MANAGEMENT ACTIONS
Management Action 1:
Continue to track and evaluate indicators of environmental stress, including algal blooms, fish kills, and fish and shellfish diseases.
Management Action 2:
Improve the techniques for evaluating the overall environmental health of estuarine waters.
Management Action 3:
Develop and adopt better indicators of shellfish contamination as soon as possible.
Objective E:
Evaluate Indicators of Environmental Stress in the Estuary and Develop New Techniques to Better Assess Water Quality Degradation
Strategy: Several highly visible indicators of environmental stress include chronic algal blooms, fish and shellfish kills, and fish and shellfish diseases. The Division of Environmental Management (DEM), Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF), National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), Shellfish Sanitation Branch (SSB), various academic and private sector researchers, and citizen monitoring groups would coordinate monitoring efforts to track these indicators of environmental stress to provide the widest geographic and most cost-effective monitoring coverage of the APES area.
Resources should be concentrated to establish a response network to identify and collect data on algal blooms, fish and shellfish kills, and fish and shellfish disease outbreaks; improve management tools to address shellfish contamination; and accelerate the development and application of new bio-assessment techniques to evaluate cumulative environmental impacts in estuarine waters.
Algal blooms and fish and shellfish kills and disease outbreaks have been monitored by various groups including DEM, DMF, Wildlife Resources Commission (WRC), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), NMFS, Pamlico Environmental Response Team (PERT), and academic and private researchers. However, this effort has not been fully coordinated to cover all waters of the APES area.
SSB has monitored the extent of bacterial contamination in shellfish harvest areas, identifying potential sources of contamination and issuing shellfish harvest area closures as necessary to protect the public health. Bio-assessment techniques have the advantage of detecting water quality problems that chemical or toxicological monitoring may miss or underestimate.
The resident estuarine biota act as continuous monitors of environmental quality, increasing the likelihood of detecting episodic events (e.g., spills), nonpoint sources, or other highly variable impacts that chemical sampling often misses. Bio-assessments also provide a means of directly assessing the biological integrity of the estuarine community. This assessment can serve as a basis for identifying high quality water deserving special protection, implementing state anti-degradation policies, confirming in-stream impacts predicted by fate and transport modeling (e.g., waste load allocation), and toxicity testing. The advantage of bio-assessments is their ability to assess ecosystem health -- one of the principal goals of the Clean Water Act.Several sites within the APES area were identified as exceeding levels of concern for toxic contaminants in ambient water, sediment, and/or fish tissue using protocols suggested by Cunningham, et al. (1992a).
Concentrations of mercury exceeding 0.15 ppm, for example, have been found in sediments of the Albemarle sound and its tributaries. The Division of Environmental Management (DEM), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and other state or federal agencies should coordinate monitoring efforts for these environmental media to provide the maximum geographic and most cost-effective monitoring coverage.
Resources should be concentrated to evaluate the potential impact to aquatic life, wildlife, and human health, and to identify additional contaminated sites.