New Reports Show Progress Toward Understanding Nutrient Impacts in the Bay

SFEI scientists studying the role and effects of nutrients in the Bay recently completed two draft reports that summarize current knowledge of the issue.
The Lower South Bay Nutrient Synthesis was a collaborative effort between SFEI and a number of co-authors in the region, including experts from USGS and UC Davis. Lower South Bay (south of the Dumbarton Bridge) is a shallow subembayment where nutrient concentrations and phytoplankton biomass are typically greater than elsewhere in San Francisco Bay. Additionally, low dissolved oxygen concentrations have been observed in the shallow sloughs and creeks that exchange with Lower South Bay. The Lower South Bay Nutrient Synthesis summarized the current state of knowledge on nutrient-related issues in this region, including: synthesizing data and observations related to nutrient inputs and cycling; characterizing trends in major indicators of ecosystem response to nutrients; evaluating the relative importance of physical, chemical, and biological factors that regulate ecosystem response; and identifying remaining high-priority science questions.
The second report is the 2015 Annual Nutrient Science Program Update. This report is a succinct progress update on the ongoing elements of the Nutrient Management Strategy for San Francisco Bay. This reports presents brief results on a number of monitoring activities from the last year, including ship-based monitoring, high-frequency moored sensor monitoring, high-spatial resolution mapping, and source monitoring, as well as progress towards developing long-term nutrient monitoring and modeling programs.
Comments on these reports may be sent to David Senn or Emily Novick.
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This visualization tool facilitates intuitive comparison of continuous data from around the Bay, and across a variety of analytes, to demonstrate the potential for collaborative monitoring across programs.

This visualization tool facilitates intuitive comparison of continuous data from around the Bay, and across a variety of analytes, to demonstrate the potential for collaborative monitoring across programs.
The indications of decreased Bay resilience to high nutrient loads have come to the fore at a time when the availability of resources to continue assessing the Bay’s condition is uncertain. The San Francisco Bay Regional Monitoring Program (RMP) has no independent nutrient‐related monitoring program, but instead contributes approximately 20% of the USGS data collection cost. Thus, there is currently an urgent need to lay the groundwork for a locally‐supported, long‐term monitoring program to provide information that is most needed to support management decisions in the Bay.

Developing a Bay-wide numerical model that can be used by the RMP, the Regional Board, and stakeholders to inform environmental management decisions has been identified as an important need for several initiatives. Modeling is a key element of the Nutrient Strategy, to aid in identifying impairment and feasible control strategies under current and future conditions. In recent years the RMP has also been laying the groundwork for developing contaminant fate and bioaccumulation models for the Bay that can be used to forecast conditions under different management scenarios.