoffs between water quantity, water quality and the biological outcomes in these estuaries. So for example, we called out the need for especially explicit water quality modeling and a sustained program of monitoring and research that can help to build towards a predictive harmful alga bloom modeling toolkit for the northern estuaries, understanding that this is a critical issue of importance for those communities. In Biscayne Bay, watershed loading models and water quality models are needed to link restoration and other human activities that are happening in that landscape and link them to the salinity water quality and light limitations that appear to be impacting the viability of seagrass in Biscayne Bay. Furthermore, mechanistic biological models are needed in the northern estuaries that can capture the quantitative basis between freshwater flows, water quality drivers, and biological goals for those prized habitats of seagrass and oysters. Predictive tools are needed to identify thresholds and tipping points in all the estuaries and absolutely for Florida Bay to help you really understand and disentangle those complex factors that are associated with salinity alga blooms and seagrass die off. And then finally, as an example, a Southern Everglades transition zone monitoring and modeling program is needed that really supports project planning and can help to couple your existing regional hydrological models, including both groundwater and surface water exchanges with essentially what's happening in the estuaries on the receiving water end with respect to estuarine hydrodynamics, salinity, water quality, and biological outcomes. So having clarity, first of all, in the future, water management decisions that need to be made can really help to prioritize this research and what monitoring data you need, what models need to be further developed, and how they can be used in tandem to create a synthesis that can guide your future actions. Next slide. So as you improve and increase the mechanistic basis for this, this modeling toolkit, we think that the investment is really going to pay off for you in terms of helping to support discussions of climate change adaptation, which is a grand challenge for the Florida landscape. So for example, modeling of coastal boundaries to understand the effects of sea level rise and how that impacts estuarine hydrodynamics, the salinity regimes and the ecosystem feedbacks, biogeochemical and biological is critically important. To really go further with mechanistic investigations to understand how those primary drivers, climate and sea level rise and their effects on temperature and flow and salinity are really causing a set of feedbacks on habs, on seagrass or in peak collapse, for example. And then having these ultimately investing and making the mechanistic, we think that's really an important component of this because it's going to increase your confidence and the ability to use those tools to be able to plan out scenarios of potential water management responses that I think are really key for planning and adaptive management of these estuaries going into the future. So with that I will stop and pass it back to Casey. Thanks Martha. So, the previous chapters addressed timely specific topics. Chapter six really addresses a common theme that emerged from our various conversations many conversations that we had with stakeholders and staff through the last assessment period. And I think the theme that emerged is this question of how science supports decision making and a reaction to chapter six might be something along the lines of well we use science all the time. Science is used to use models we collect data. We talked to experts and all those things are true. So I want to just begin this discussion of chapter six with a short personal reflection on how it really came about. And maybe most importantly to begin with a definition of science and the definition I'll use comes from Richard Feynman is I paraphrase him is a Nobel Laureate physicist and the definition is science is the practice of proving the experts wrong. So science is the practice of proving the experts wrong. And let's dig into that a little bit first. The most important probably is that science is a practice. It's not a model. It's not a data set. It is a practice or process. The second point relates to the ignorance of experts and while everyone loves a good laugh at experts being proven wrong realize that in science the expert most likely to be proven wrong is yourself the one conducting the experiment. And the corollary to that is if you're doing something and you can't prove yourself wrong, then it's not really science at its best science is a formalized process of developing and testing hypotheses, learning from those tests to improve the hypothesis. So what does this have to do with SERP. Well, really we can think of SERP as a $23 billion hypothesis that a set of investments is going to restore the Florida Evergates and and provide a host of services for the people of South Florida. And this is a hypothesis that was developed under a great deal of uncertainty. And so it needs science. And so now let's turn to chapter six, which is really tries to address this topic. And the first point is that as others have mentioned already that there is a great opportunity to begin to test this hypothesis that restoration is going to work as some of the projects are coming on the line. And Charlie can go to the first bullet. Thank you. Yeah. And as we test this hypothesis will learn from the projects coming online, and then we can adjust and prove decisions improve our hypothesis as we learn. And the second key point is that because science is so important. And there's this great opportunity from learning from projects as they come online that we can, or we really should think carefully about how we design our monitoring and our monitoring and how we can exercise both in order to get the best possible learning from the ongoing activities and use them to again to improve our hypotheses about our next steps. You can go to the next slide Charlie. There we go. There's that last bullet yet next slide. So here's some specific ideas about steps that can be taken for linking science to decisions. And the first is thinking about monitoring and specifically of course there's a great and a very impressive monitoring effort going on. One of the questions that arises is, are we benefiting and realizing the potential of all the monitoring that is taking place to the extent that we could. And realizing that potential really requires revisiting the strategy and the design for monitoring to make sure we're answering these fundamental questions about syrup as projects come online, which is, is it really working. And the theme relates to the use of models and the modeling efforts of serve is absolutely impressive. The work of the interagency modeling centers is outstanding and those on full display and during cop, as was reviewed earlier. And the question here really is, again, can this use of models benefits restoration even more. We see two potential areas for that to take place. The first is the assessment of restoration progress and that's to the assimilation of data and models to give us a better understanding of the status of the system right now. And the second area is the evaluation of future scenarios. So the model that the model effort so far has been primarily focused on getting projects evaluating projects and getting projects approved. And that's important. But the question here is, given that there's a changing baseline, could these models also be used to help us anticipate the future and adjust as necessary. And then the additional area that we identified related to synthesis. So the next bullet. Thanks, Charlie. And we really see synthesis as being the engine of science. It's bringing together the data is bringing together the learning from the models and and integrating them in a way that we're learning about the system as a whole. Again, it's essential as these projects are beginning to come online. And really a key basis for synthesis is good data management practices. There's a large, really an impressive effort in terms of data collection. So again, we can't fully benefit benefit from all that data until there's or we can benefit more with great data management practices that includes metadata and other good common practices to allow us to compare data sets across different fields and different methods for collection. Next slide. I want to spend just a second on a topic that I think has great potential for serve, and that is data assimilation. And this is a practice that is commonly used, especially in weather forecasting to integrate in an optimal way observations and models to create the best possible estimates you can get from both. And it's really ideally suited for a situation such as serve where we have lots of different kinds of data collected. We have models that provide a comprehensive look at the system. We can bring those together to create something called a now cast, which has the potential to provide us probably the best estimate of current conditions and and could be a powerful tool for for really evaluating status and how the system is evolving as a whole. This would require new effort for certain and new modeling approaches. I do think it's something that's worth considering given the potential that it has to benefit the system and the restoration. Next slide. And yes, so these are really summarized in a final or these points are really can't happen until we think also about the organization of the people who are going to really do this synthesis. And so the final point we wanted to make was regarding the need for a nimble organizational structure for science. And this includes a number of things shown on the next bullets that there's adequate staffing of appropriately trained staff and scientists that have a continuity of expertise throughout the life cycle of projects and so this is something that was clear through cop really benefited from a team of people working together over a great period of time. And I should also mention that cop was really a process that illustrated learning from natural experiments that were taking place to inform some of the options that were evaluated. And strong science leadership is essential and strong science leadership really part of that is realizing that science is not a peripheral or an add on to serve but it's an essential engine of restoration. It's how we learn whether restoration is working or not, and how we can adjust our hypotheses and to make sure that it will work given the changing landscape. I said one more slide figure I want to share, and this is a chart of funding for recover over time. And this is a product you can think of this as a proxy really for funding for synthesis for science and synthesis. And you can see that the funding has tailed off, while the challenge of the need for science and synthesis is only growing. And that's especially true as I mentioned going forward, given that the projects are coming on line right now and so there's a great opportunity for learning and really testing and improving our hypotheses about restoration. Okay, thank you, Casey and thank you to my colleagues for those those overviews of the section report. So I just like to summarize and then I'd like to transition to question and answers. So we've seen an expedited pace of restoration implementation which has been supported by recent funding levels indeed good news. We also are very excited about the cop implementation will is expected to deliver substantial benefits. And with this, there is great opportunities to learn and enhance these benefits. But the estuaries are impacted by a variety of factors a variety of disturbances and SERP will certainly help, but is by no means the entire solution to improving the conditions of estuaries. And indeed water quality may limit achieving SERP goals so given this, the application of advanced science and modeling tools will help in this regard and try to maximize the impact of SERP to improve the condition of estuaries. And then finally a SERP pivots from project planning and construction to operations and adaptive management. Strong science is absolutely critical to support decision making and this would include effective monitoring data analysis synthesis application of modeling tools and strong scientific leadership with appropriate staffing. So, as we said earlier the report is available online. In addition there are some resources that are available including a press release, and a four page sort of crib notes of the report report in brief. And then the final report will be will be published this summer. So we thank you for your attention and then I think my colleagues and I will be happy to take on questions if you have any. Thank you Charlie and thanks to our other committee presenters. We have a few questions and please keep sending those in. The first question is on estuaries so either Martha or Denise Wardrup can take this it's from Chris Robbins from the Ocean Conservancy. And the question is regarding haves. The report is saying that we need better predictive tools that predict conditions that could lead to haves and to make better use of the data already collected and available. So what are the types of conditions or drivers and associated data sets that should be part of these predicted have models. Martha I think that's something you've thought long and hard about in California. So, that's a great question Chris and I, and I think in the report we dug into a little bit of a simple explanation of the typical have drivers that seem to have a commonality across the landscapes. You know, whether that's Florida or other places but I think that what's important to understand is that what is specifically driving haves location to location really depends. So what we're recommending is is a careful walk towards discerning what are the most important drivers for haves through a process of using existing tools and data targeting. And that's going to tell you a lot I think a really great use of models is to tell you what you don't know and what's missing in terms of key data gaps. And then an incremental addition of observations and improve tools that inform your understanding over time. And so great examples, you know, I think some of the basic drivers that we understand always to have always seem to have some degree of influence, include nutrients flow temperature. There are a number of site specific factors and so I could go on and so I think I think the message to you is that there's a basic set that seemed to appear in most most common water quality models, and then many others that represent site specific conditions. Thanks Martha. The next question is likely for Casey. Does the report provide references of good examples of data assimilation procedures for using recent data update model predictions. And Judd says, Judd's from the Park Service that this is a very useful concept and would like to start focusing on using these procedures. That's great to hear the report provides I would say an overview and some links to get started some examples, specific examples of how data assimilation is used. There's a pretty rich literature on it. And it's, I'm happy to gather information and provide more regarding specific questions. I would say the report provides an overview a place to get started. Okay, the next question is from David Wagner. And this might be a question for Denise read or Denise wardrobe about adaptive management and governance. And so, as you pivot to operations and management and adaptive management of the SERP is are the proper governance and these in place to support robust adaptive management programs that are necessary to carry the program. And maybe that taps into cop as well. Jeff wants to, I will say that that's not something specifically we addressed in this report regarding the overall program. And I can take a shot at that. To some extent, I think we have actually addressed this in previous reports in some way. But I think the part of this report that that addresses this is the site year of in chapter six as Casey described, have really linking the science side with the decision making better. And I think what what we found overall was that there was a lot of good science going on, but we're asking questions about whether or not it was really at this point in where the program is delivering decision makers what they really need. And so that, of course, is inherent in in adaptive management in terms of some kind of decision being made, whether it's an operational decision, whether it's a decision about planning or a future project or something like that. And how those kind of feedback mechanisms work has not to date from project data really been really been conducted on any scale at certainly not on the kind of scale that that I think you know this this was laid out originally in the in the book and so it's really part of this pivot of now you've got projects on the ground. Now you are operating the system differently. Now you can collect information, which is what you can then use. And in your models with your models as Casey just described to really support the decisions that are coming up and so I don't know if we're saying that the mechanisms are absent entirely. But they haven't yet been tested in the way that they are going to be tested. And so what we're suggesting in that in that chapter six is that this is a real this is a really good time to make those connections and to make sure that adaptive can work and that we can have those feedbacks between the generation, you know science data modeling and those kinds of things, and the decisions on how to move forward. So maybe that is a little indirect Stephanie but but I think it's just about where the program is at the moment. I would also add to that I think Denise spoke. Denise number one spoke really eloquently to the project scale of that and I'd also, you know it's a great opportunity right now and really the first opportunity to do adaptive management at a system scale. And I think that has a lot to do with cop in the IDS and just Casey's depiction on the slide of the support and funding for that large scale system wide view that somebody's looking at how the pieces are operating together because there is going to be a time when trade offs are going to start to become important and apparent. And there has to be a little bit more of a formal recognition of the need to be doing that adaptive management at the system wide scale and looking at things at a system wide scale. So I think at both scales that needs to happen. And again, it's not that the tools aren't there it's just that the muscles haven't quite been exercised yet. Stephanie can I add one observation and you may clarify here on the on the diagram that Casey showed about the workload for recover and that the science team for the Everglades is the is the work on interim goals and interim targets that I believe has been initiated. The timing on that I'm not question what it status is now as of March 2021, but the timing on that work was not in a position where the committee could really review it and weigh in on it but clearly this this idea that in 2021, we are revisiting our interim goals and interim targets which we haven't done for a long time, using new information. That's a really good opportunity to kind of do adaptive management and in previous reports we've talked to how to do it programmatically. In terms of things like soap updates and those kinds of things which there may also now be some some some movement on so they're all kinds of different scales at which this as Denise just described it which this adaptive management works and you know the exciting thing is that you're now at the position where it's all coming together. I had a little something about the cop committee did do some assessment of the relationship of science to decision making in the cop chapter with specifically about the cop adaptive management plan. So there's some, you can see some examples of what the committee's been talking about there. I think one theme from that is that where, because a lot of things are well specified and how the information is going to flow where it's going to go is well specified but tends to be a little bit less clear, right at the top where you're at the level of where some decision might be made, where the science is at that last stage. Keep sending your questions in because we have about five more minutes left. I have a question that I'm going to assign to myself, which is, why was there a four month contract gap. And that comes down to the fact that we have biennial reports but we have five year contracts. So it's kind of off cycle, and we had actually been expediting our processes so we almost did three full cycles within a five year contract, but it just so happened that the timing of the report release was about a month in the contract end and there were glitches in the agency, the sponsor side of getting the interagency agreement through headquarters. So there was that delay in the process. I did want to ask the question about to the whole committee about what you most want the Everglades restoration advocates and researchers to take away from the report. And so you guys might have different perspectives on this, but a chance to kind of sum up what you hope people will take away, and anyone can jump in. So I'm going to say that this is exciting, because I've only been on two of these previous reports but this idea of this pivot, the central theme in here, that now it's not about planning what you're going to do. It's about planning what you can do in the future at the same time that you are operating and managing a partially restored system. But that is really exciting for the folks on the ground in the Everglades. It's really exciting for the committee to see, and it's a big challenge. And I think that that's kind of for me anyway the essence of of chapter of chapter six. And if you look elsewhere in the in the report I think you'll see us mention that many of the foundational pieces for doing that are there. And it's how they all come together that is going to be the challenge to make this this next step work but I think that this is an exciting time for the Everglades is one of the messages I would like to people to get from this report. I would second that without having to add much more I think that was perfectly stated, super excited, you know, especially since I did my dissertation 20 years ago, plus in the Everglades just to see how far that science has come. And what you have as tremendous assets to be able to move this program forward. Very excited to see it. All right, I'm going to ask one last question before we wrap up a question from Dave Wagner. Asking about whether the impacts of climate change and sea level rise will cause system changes so large that the models are no longer accurate in identifying system dynamics. And so what you think about that for a while because that could go to Casey or Denise read or Jim. And maybe the broader question is how does one adapt the models to better understand what might happen and climate change. I would say and I think Martha hit on the spot when she was she was talking about the history chapter that we need process based models right and you know, if we've got process based models that we're not relying on, on historical relationships, you know, that's, that's the way to go when we start getting outside of historical relationships, if we're basing just on on statistics for instance then, then we could be in trouble but you know we understand a lot about those processes. And so if we can build that into the modeling and I think that's exactly what chapter five recommends then that should help. It's a challenge for all of us who work on coastal systems though. Yes, again, second, Denise, what you had to say and I would just emphasize because we're facing the same issues on the West Coast is that in order to not have your models your management models become obsolete. There needs to be sustained investments over time. So that climate change and other things don't catch you unawares. And that's it I think that's really important. I just add briefly that I think it's a great question. There are a lot of models, lots of different kinds of models and they'll be affected differently from by these changing baseline conditions. And I think that building on what Martha said that evaluation of models has to be a continuous process and that can only be done by comparing their predictions with the reality. And I think that needs to be done, not just in the context of sea level rise, but in general with a changing baseline, a better understanding that models will drift if you don't compare them to reality, learn from the differences and correct them. Data simulations as a way but not the only way to do that. I think that on top of that, the, the, to me, the models of seagrass of die off are a perfect example of the success of science. I mean, that's an incredible wealth of knowledge about how that happens, and that the building blocks now to really understand tipping points and predictive capability has is is just there. And it's a success story really to me at a comment. Yeah, this might double kill a little bit off of what Casey said, in terms of hydrologic models. It's not necessarily the case that hydrologic models that we use now won't be useful in the future. One of the things that we do have to do is is run these models to account for forcing factors and different boundary conditions associated with different futures. So, instead of using historical records to predict hydrologic responses to changes in infrastructure, we have to account for future climate change how rainfall change in the future. And also with respect to hydrologic models, Dave you mentioned sea level rise, and where that comes into models of the freshwater system is how it affects the boundary conditions and flows to the sea. And so we can use these current models but we have to update them to account for sort of new forcing factors for modifications and forcing factors and boundary conditions. So thanks to everyone for this discussion it looks like we're kind of at the end of our hour here and, and so those are all the questions we have time for today. I want to just say that once you exit the webinar you're going to be redirected to our report page where you can download a free PDF of the report and we hope that you'll continue to follow our process which will kick off with its ninth biennial review. And that's the report expected in November 2022 so with that I want to thank all our speakers from the committee and thank you for participating have a great afternoon.