Seizing diminishing habitat conservation and restoration opportunities in the Tampa Bay, FL watershed: An urban estuary in recovery

Abstract

Habitat restoration efforts should integrate past trends, current status, expected climate change and coastal development impacts, remaining realistic opportunities, and resource management community capabilities. Integrating these concepts, a new target setting approach is being implemented in the Tampa Bay region with broad transferability potential. Past changes, as determined through a three-decade habitat change analysis and over forty years of habitat restoration experience in the region, has informed the new approach. It is also primarily focused on what is possible today and the projected needs for the future, rather than focusing on or attempting to replicate past ecological conditions. Likewise, this new paradigm accounts for persistent local and global stressors – especially watershed development, sea level rise, and climate change. As such, newly established numeric targets are “place-based,” meaning that they attempt to maximize the remaining restoration and conservation “opportunity areas” within the watershed. Lastly, the approach is comprehensive in that targets for the range of critical habitats, from subtidal to uplands, are now defined. This approach represents a general framework for addressing competing interests in planning for habitat restoration that could be applied in other coastal settings where sustainable urbanization practices are desired to co-exist with natural environments.