Unintended impacts of freshwater flow restoration on water quality of coastal Everglades and Florida Bay

For the restoration and protection of the Greater Everglades Ecosystem to be successful, four factors must be in place regarding water: quantity, quality, timing and distribution. These factors need to be fine tuned, as much as possible, to approach to those of the pre-development natural system as it existed in the early 1900s. Results from paleoecology-based models (Marshall & Wingard 2012) indicate that oligohaline to mesohaline conditions used to prevail in the nearshore embayments, and polyhaline conditions in central Florida Bay, where nowadays hypersalinity is a current issue. Models have been developed to determine the required freshwater discharges to reduce salinity (CERP 2012), but nutrient changes associated to the required discharges and salinities have not been assessed. We present a methodology to assess water quality changes in freshwater marshes, mangrove forest and coastal embayments of Florida Bay as proposed discharge and/or salinity regimes are introduced due to restoration. Our results indicate non-uniform spatial response of water quality to changing discharge/salinity that must be taken into consideration to avoid unintended adverse effects on the ecosystems (i.e. eutrophication)