Bayfront Park to become FWC testing ground

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is planning to test how different resilient shorelines affect marine life at Bayfront Park.

By Bret Hauff
| 3:54 p.m. June 1, 2018

An example of one of the sea wall enhancements to be installed at Bayfront Park.

Longboat Key
News

Bayfront Park will become a testing ground for a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s campaign to ensure sea life is safe when shorelines are hardened.

The conservation commission plans to install two seawall alternatives at Bayfront Park this fall as it prepares to test how different kinds of resilient shorelines affect marine life.

Sea Level rise management plan

The town of Longboat Key has entered a partnership with the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program to create a long-term, holistic plan for how the island can address sea level rise.

This partnership, orchestrated about two months ago by Commissioner Irwin Pastor, was formed to create a “long-term resiliency plan” that will employ means of mitigating the potential damage caused by more intense storms and higher sea levels, according to an email from Sarasota Bay Estuary Program Executive Director Mark Alderson.

The Sarasota Estuary Bay Program also will help secure funding for the town to hire a third-party consultant to “ focus on what we all consider as a problem for the future,” Pastor said.

“We have to deal with it, we can’t just keep on putting these things off,” Pastor said of the potential impacts of sea level rise.

“Were not going to solve it overnight, but we have to put more resources, more effort into it. It’s not just something we can stand by.”

Those resilience measures include a seawall, which is already installed at the park, a concrete relief of mangrove roots to be put seaward of the existing seawall, biodegradable bags of oyster shells and a natural shoreline of mangroves, which, again, already exists at Bayfront Park.

“The purpose is to determine which method provides the most habitat benefit for coastal sea life,” said Fara Ilami, coordinator of the coastal wildlife conservation initiative at FWC.

FWC chose Longboat Key’s Bayfront Park for the experiment because it was one of the only places in the state where the commission could find both natural shoreline and a seawall within such close proximity, Ilami said.

The idea is to gather data about different shoreline hardening structures with as few variables as possible — meaning that testing each in such close proximity will give FWC a clearer picture of how these different kinds of walls work in a location where sea life is similar.

Shorelines are being hardened across the state as communities prepare for the potential impacts of sea level rise, Ilami said. So FWC wanted to have a data set to tell Florida residents which kind of hardened shoreline is best for marine life.

“A lot of people are going to be looking for ways to stabilize their property as the sea level rises,” Ilami said. “One of the reasons for doing the study is so we can provide people the information they need.”

To get the information, FWC will install, maintain and monitor the alternative hardened shorelines for two years, all while taking samples of soil and counting the number of fish gathered in the area of the hardened shorelines.

The experiment will cost the state $180,000. None of the money comes from the Longboat Key budget.

The data collected from the study will help FWC with recommending what kind of shoreline protection is best for sea life on the west coast of Florida.