The interagency experiment of Florida Bay

A series of significant and obvious changes in Florida Bay have occurred over at least the past 10 years. These include: extensive losses of sea grass habitat and changes in diversity; extensive loss of sponges; reduced water clarity; micro-algal blooms of increasing frequency, intensity, and duration; and declines in economically important species including pink shrimp, lobster, and fish. To address the information needs to provide managers to develop appropriate actions to “restore” Florida Bay, an interagency group formed from an ad hoc committee to organize research to determine the causes of these changes. The resulting “Science Plan for Florida Bay” completed in April 1994 defines research required to provide the critical information needed to guide restoration and formalizes a process to review the relevance of research in meeting these information needs. This approach includes a structured process to optimize the distribution of research funds to meet recovery and restoration criteria. Research responsibilities of the eight federal and state agencies included are separated largely by agency mandate and expertise. A process which provides for the optimization of resources has been established and is described within the “Science Plan for Florida Bay”. This process has provided guidance in directing research to focus on the critical hypotheses relative to changes in Florida Bay and adjacent waters. This process has been adopted by the Science Sub-Group of the Interagency Working Group for South Florida Restoration. As such, the Florida Bay interagency process is a model of how to optimize resources to provide information needed to measure changes in a system such as Florida Bay