Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, South Florida/Caribbean

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The USGS Southeast Ecological Science Center, Gainesville, Florida is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research investigating: Monitoring of Faunal Communities of Biscayne Bay¿s Rickenbacker Basin in Relation to Harbor Dredging in Port of Miami. The Port of Miami is being improved in order to capitalize on the increase in trade expected with the expansion of the Panama Canal. Improvements include dredging to widen and deepen major channels within Miami Harbor. Dredging commenced in November 2013 and is scheduled to continue for eighteen months. The modifications to the Port have the potential to impact over 400 acres of benthic habitat within Biscayne Bay, and the adjacent coastal area including: seagrass, hard bottom reef, rock rubble, and unvegetated sediments. Channel deepening and widening activities will be conducted within the Rickenbacker Basin of the Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserve. It is estimated that 0.2 acres of seagrass habitat within the existing channel and 7.7 acres of seagrass habitat outside of the existing channel will be impacted (USACE, 2011). Due to the sensitive nature of the benthic communities in this region, monitoring of those communities is warranted to determine what changes, if any, occur within the Basin, outside of the region of direct impact. The proposed project will assess changes in the monitored communicates, and to what extent, if any those changes are associated with the Port of Miami expansion activities. In addition, thirty reference sites located in North Biscayne Bay (Julia Tuttle Basin) will also be monitored to support statistical inferences drawn from the field observations. A long term dataset (2005-2011) collected in the region as part of the South Florida Seagrass Fish and Invertebrate Assessment Network (FIAN) project, (http://sofia.usgs.gov/projects/scopesofwork03/assessnetwk.html) will provide pre-impact baseline information needed to evaluate the impacts of dredging.

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