Statistics of Boat-Traffic Impacts on Salt Marshes along the Florida Intracoastal Waterway

Abstract:

As Florida has nearly one million boats registered annually and an economy that relies heavily on water-related tourism and recreation, it is crucial to understand the impacts of boating on coastal ecosystems. Boat traffic and coastal development place stress on intertidal ecosystems, but the mechanisms and magnitude of the problem are not widely understood. Our team characterized boat traffic and its impacts on the environment through field observation data collected along the Intracoastal Waterway within the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve on the east coast of Florida. We deployed an array of cross-shore sensors coupled with two video systems. The video data was used to estimate the physical characteristics of the boats, such as length, size, speed, and acceleration. The boat description was then paired with the generated wake captured by the array of pressure sensors, 3D velocity sensors, and optical suspended sediment concentration sensors. We designed this experiment to develop quantitative statistical descriptors for characterizing the wake climate that leads to the removal of sediment from the salt marsh study site.