Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the third meeting of CISRUP 10 or CISRUP X3. I see a couple of people from yesterday's field trip. We had a really great field trip to the West never glaze and we'd like to especially thank the Mikasuki tribe and the park service. And big Cyprus national preserve staff for sponsoring us that on that trip and it was really informative and illuminating and enjoyable. Today, we've teed up three sessions. And the first one is on climate change and BBCR planning. The second session is on adaptive management. And the third session is on strategies to incorporate indigenous traditional ecologic knowledge in CERP. I would like to thank all the speakers and panelists who spent time preparing for that session and joining us today. One housekeeping item. If you're a member of the public and you're interested in addressing the committee in three minutes or less. There's a sign up sheet outside on the table. Please sign up by two o'clock today. We're going with the first session. Perhaps we could start with introductions and I'll have the committee members introduce themselves. Maybe we can start with our fearless leader Stephanie. Stephanie Johnson of the National Academy staff and study director for the project. Dr. Dixon, professor of statistics at Iowa State University. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Casey Brown, water resources engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts. Dave Wagner. Good morning to everybody. Wilpert engineering scientific consultant. Morning, I'm Marla Emery committee member and research geographer with the US Forest Service retire and currently scientific advisor to the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. Good morning, Matt Harwell. I'm a systems ecologist and a former Everglades scientist. Charles Burgess National Academy staff. Emily Bermudas National Academy staff. Helen Regan. I'm a conservation biologist and ecological modeler and I'm a professor at University of California Riverside. Margaret Guitar Professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University. Good morning, Tracy Quirk, and I'm a professor of wetland ecology at Louisiana State University. Good morning, Al Steinman. I'm a research professor in aquatic ecology at Grand Valley State University. Good morning, everyone. Bill Hopkins. I'm a professor of wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech. Jeff Walters Professor in biological sciences at Virginia Tech. And we have a few people online. Committee members. Yes, good morning. It's John Callaway wetland ecologist from the University of San Francisco. And this is Wendy Graham. I'm a hydrologist and director of the Water Institute at University of Florida. And I'm Charles Driscoll. I'm on the faculty of Syracuse University and I'm also committee member. And I think that's everyone. And I'm Jim stairs professor of hydrology at Yale University. So Stephanie, are there any other house key house key keeping item before we get underway. Okay, we'll get started with Nicole nemeyer of the South Florida water management district. And she's going to give us an overview of BBC objectives relative to current ecological conditions. Good morning, everyone. My name is Nicole nemeyer. I work with the South Florida water management district ecosystem restoration bureau. And I serve as project manager for the Biscayne Bay and Southeastern Everglades ecosystem restoration planning study, also known as BBCR. And I'm going to provide a brief high level overview of the BBCR planning study this morning. Okay, so this slide represents the historic existing. Wait a second, we're catching up with the audio video. Okay. Okay. So this slide represents the historic existing and future conditions of the greater Everglades ecosystem. And it shows the BBCR study area relative to the greater Everglades ecosystem. Historically, there was overland sheet flow across the landscape. And that moved through gradient of ecological habitats from freshwater wetlands to coastal mangrove areas to the near shore seagrass areas. And when the CNSF project was constructed that disrupted that natural overland flow and gradient of habitats and the ecological connectivity between those habitat types. So in the future, within the study area, the planning study is contending with sea level rise, which will inundate portions of the study area and result in saltwater intrusion. At the bottom of this slide, these schematics depict the historical current day and future hydrologic regimes. Historically, the flow was traditionally overland sheet flow through that gradient of habitats to the near shore coastal areas. Present day with the canal system. There are point source discharges to the coastal areas, oftentimes too much flow to the near shore area during the wet season, and then not enough flow to the near shore area during the dry season. And in the future with sea level rise will be contending with, again, saltwater intrusion, and it makes it a little bit more complex with moving that water across the landscape and into the coastal areas. Okay, so this is a closer look at the existing conditions and the gradient of habitats that I mentioned previously with the freshwater wetlands with sawgrass and mule grass vegetation types. And within our study area, the freshwater wetlands are located within the southern Glades region, the model lands and an area we refer to as the triangle it's between two roads, us one and card sound road. And it also includes intertidal coastal areas predominantly with mangrove red black and white types in the near shore coastal areas. And then we have a subtitle. A closer look at the study area, which is within this magenta area here. It encompasses a significant portion of Miami Dade County, it extends all the way north to the county border between Broward County and Miami Dade County west to Water Conservation Area 3B and Everglades National Park, and then south and east to the coastal areas that I mentioned previously. Within this white dashed line are the natural areas that we're targeting for restoration. And that includes again the southern Everglades, the Eastern Panhandle of Everglades National Park, the model lands, Manatee Bay barn sound, card sound and Biscayne Bay and Biscayne National Park. The SERP yellow book components included in the BBCR study include the North Lake Belt, which is located in this area. Those are lime mining operations, some are still active, some are not. And they form a series of lakes so we're looking at sourcing and storing water in that area. It also includes west and south Miami Dade County reuse, which we're looking at for water supply for ecological benefit. And also the Biscayne Bay canals and coastal wetlands. So we're looking at reducing those point source discharges and redistributing those into a more historical hydrologic regime through the coastal mangroves and into the shoreline rather than point source discharges. And then it also includes the C111N canal project yellow book component, which is evaluating redistributing flows into the southern Everglades and Eastern Panhandle of Everglades National Park. Components four through six were actually components in prior SERP studies that are already authorized the Biscayne Bay coastal wetlands and Biscayne Bay coastal canals. We're part of the BBCW Biscayne Bay coastal wetlands phase one project and C111N was part of the C111 spreader canal project. BBCR has four project objectives and some overarching themes, which include water sourcing from the northwest portion of the study area, conveying that water south, and redistributing those flows and rehydrating the natural canals that I mentioned previously that are targeted for restoration. The four project objectives include restoring salinity regimes and minimizing the unnatural canal releases, restoring freshwater wetland depth, ponding duration and flow timing, restoring the natural ecological and hydrological connectivity between that gradient of habitats. And then finally see level change resiliency increasing and restoring the ecological resilience in the coastal habitats in southeastern Miami Dade County. We have a planning process timeline for the study. The study kicked off in September of 2020 with the scoping phase. We're currently in the alternative formulation and analysis phase, which consists of three rounds of modeling. Before we get to one final tentatively selected plan. We're currently in the midst of that third round of modeling before we land on that one plan. We plan to have a chief's report at the end of 2025 and submit that to Congress for authorization with word of 2026. And that concludes my presentation there is a BBCR webpage that the Army Corps of Engineers has I think you received some read ahead materials those are also available on the website fact sheets slides from our project delivery team and you can also reach out to us at this email address BBCR comments at usace.army.mil or to any of the project managers or planning leads at the Water Management District or the Army Corps. Thank you. Thanks Nicole. So, next, we're going to go to Gina Ralph of the US Army Corps of Engineers, and going to present on consideration of climate change in BBCR planning process. Good morning. I'm Gina Ralph with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and I was asked to give a brief overview of how we utilize performance measures, including those for resiliency in order to evaluate alternative plans. Okay, so we develop project performance measures that have specific targets. These are quantitative in nature. And we utilize those as part of our hydrologic modeling. So our regional simulation model is the basis for the evaluation of these performance measures. With this, we calculate how much of a target each of our performance measure will have a target, and we evaluate how close the alternatives get to that target. And from that, we have developed a planning model, which I will give you a brief overview of next. So there's just one piece of the puzzle where we develop these habitat units. This is the currency in which the Corps of Engineers evaluates projects. In other projects such as our coastal storm risk management or deep draft navigation. We use national economic development as the standard, but in aquatic ecosystem restoration projects, we utilize habitat units. So here these habitat units across all our alternatives. And then we look at all of the different other accounts in which we assess, including environmental effects. We have to do within SERP what we call our savings clause analysis, where we analyze flood control and water supply needs. Of course, we utilize economics. So we have a CEICA, which is cost effectiveness incremental cost analysis. All of these components help us settle on the plan, which we call our tentatively selected plan. So ecological performance measures. I'll give you a brief overview of them. They're all linked to our project objectives. They are modeled and they are evaluated quantitatively. Each one of the performance measures has a documentation sheet in which you can understand the rationale, the basis for the target, as well as the literature and the calculation of the individual metric. They establish that relationship between our modeling output and our ecological goals. And those are developed from our conceptual ecological models that we use in Everglades planning. And that recover restoration coordination and verification has just completed several updates to those models. And these are going to provide that foundation for those habitat units. So Nicole gave you an overview of the objectives of the BBCR project. And this is just to show you the crosswalk of how the individual performance measures are tied to the specific project objectives. So as you can see, we have nine performance measures here. And later today, Fred and Carlos are going to give you an overview of our resiliency performance measure, performance measure number seven, the adaptive foundational resilience. So the performance measures just to, again, this was included as part of your read ahead. It gives you an overview of each of the performance measures and what they are quantitatively measuring to meet our objectives. So salinity in the near shore of Biscayne Bay. This is a really savvy performance measure created by multi interagency group of scientists utilizing information collected as part of the IBEAN program, which is in part funded by restoration coordination and verification. We also have a direct canal releases. It simply measures the reduction in canal flows as a result of the alternatives. We have a timing and distribution of flow sources to Biscayne Bay. And that's looking at how similar can we get to those historical flows to the bay. Hydro period and water depths. We like to evaluate these together. Those will look at the duration of flooding and then the actual depth within our communities. The wetland salinity performance measure. This looks at poor water salinity. And this is utilizing information collected through the long term ecological restoration. I'm sure I got that wrong. The LTER program. And then Fred and Carlos don't want to spoil theirs. And then we also have ecological connectivity and sheet flow. So how have we taken all of this information? It's a pretty large area and look at nine performance measures to come up with a single score for each alternative. So we have to have a process for doing that. So we have specific regulations within the Corps of Engineers in which we have to develop a planning model. It has to go through our ecosystem center of expertise in order for them to approve of how we're going to go ahead and aggregate all of these scores into habitat units. So we first divided the area in zones. So we have five zones within BBCR. The zones were based upon their drainage characteristics, historical flows, the unique characteristics of beach and then any natural and artificial barriers. And you can see on the map here are our BBCR zones. So A, B, C and D are terrestrial and E is the near shore, which is the entire near shore of our project footprint. Within those zones, we also have indicator regions. So you can see there are lots of indicator regions in which these are groups of cells within the modeling grid that have similar characteristics. Similar vegetation, similar elevations, and they represent the landscape common to today, as well as the pre drainage system. And they are intended to be homogenous. So what we use these indicator regions for similar to other projects that we've done for SERP planning is we use that to predict what may happen at the larger scale. Because it's hard to synthesize all of the information from every individual RSM cell that Walter will tell us we can do that. But this makes it a little bit easier. So we expect that change within those indicator regions are going to be show similar responses to those hydrologic changes. And the indicator regions that we have here. We were very specific in how we chose them. It was a very long integrated process with the ecological sub team, and again a multidisciplinary and multi agency approach. So we didn't think just indicator regions were enough. We also wanted transects because we want to measure flow and the sheet flow performance measure will measure the flow at those transects. So we have zones, ABC and eat all have transects zone D does not have any transects included. And so what we've done what we've done from here is this just shows you now the name of the zone, a through E, the number of indicator regions and transects within each of those zones. And then of those nine performance measures, which ones are calculated within those zones when we roll up our scores. We can't see the boxes, but it's just a graphical illustrative interpretation of how we're actually doing this. So the planning model is on your left, the first step is we have to normalize and tabulate the performance measures so we want to make sure they're all on the same scale. So from there, we are going to compute weights and weighted scores, and you've probably heard me before say the core doesn't like to wait things. And how we've done this here, each of the performance match some of the performance measures have sub metrics included within them. And so those sub metrics, we don't want a performance measure that may have two sub metrics being twice the weight. So that's what I mean by waiting, we've simply adjusted that. So all of the performance measures have that equal score of one with the exception of the performance measure for the near shore salinity. Although that one has three related sub metrics, they're equally weighted because of the importance of having sufficient ways of evaluating the vast near shore community and ensuring that that project objective has equal an equal voice. So from there, after we've computed the weights, we start doing these these combine combinations, and we call them station scores so a station score is simply whether it's an indicator region or whether it's a transect, it's just an umbrella term that we use. From there, we're going to sum and normalize the station scores again so that no one has more weight than another. So again, putting everything on a level playing field. And then we calculate those habitat units. And from there, we're going to compare habitat units across alternatives, and we do that by comparing it to the alternative minus the future without condition. So that delta will give us our ecological lift. So that is a very short, quick summary of a very complicated process. We have a, you know, it's probably an 85 to 90 page document that I'm happy to share with you that is currently with our eco PCX for approval. We start that coordination early on in the process so there aren't any surprises. This is my third time with going and informing the eco PCX of what we're doing. We start with approval of the performance measures, then we go to the approval of the modeling tools, then we actually have a spreadsheet that does all of these calculations that also undergoes a peer review with the army core. And then finally, in October, which is just a few days away. I am anticipating another meeting with them to address any final questions and then we'll have our, our final approval moving into our third round of alternatives. And with that, I'm going to, I think, turn it over to Carlos. Walter. Okay. Thank you. Gina we can. Are there any questions from the committee. Go on to Walter. Yeah, I have one question, Jim. Gina, is any of this peer reviewed outside of the core. Yes, so we have several steps in our review process so the step for the planning model goes to the eco PCX. Right our document we have a district quality control review, which is internal to the Jacksonville district and at the same time, South Florida water management district will go through their technical review process. We also have what's called an agency technical review, which are individuals within the core from outside the South Atlantic division. Jacksonville is part of the South Atlantic division that will do that review. And then we also have an independent external peer review that will also review all of the details of the project short. Go ahead, Helen. I have a couple of technical questions. So number one in the design or selection of the performance measures. I noticed that they aren't there aren't any that are directly biotic. They seem all a biotic with perhaps the exception of expanding habitat. Can you elaborate on the rationale for that, like why they're on any sort of more ecological biotic measures. Sure. So we are measuring our ability to adjust flow. It's all based on hydrology we're using output from a hydrologic model to understand how we are redistributing flow to meet the objectives of the project. This is for habitat units when we go and document the performance overall of all of the alternative plans as part of the National Environmental Policy Act documentation. We also use a whole suite of tools that we term ecological indicator tools. And Laura Diaconto will talk a little bit more about some of those tools that the joint ecosystem modeling group has developed that will tell us a little bit more of how is it going to affect waiting birds. How is it going to affect pink shrimp. How is it going to affect alligators or crocodiles so we will understand that biotic response, but that is not used to measure and evaluate in the habitat unit process. I remember from the first slide where you see the pieces of the puzzle, those gem tools will help us to understand the environmental effects, which is another piece of the puzzle. Okay, thanks. That was a clear explanation and then my other question is, why were only a subset of performance measures used in some region. So what's the rationale behind using different sets of performance measures across regions. So, some of our performance measures, let me get to the. So some of our performance measures performance measures, one, two, and three, those are directly related to just the near shore. So they are simply measured in the near shore environment, which is zone E for the entire in the entirety of the project footprint. Other performance measures you can see 456789 are measured in the zones ABC and D and those are our terrestrial performance metrics, and that's the difference. And I just have one more question I'm sorry. So, when you're looking across each of these different zones, a to e, how then is, how then our decisions made is there an aggregate across those zones or are they considered separately looking at costs and benefits across each one, or in each one. The beauty of the planning model is that we can look at indicator regions, we can look at zones, and we can then roll it up, because, you know, when you roll things up like this, you lose that the parts and pieces, but by having the ability to look at performance within zones, there may be specific management measures which are the engineering features that are providing a certain suite of benefits in one zone. And we want to retain those and move those into, you know, our next round of modeling tentatively selected plan. We have that ability to mix and match to understand what management measure what engineering feature may be responsible for providing the benefits within a certain zone. So that's why we've done it this way, so that we can have a good idea of what's happening throughout the spatial footprint acknowledging how large it is. Thank you. I have one more question from Ramesh Reddy who is online. I was just curious to know that why the water quality as a performance indicator is not included in their model. So, we do not have a water quality performance measure that we developed as part of the ecological sub team. There is a water quality evaluation methodology that the water quality sub team is working to develop to describe changes in water quality as a result of the project. And that will be included in our National Environmental Policy Act documentation, but we don't have anyone here from our water quality team to to speak to that today. Thank you. Thanks very much Gina. Next we'll hear from Walter Wilcox from the South Florida Water Management District.  Thank you so good morning everyone. Okay, great. Yes, so good morning everyone I'm going to go very quickly through a lot of slides it's going to be break back a lot of this material has been covered in the past committee sessions so if you have any questions please reach out and you also have a lot of resources there. So this is your quick introduction to the modeling work that's being done to support the evaluations that Gina just went through. And so we have a broad range of modeling tools that we're applying in the BBC project. You can see these are the four primary modeling tools that are being used as part of the plan formulation and overall project support. On the left is the RSM wave flex model the regional simulation model is a daily time step hydrologic model that runs a long term climate record. It was developed by the South Florida Water Management District it's been in application for 20 plus years in everybody's restoration peer review twice gone through the course engineering certification process for approval for use in South Florida. This is one of our benchmark primary hydrologic model that we use to analyze the effects. When we're running that model just to get ahead of some of the questions that the previous committee had asked. We're not running a succession tool we're not starting a today's system and moving out into the future and seeing how things evolve with sea level change over time. What we're doing is running snapshots in time. We look at the current system, and we run a long term climate record through it 1965 through 2016 climate. The current system might react to that rainfall, and then we move to the future we go out to 2085. We look at the sea level conditions the future conditions and we do the same thing we run all the climate record through that future scenario, and then we compare the two scenarios to each other to see that the changes so the model actually has the capability to run succession but we haven't quite gotten there yet as an overall team with the data sets and the performance measures and things like that. So the hydrologic model is the RSM on the left. We also have two salinity models that are applied by that have been developed by others I should say the bisect model was developed by the USGS. Ishtag Kandekar and Eric Swain and Tiffany Troxler are supporting the project by running that model through FIU and USGS for the project. We also have the Biscayne base simulation model, which was developed over the years Department of the Interior was integral in that Eric Stamina here had a large effort in developing that model. We brought that into the energy center and updated it and we're running it as part of the, the tool suite to evaluate the near short salinity. And then the model on the right is the Miami data RSM it's just another version of the RSM model that runs at a smaller temporal and spatial timescale so it runs at a 15 minute timescale. And it's really used for the flood evaluation portion of the project. We'll talk about that much today. So when we're doing the plan formulation. This is kind of the workflow, the project team, Jennifer John and others will define an alternative that comes to the energy to see modeling center. So when we run the RSM GL we put all the features into the model and simulate the hydrology. That hydrology is then fed as boundary conditions into the two salinity models of this game base simulation model and the bisect model so that we get the salinity response. And then we begin the evaluation so the RSM is directly pro post process for some of the hydrologic measures the hydro period the water depth ponding those types of things. And then the salinity models and those get post process for the near shore salinity and the wetland salinity performance metrics, and then as Gina mentioned we also provide information to Laura and Stephanie Roman act for the joint ecosystem modeling group and they do all the ecological modeling, and all of that then feeds into the habitat unit and the evaluation along with all the other information of the project is selected. And I really quickly run you through some of the updates that have been made BBC has been great in sponsoring tool updates as part of this effort identified by this panel, I think, two committees ago, there was a very limited set of tools that were available for this type of work, and the BBC project has spent the last several years updating the modeling tools. So there's a lot of texts on these I'm just going to kind of quickly run through them, you'll have the presentation, you can go back and review the text but essentially we've updated the RSM GL to expand and refine the spatial extent and the mesh in the southern southeastern portion of the system to respond to the needs of the project within the study area. So you can see we've actually expanded the mesh off the shoreline. We've also expanded the model salinity or things like that but that's a necessary thing to move our boundary conditions kind of further away from where we want to model. So we're still using the RSM for the terrestrial modeling. But we want to make sure that the flux exchange from the terrestrial to the near shore environment and the stages in the terrestrial environment are well represented. And so that was a technique that we used to try to get there. So in terms of the fidelity we've expanded the, the spatial extent. We've done things like calibration it's still a challenge in this part of the system we brought into a lot of new data sets. Some of the areas are relatively heterogeneous and this is a regional scale model, but you know the improvements that we've made in the model mesh and the other data sets have improved the data matching in this part of the system. So we've kind of corrected things where in the previous regional simulation model what I call the legacy original mesh. The focus was Everglades restoration central Everglades restoration I should say. And so the boundary conditions were just that they were boundary conditions and we weren't really focused on it so you can see on the left there like the very bottom. There's a bunch of blue arrows moving along the coastline, you know like just making a left as they reach the coast and you know kind of collecting in the eastern panhandle. On the right you can see that we've corrected those types of modeling numerical issues right so the water is now moving perpendicular to the coast or it's moving within the preferred flow paths, you know in the lower spots of the topography etc. So those are the types of changes that we made. We've also incorporated updates to the data sets and I'm just going to run through the animation here quickly to the blue. So all of those land cover and specific habitats, you know landscapes that Gina mentioned, they've actually been brought into the RSM model so all of the land cover data has been updated in the southeastern portion of the system to represent those mangrove systems and freshwater systems that Nicole described. We've also incorporated updates to topography to account for the creation processes that are happening over time. And we're also updating the title boundary conditions which I'm going to get into here in a second. We're working at sea level change. The title of this presentation is actually climate change, where we haven't quite gotten to the rainfall climate scenario piece yet I think you heard about that at your last session we're working with, you know, Dr. Obasekara and others to generate regional climate scenarios that's coming. It's not quite here for BBCR so BBCR is focused on sea level change pieces of climate change suite of stressors. This is a climate change protection at the back of the station in which is pertinent to our study area. And you can just see that there is a sea level rise anticipated in this part of the system, based on a lot of work by other members of the team we're following the green trace which is the sea level change curve for our primary formulation. We will do a check later in the project on the high curve, the right curve to see what affects that higher sea level accelerated rate of change does to our project. But for the formulation step we're in right now we're looking at the green trace and that's kind of mimicking what we've been seeing in the system over the last 10 or 15 years. So for the formulation we will run scenarios at the current condition at 2022, and then we'll run scenarios out at the end of the planning horizon which in this case is 2085, and we'll compare those different scenarios to see the effects of the project, and embedded in that is a change in sea level as you see here roughly 1.6 feet additional sea level across the across the domain. And so when we do this in RSM, again the title boundary conditions in the RSM used to be pretty simplistic I think there were 10 stations that were used across the domain. We've significantly expanded the spatial fidelity of the model. We've added in, oh, you can see a large suite of gauges from a variety of sources from the NOAA offshore title stations both primary and subordinate stations, as well as tailwater conditions that are structures as well as locations that everybody's National Park Month maintains. So we have a very good, you know, spatial representation of different title conditions along the boundary of the RSM. And when we are trying to model in this type of planning exercise I think you talked a little bit about some of the sea level change things that are being done for resiliency and things like that. In the long term planning, we have available to us these long term time series of what we call the NOAA harmonic data, and the NOAA harmonic data tries to get at the signals that you see from larger scale influences on title boundary conditions like the position of the moon, you know where things are driving things around, and they do a great job of capturing some of the variability, but we were concerned in our project that we weren't that we were going to miss some of the important variability in the data set that we observed by just using the NOAA harmonic time series. In an event type modeling like what you heard last session. It's pretty simple you just add an extra offset to it you say I got a storm event, I've got a search you know I'm going to, you know, put an offset on top of the, the, the harmonic signal. In a long term planning model you want to maintain some of the temporal and spatial coherence of the data, and we started casting around saying who's doing this, and we talked with NOAA we talked with the poor climate and no one's doing this. So we had to do it. And so what we were getting at here is this concept of residuals so you can see in this simple example there's an observed time series of title data. The NOAA harmonic, which is kind of the fundamental standard that we're using a lot of places is the orange time series, and there's differences and some of those differences probably don't mean that much to us but others like the peak, you know water level differences that you see here. We wanted to try to capture some of that in our planning so that we weren't blind to it as we were doing our study. So we went through this process that I won't describe. Dr. Alali and the IMC came up with a really innovative way of trying to further decompose the signal and the observed data being predicted by the harmonic itself. And if you want to get into that I'm happy to have a great side for conversation over lunch. Again at this back of key I'm just going to use some examples. So this is the signal decomposition of the residual itself. So this is above and beyond what NOAA gets. This is the first eight components of the residual that we're trying to add into the modeling of what's already there with the harmonic. We do screen out the what we call a high frequency noise signal so there's a ninth signal in there which is completely confounding. And we said we're not going to chase it like it's just there we don't have anything to predict it. It's not worth going for. So we are trying to capture these first eight signals that we saw in the data set. And when we do that what we see is this is just a simple box and whisker of kind of seasonal pattern of observed salinity of sea water level that we see at the back of station in real world data this is observed data. And when we use the harmonic we get what you would expect a very nice harmonic signal right and so we lose some things by doing that. When we put back in the additional residual modeling and the offset. We come to something like this so you'll notice it's a little bit higher than the observed. Because of the sea level change we've actually experienced four tenths of a foot of sea level change relative to the center point of the last title epic. But we went through this exercise because we want to see that variability, we want that to be in our time series, and we don't want to just rely on the harmonic which is a completely appropriate. You know, technique for other intended purposes but for this purpose we wanted to get a little more. So, so this is kind of what it looks like in, in time series mode the, the orange is actually the observed data and you can see there's an increasing trend, and there's changes in the variability over time. If we just use the detrended harmonic data we get the red, and what we're using and maybe series the blue which has its detrended. It does it's not trying to capture a sea level change we would have a version of this for the current condition. We would have a version of this with 1.6 feet higher for the 2085 condition, and we're trying to capture that additional variability so you can see in particular this blue trace. You have captures a lot of the period that we were trying to match here. And there are some, you know, there's still an increasing trend, you know if we were at a different point in time or if we were trying to do storm surge modeling or something like that we would be worried about some of those really high peaks, but you know we were pretty comfortable with this outcome for what we're trying to do here. This has gone through all of those updates will hear about its application in a couple minutes in the next presentation but that's just to orient you the types of things that were done in the model. And then we also updated the salinity models, the base game base simulation model was updated to version five, again building on the good work that was done by the Department of the interior. We wanted to make sure that we could pass the flux data from the r some gl into the bbsm and get reasonable results. In order to do that we have to do a limited recalibration exercise of the bbsm model to make sure that the data transfer between the two models was still capable of reproducing the historical data and then moving forward into application. So we went through that process and we now have a tool that we're applying the outcomes of this tool or what actually go into the near shore salinity performance measures that Gina described, and that's been a very helpful tool for us. I'll just mention some of the recalibration efforts, you know, just, we were doing the standard things checking for root mean square and bias and everywhere you see a green here. We actually were able to improve the simulation by combining the new boundary conditions and also bringing in some of the some changes in the conceptualization and accounting for some other parameterization in the diffusion coefficient and other factors. So, again, we're pretty comfortable with the behavior of the model, just to show you some plots, the observed data is calibrated to the, you know, to the model response, you know, for what we're doing. And then just in conclusion, the bisect model has also been updated. Again, it's working with the r some gl boundary conditions, the fi ut team is putting a lot of effort to that. We also validated that model to the latest observations of poor water data that they've been collecting as part of their study. So we have, again, observation data points within transects in the southern part of the system that Dr Tiffany truck slender others have been collecting and that was used to calibrate the density dependence salinity response of that part of the model. So this model is is now in place and integrated with our overall modeling suite, and that's used to evaluate the wetland salinity performance measure that you know described in the last presentation. So that's your breakneck introduction to the modeling tools that are helping to support the project. Happy to answer any questions. Go ahead Casey. Thanks Walter that was great. I'm just curious if you could talk about your feelings and using these models and each of the models in these in the future conditions, which are seal up future syllable rise in the sense that they're calibrated for historical conditions they have various assumptions and your thoughts on how well they'll hold when you sort of put them to work under these new conditions they haven't seen before. Yeah, that's very fun of mine for us. We're trying to make sure that we do have robustness into the future by looking at obviously the reactions that we get to the sea level rise in the future condition. We've also taken some steps to adjust the data sets themselves topography Fred is going to talk about this when we get into the application phase. But over time, the physics of the system are changing and to the extent possible we're modifying the model input data sets to reflect those realities right so we're modifying topography to represent the creation changes. We believe that vegetation landscape is still going to have roughly the same roughness like a mangrove, you know in the future but we did change. We don't have it open but the map that I showed you of the vegetation map. We have a methodology for moving that those vegetation classes inland in response to sea level. So we're relying on the calibration certainly for the physical parameters opera parameters vegetation resistance, but we're manipulating data sets to try to account for some of those differences that you're mentioning in the future system. So we're working on the, when we apply the model to make sure that the responses make sense and that we're not getting things like numerical oscillation or, you know, we don't violate the water budget the R7 can't violate the water budget but you know those kinds of things. But that answers. Thank you. So, how often do you update the model run and the models themselves and what trigger those updates. So the regional simulation model is our enterprise tool that we use for central Everglades. We're on about, I would like to say five years but it's probably closer to 10 years we do a long term data extension. When we first started doing everybody's restoration that the types of models that we're doing here. They use the climate record from 1965 through to actually was 1995 when we first started every legislation. And now we're up through 2016 so every time that we do one of those big data updates we revisit globally the calibration efforts and so we will bring in the latest data will recalibrate the models across the entire spatial domain. We also do efforts for specific projects, driven by the project needs to update the tools so like what you saw with the remeshing, and what I call limited recalibration. That was done as sponsored by BBC or it was specific to this portion of the system we did the same thing for Western Everglades, five years ago when the Western Everglades needed more fidelity out of the model than what we performed. So we remesh did a calibration effort as part of that project. So the answer your question is we have two ways of doing it we do it episodically when the project needs it and has a schedule and the funding to do it, or we do it programmatically on roughly a five to 10 year cycle where we do a system I'd look and update our tools. I'm going to sneak a question here before I get to Wendy. You devoted significant amount of effort to to sort of expanding the boundaries of your domain of RSM. RSM is a freshwater model. How are you accounting for slender effects in the flow model, is it variable density now, or are you doing equivalent freshwater head. We're not accounting for the density dependence of flow. It's strictly, like you said fresh water water movement, but we're going back and forth between the bisect model which is a density dependent model, which is an integrated surface water groundwater model, and we're going to leverage the back and forth information between BBSM and bisect with the RSM to come to a version of water flow where everything works and makes sense. Right so we're not relying on strictly the RSM I know that the application mode it's RSM runs and then the other things run, but when we were developing the models we were going back and forth to make sure that the two pieces of information came together. Why is it necessary to do that coupling why wouldn't you just accept bisect the bisect model. Because the bisect model is primarily a ground water model it has some surface water capability but it definitely lacks the, the ability to put in all of our future project features easily. I'll put it that way so the, you see the note on there that it will not simulate the project features. The real strength of the RSM is that it gives us not just the physics of the system but it gives us the ability to implement the infrastructure and the operational development. So when we're doing all these things with BBSR let's put a reservoir over there let's put a pump station over there let's move water in this way and that way. RSM is great at that. And the other models don't have quite as much capability so the coupled approach made sense to us to help get to all the pieces of what we're trying to change the project. Okay, thanks. Go ahead, Wendy. Yeah, I was wondering for your future condition your future sea level change condition. So you're still measuring against historic salinity performance measures you're not thinking about changing performance measures for future sea level rise. Not sure I understand the question Wendy sorry. Well you have you have salinity performance measures that are based on historic sea level. Correct. I think the salinity and probably genic cancer is better but the salinity performance measures are informed by the IBM observations in that sense the framing of those performance measures is predicated on historical data but we're applying them in a future condition where the dynamics within the Bay are different there's less fresh water there's changes in the salinity regime, and we are seeing a sensitivity in those pms which we'll talk about in the next presentation. Okay, then I'll wait. Okay, thanks very much Walter. Thank you. Okay, so Jennifer john of the court is going to kick us off on BBC or alternatives sea level rise and resilience. So this next presentation, as Gina mentioned it's very, this is an interdisciplinary process. And the problem when you have Fred Walter and Carlos all in a single presentation is that there's too much knowledge to go through hotel walk by. We're just going to switch. And so this part of the presentation. We're going to get into some of our rounds of alternatives that the BBC or plan formulation process developed. And then some of the results, particularly the results that Fred and Carlos have worked on for the resiliency performance measure. So this is our USACE risk informed planning process. We start with identifying problems and opportunities, which goes into working on our planning objectives that Nicole described earlier. We always do an inventory and forecast which is describing the existing conditions and a future condition if no project were to be implemented. So step three is plan formulation, which is the development of different alternatives that might solve those problems. We evaluate those alternatives and compare them. And then step six is decision making and selection of things to move forward. So if you want to note that this is an iterative process, we go through this cycle, many, many times, and BBCR is currently on its fifth iteration of this. Every time we have additional information that we get to utilize and incorporate into our process. Nicole presented this earlier, but I just wanted to reiterate our project objectives for the near shore salinity improvements. Improving wetland water depth ponding and flow timing, restoring natural ecological and hydrologic connectivity. And what we're really going to focus on with this presentation is that resiliency to sea level change a climate change. The graphic that we put up here really is kind of how we start a plan formulation process because any feature that we want to put into the ground needs to meet an objective in some way. So, we have water sourcing available in the Northwest, we need to move that water through the urban core of Miami Dade County, and also uphill over a coastal ridge, so that it can finally be redistributed into our coastal features, which are in the south and the east, and the near shore areas. So, these are our round two alternatives. These were developed and modeled in February. And these are the latest alternatives that we have modeling results for. And so this is also the first chance that BBCR had where the team was looking at sea level rise and comparing a future without project scenario with an intermediate sea level rise compared to sea level rise being included in our with project conditions at 2085 Alternative 21 had features in the Northwest that was looking to hold water in wetlands and some rock mines before conveying that water and distributing it south and east. And then in our south and east areas the redistribution features in the model lands and southern blades had a couple of different orientations or materials, different types of features for seepage management. And we changed these throughout our different alternatives to find which ones would provide the most types of benefits. In alternative 21 we did have a sensitivity run, we use these features that we added wastewater reuse. Alternative 22 used features in the Northwest, but we weren't trying to hold water there, we were just trying to capture that water and directed further south and east for additional sources for use. Alternative 22 had a sensitivity run in the coastal agricultural areas, where we used one way drainage wells to move water out of the coastal agricultural area. Alternative 23 had some different features in the Northwest to try to hold water for some seasonal carryover. We wanted to use these different features to compare, which would do better versus alternative 21. These sensitivity runs in alternative 23. They were both awkward for storage and recovery. One was in the Northwest and one was in the coastal agricultural area. And then alternative 24 does look a little bit different. We didn't have any sources of water in the Northwest, and we were only looking at redistributing regional water within the natural areas. The big purpose of having this particular alternative was to compare the benefits of utilizing water sources in the Northwest, which we have in our other three alternatives. And we know that those Northwest features are a little bit more complex, they are most expensive. At least the core team is anticipating some questions from our vertical review team about being able to justify using those more expensive features. So we decided to include alternative 24 so that we would have all the modeling data and the robust of the evaluation compared to the other round two alternatives. And that would help the team be able to show and make those comparisons. All of this modeling data, thank you Walter was presented to the team and provided in about April timeframe, and the team spent a lot of time with this data. And the full evaluation, and we had a complete comparison presentation in late July to our public and our PDT meeting. And so I just wanted to point out to Gina's point that she made earlier from a question I believe it was from Helen. But when we did round two we knew we had a third round of alternatives coming afterwards. And so our focus was less on an alternative by alternative comparison. So we didn't want to say, Oh, alternative X from round two did the best. We were trying to focus on performance of the different alternatives within our zones. And that was mostly because one alternative might perform the best in the Southern Glades, but then it might perform perform the worst for the near shore. If we did an alternative by alternative comparison we would lose some of that information. And so we were looking at zone by zone so that we could put together the best pieces for the next round of alternatives which is round three. So we have the nine ecological performance measures, and we also analyze water supply flood protection and water quality. And I believe now I'm going to turn it over to Walter to talk about some of the hydraulic outcomes. Yeah, just want to start by acknowledging the energy modeling center team that works to develop all of the modeling work. The energy model centers comprised if you're not aware of, of staff from both water management district and the army for who are the federal and state sponsors but in this case we also had a very significant infusion of help from Department of the Interior Park Services has been actively involved on this project and helping with the development as tools so I just want to appreciate the you know the energy to help on this. So, I'm going to go through just to give you a feel for the, I think the topic was, what are we, what are we learning about sea level change, you know, as we do these, these alternatives. So we're learning that it's a big deal. So, so to show you some of the modeling. You know, when we typically do these projects prior to BBC or we would be doing something like this we'd be looking at a future without compared to an existing condition. When you look at this is the extent of that RSM GL model that we talked about and you can see the mesh from all the way from the everything's our cultural area down to Florida Bay. In this particular graphic when we're looking at blues we're looking at increased water levels in the condition that we're comparing on the left to the condition on the right. We're looking at whites or yellows or reds it's drier conditions essentially. So on the left would be a typical thing that you would look at for like a central everglades project clip we're putting water into the northern part of the system. It's probably getting through the system we're removing levees, right things are getting wetter through the other blades. And that's how we would normally look at things and we wouldn't really see much going on at the coast. So contrast that to BBC or where we start putting in sea level change. And now we're looking at in this case, you can see we're looking at two conditions here the future without intermediate is the future without condition that has that 1.6 foot of sea level change offset, compared to the existing condition, which is, you know, today's sea level. Sorry. And then on the right is how it would have looked if we just ended the sea level change and we didn't have all the projects so you can see on the left. That's the cumulative effect of everything that we think is happening in the system right we're doing everybody's restoration and sea level is coming up and stages are getting wetter right I do want to emphasize this is a stage map. And that is ponded water, right in fact the vast majority of the water that you see along the developed side and the urban side is still groundwater in 2085 on the intermediate curve. It may not stay that way in the high curve. But, but it's I don't want this to be interpreted as ponding or surface water flooding. Okay, it just means that the ground water levels are coming. And so, just to give you this was a set of material that was put together by Drew Coleman is the engineering team lead on the BBC your project. And I'm just going to hit a couple of the key highlight points so we're doing a lot of the things that Jennifer described, you know, we're moving water through the system. And so we came up with this kind of color code just to orient people and for the benefit of the product delivery team we've we went slide by slide through each the colors, given the time constraints today you don't get that benefit you just get the big dump of all the summary. But basically, we're looking at things all throughout the system we're making sure that water that should stay in everybody's national park and continue through the natural system on the western side, that it stays there, and that we're not kind of mining everybody's national park to create benefit on the eastern side. And then as Jennifer described we're looking at trying to capture water in the northern part of the system, reduce some of the impacts of high flow to the northern part of the Biscay Bay. And then move that water through the system and across the coastal ridge, and get it down to the southern part of the system and improve our ecosystem at the green transect which is, you know, called a mega transect here. So I'm going to focus in on kind of that area near the green transect. So this is an example of what BBC is doing so in this case we've got a serious we've got two canals actually that move through this area. There's one on the northern end here and there's one of the southern end. Today's drainage is provided by those canals, the structures open water levels, you know, get high triggers the operation discharges as a as a pulse point discharge of the Biscay Bay. What BBC is trying to do is to prevent those coastal discharges of the structure and put it on the landscape and move it into to wetland system and let it, you know, more naturally move in a distributed way, you know, toward the shoreline. So you can see that's what we're doing the these great graphics that Jennifer puts together with all the polygons on the maps we, we are putting wetlands everywhere, we're putting pump stations everywhere. I mean, this is a lot of infrastructure it doesn't seem like it, but when we start adding up, you know, what's on this, what's this, you know, seven pump stations at 300 CFSE each. You know, you start ringing the cash register there's a lot of stuff going on here. So the basic premise is that you can see this in this flow diagram, rather than discharging by gravity through these coastal structures. And again with sea level change gravity is not by any means guaranteed. We're now going to start putting pump stations in and moving the water by a pump stations into our coastal wetlands, letting the water move across the landscape infiltrate into the groundwater move through the landscape toward the shoreline. And then we'll get a mix of surface water and groundwater moving toward the near shore environment will create coastal wetland benefits by doing that, and we'll hopefully sustain the shoreline by doing that. And so you can just kind of get a feel for that from this graphic. And so indeed we see that if we look at this green line transit going back to this map. We see that the round two alternatives, you can see they're in green. So we're seeing the numbers of past what I'll call passive flow not structure flow. We're sending, you know, huge amounts more water through the passive system in BBC here. It's really a very good success story for our formulation to date. Instead of sending that water through point discharges in the coastal structures it's now being spread across the landscape. And at those measures of landscape flow, you know, we're seeing 400 500 600% increase in water moving, you know, through the system in a natural way. That's huge. We also see that the that helps us to combat the effects of sea level change because one of the things we were noticing in. I'm not sure how explicit it is here but when the sea level comes up, the natural gradient from today's groundwater to the sea level is reduced. And so in the future we actually wind up with an increase reliance on our coastal structures right so in today's system some portion of the water is moving through the ground water towards the shoreline. Some portion is going through the canal system and through the coastal structures. When the sea level comes up and the groundwater doesn't have that that gradient anymore to get to the shoreline. All of a sudden it all starts going through the coastal structures and I'll show you that in a second we start seeing a lot of flow through the coastal structures. And this not only reverse not only accounts for that and get suspect where we were but it increases above and beyond that by hundreds of percent so we're able to kind of get ahead of sea level change so we're not just combating the effect of sea level change, we're actually creating an environmental enhancement above and beyond what we're seeing in today's system. I just wanted to show you some of the alternative performance so again this is a seasonal plot of flows across that transect, and I think. I have my mouse but what you can see there the the blue traces is the current system the lower blue trace, and you can see there's a seasonal pattern of flow moving across that green transect toward the near shore environment. When we go to the future without intermediate with the sea level change that actually goes down, it goes to the gray level right you know so we're reducing that gradient, we're getting less water moving in the way that we want it. But then when we put the alternatives and you can see all the alternatives of the higher traces, we go past the existing condition we go back up to a much higher condition and that's that you know 500% increase that we were talking about right we're getting a lot more flow, moving through alternatives, both to combat the sea level trend, and also to create the restoration benefits that we're looking to achieve and I'll just mention since Jennifer mentioned all 24 that didn't have the storage features all 24 does indeed show up as the lowest trace there with the lowest seasonal carryover and the lowest total volume. So we are getting some benefit from those northern Northwest storage features in our project. So this is the story of the coastal structures and so this is just an example of one of those structures the s 20 f structure. What you see here is again a seasonal pattern flow. The future without intermediate is the blue trace and what you can see there is there's a lot of flow moving through that structure in response to the current flood system and the effects of sea level change. And then all the alternatives, I don't know if you can even see it's it's much smaller bars there you know those color bars. All the alternatives significantly reduce the amount of discharge that we're making our coastal structures because we're sending it through those pump stations instead into the coastal wetlands and so again the features, you know our take home from this is that we're able to address the shortfalls in the current system if we were just to continue when not doing anything into the future those coastal structures would continue to have their tailwater rising. They would get less and less effective right they'd have to do more because the groundwater isn't going where it's going. And we have a big infrastructure problem right this is the solution to that infrastructure problem put it into the landscape. You know build the pumps and we get the environmental benefit as well as maintaining the flood protection and the current system functionality. I mentioned that it gets very tricky and can house this is a canal duration curve for one of those structures, and I'm just showing you this to kind of give you the idea of the things that we're dealing with it in the future condition. You can see this kind of three stair step duration curve. There's actually an operating protocol that operates the system at different times of the year based on the needs for agricultural planting. This is the ag drawdown operation and so you, you lower the water levels at a certain time of year to allow for planting and then they come back up a little bit as the crop is still in the ground and then they come higher in the wet season. And you see that in this duration curve and kind of this three stair step thing. When we do BBC or we don't have that clean stair step right because there's all kinds of other things happening we're moving pumps we're got water coming in from sea level change. And one of the lessons that we've learned definitely is that the operating strategy for these pumps and the coastal structures is very specific to the sea level condition that we're seeing right so when we look at 2085 it's a different operational mindset, not just a different set of infrastructure, than it is in today's system, and I don't want to. I just want to make sure that we acknowledge that there's effort required to evolve those operations over time both in the real world and the planning to try to make sure that we capture those dynamics. Going down into the southern glades I'll just mention quickly here hydrologically. This is a transects public viewing window so if you look at this zone a transit here it's actually north to south kind of a, you know, in parallel with the direction of the flow. If you were standing over here and looking sideways. This is what you would see the ground surface slopes down with this purple trace and the C 111 canal which is somewhere around here shows up on the map. I just wanted to point this out because in this case this is the future without intermediate and the blue represents the model simulated water levels with that increase of 1.6 feet in sea level. So what you can see is on the left side here without the project. We're very dry, right we haven't achieved restoration, but on the right side we're pretty wet. And that's not because of our restoration efforts that's because of sea level change right. And so this area. In fact it's too wet. And again, it's not because we're putting water there it's because of sea level change and so when we go to our project, just to jump back and forth a couple times here on my pseudo animation. You can see that when we put water in at the upstream part of the system we do get increases in water depth and stages, but notice the right side of that graph. It doesn't change so that what we're learning is there's parts of our system where sea level is dominant, and we can increase flux toward the sea level, but we can't really do much about the water depths that we're going to achieve. And so we see that as well in other parts of the system this is the triangle area of the zone B area. Same kind of trend. As I just mentioned here we also have learned that we have a lot of capability to decide how and where we want water to move across the system. In the future without if we do nothing again and no action, sea level starts coming in and just starts taking over different parts of the system. When we do our alternatives as an example of two of the alternatives, we can reverse some of those flow there arrows, you know we can get the water flowing toward the shoreline again, right and that's a positive thing for our project. And again, depending on the infrastructure that we're putting in you'll notice these two alternatives to totally different infrastructure setups. We really have a lot of choice in our project about where we're trying to combat sea level and where we may be effective at combating sea level, and we're kind of incorporating all that information into our ongoing formulation steps as Jennifer. And just to wrap up on the near shore salinity because I don't think we've shown you anything so the all those fluxes and all the green line flow that we were just talking about that green transit flow. It shows up in the near shore environment. And what you see here, these are just some of the locations where we look at salinity and what you'll see is there's a trace here that goes. Clearly this could be read but there's a trace here that goes very high that's the future without intermediate that is experiencing the sea level effects of both higher sea level and reduce groundwater flux and so we wind up with very high saline conditions we're not in the desired as a hailing regime. And you can see that with the BBC alternatives are we were able to push those salinity regimes back down during the majority during the entire duration, not necessarily to move into the ideal range in all cases, but we're able to push that flux you know that salinity back down by increasing the flux and spreading across the landscape in the way that I showed you. And that's pretty that's true across most of the system so this is an example of some of that this game based simulation model output where you can kind of see the spatial change in the scoring category here. And just to give you an idea this is one of the metrics the integrated biological indicator, and it just shows you that on a kind of a unit scale of zero to one. The future without has a lot more variability and a lot lower scores compared to really any of the alternatives so we're definitely moving in the right direction. And with that transition slide, I'll pass it over to you for us. It's always amazing to listen to Walter. I mean, I've been part of BBC now for a couple of years, and I'm still learning from from him. So, there is two performance measures that have a lot to do with the sea level rise. You heard his last slide showed how the dis game based salinity performance is affecting the biology of this game day. What we have here is an adaptive foundation resilience performance measure, which is looking at the fact that the, the diagram on the left is the stage. You've now seen a number of times we're putting sea level rise, the light blue is point seven feet of sea level rise. And it just in a day scene almost the entire natural system as a BBC here. And the images in the in the middle is indicating the scrub mangrove type of habitat that exists in those indicator regions that are scrub mangroves. There are a lot of open space and there is no way that that scrub mangrove is going to be able to keep up with sea level rise. So, is it possible to create a mangrove transition is it is it possible to look at the factors that would enhance the ability for accretion. So Carlos and I and a number of other people published a paper in 2021 now, which looked at the data that we've been collecting in the sediment erosion tables for the last 20 years. In areas where there's high energy and connectivity versus low energy high inundation and the graph on on the left is showing that in Taylor slew in Everglades National Park we get in the scrub mangroves about four millimeters, four and a half millimeters of growth of sediment of real elevation change. And, and where you don't have flow, you end up only with the bottom figure showing two millimeters. And so the table on the right says that you can transition. As, as water levels increase due to sea level rise. If you happen to be a agricultural plot on the land use. It only takes one foot of sea level rise to turn you into an extra and water body. The more significant. Let's see how do I get the mouse.  You just, you just log me out. I don't know. All right, I will. I'll stand over here. Okay. So what I wanted to point out was, you know, we could take a fresh water cypress marsh and and see that with one, one foot of a sea level rise could transition to a mangrove swamp. But if we got an extra two and a half feet, it would transition to an estuarine water type of environment. And if, if you do no accretion whatsoever and these are on the left, there's, I mean on the bottom is two different three different sea level rise components point to seven meters point to seven, six meters and a whopping 1.13 meters and 50 years. But if you have no accretion at all, then you're going to have for the footprint of the South Florida water management just district 11,000 square miles of wetland that transitions to open water. So you're losing open water. But if you add four millimeters per year for 50 years, then it's significant. There's a significant decline of the transition to open water and a significant increase to 4,000 square kilometers of transitioning to wetlands and mangroves. At an intermediate sea level rise. There's what's really interesting, the maximum accretion rate of mangroves is about eight millimeters per year, and that's the diagram on the right, indicating that with that kind of accretion, which has been documented in Tampa Bay, for example, that even with 1.13 meters of sea level rise over a 50 year period. There's hardly any of it. It goes to open water. So can we use the BBC or operational changes and and elements of structural changes and in the face of sea level with adaptive foundational resilience, which means going out there and and and allowing the fresh marsh to disappear and become mangroves. So if you don't do that, you're you have this these zones of upland fresh marsh or transition zone a scrub mangrove here in yellow, you don't do any of that. The most of the system will become open water and you saw that in the last few slides, but if you facilitate the transition to scrub mangrove to a tall mangrove type of system, the yellow expands, and you're maintaining, you're not maintaining you're actually increasing the functional capability of this wetland to produce the biodiversity and productivity of the coastal zone. So the adaptive foundation resilience performance measure is made up of three components. It's made up of flow, a depth duration curve and a poor water salinity curve. When a salinity comes from the bisect model, the depth duration of flow comes from RSM GL. And if here's an example of for the mangrove, looking at the pita creation as a function of salinity pita creation as a function of of sheet flow or flow, and then a depth duration curve here, showing that when if it's too deep for too many days, you're not going to get any accretion. If it's too dry for too many days, it's going to oxidize. So it's very, it's a very simple type of performance measure, but it's unique in that it's the first time anywhere in the nation, we've tried to do restoration in the face of sea level rise for a wetland. You've seen where these zones are. Jennifer, I showed you those zones. I want to point out the significance of looking at just the salinity in these zones. And if you look for example at zone a, what you find is that the salinity with all the different alternatives in 21, 22, 23, 24, that they're all compared to the future without in that area, it stays fresh. But what happens with all the alternatives, the future without which is showing these red arrows, the red arrows are showing you for those indicator regions. The salinity of the future without all the alternatives reduce the salinity with BBCR. Now, the advantage of looking at the accretion which is as water depth or depth duration flow and and salinity is the ability to break it down to understand for each one of these indicator regions within zone a, which the regions are doing best in relationship to the three elements. So, all all four indicator regions for water depth in zone a are doing terribly for accretion. And the worst is indicator region 508 which is in this southern region, which I think Walter showed you didn't change sea level rise and no matter what we did it was too deep. If it's too deep, you're not going to get any accretion due to water depth, but we are flowing. And we do have the appropriate salinity. So, when you combine these three, there will be the potential by 2085 to have some accretion. We'll be able to use it as a index of a performance measure habitat unit calculation that just how well will this do these different indicators perform. Another example of a zone with three indicator regions, showing that for zone B and looking at the salinity because of sea level rise for the salinity is right on the money, but you're not seeing a good depth of accretion ship, but we're seeing great flow in in two regions 522 520 521. We need to do something in the next phase of modeling to increase the flow to increase the accretion, but I do want to point out there's a gray bar here. It allows us to look at alternatives and figure out well out of all the alternatives. The alternative is gray is alternative 22. So what is it about alternative 22 that does give you the flow that does allow for higher accretion. And that's what that's how we move into the phase three of the monolate. Now, like Gina said, we, we have to make everything. We even keel that's not her words, but we have to standardize zero to one. So, taking the, the, the foundational resilience. This is how we broke it into bins for each one for salinity bins. What you see is where the main grows between 10 and 30 you get a score of one, but you do it also for flow and you do it for depth duration. Now that standardized now what happens now that you've standardized everything to a habitat suitability index rather than accumulation. So look at zone a as a whole what you can see right off the bat blue histograms are future without. So if we run a line across future without what we see is that for the most part in zone a the big component of adaptive foundational resilience are these orange bars, which is the salinity. So, and we can also now compare what's happening in zone a, in terms of its absolute score, and you can see that the best alternative now is 21. The second best alternative is 22. The most important attribute is salinity, and the second is flow and that ends up being very different for the triangle area and zone B. Its score is pretty much the same as zone a gets its high point 75 its best alternative is 22, but the most important attribute here happens to be salinity. So we now have the the ability to use AFR to break down the different ways to distribute water in that coastal system. Now this kind of summarizes everything that we found out in round two. I'm going to skip it because we are running out of time because I want to get to this next part. And that is using the AFR to create a topographic offset and initialize the RSM for running it to 2085. The most significant thing if we look at Ross and Nader's work, what they found is that there has been over the last 50 years a movement of it already has been a transition of mangroves into the fresh marsh, and that in areas where we're not distributing fresh water, it's significantly less of a transition. East of highway one, which here's highway one. The transition has been 3.3 kilometers. And west of highway one, the transition has been 2.19 kilometers. So we're going to use this type of trend in relationship to the type of habitats that exist. And this is the habitat for the whole system. So even though we run BBC or just for this corner here hydrologically you, you, you need to, if you're going to do a topographic offset you need to do it for the the entire region where these can flow in with the proper physics. And so, based on this relationship on this vegetation type, and then looking at four different types of accretion offsets, starting with the highest biomass we could find in the system. And that is over on the west side of Everglades National Park where you have very large mangroves that the these the same patterns of of accretion rates are used there. The difference here is that the maximum amount of accretion due to flow is is 10 millimeters. And due to salinity and due to water depth it's a you take the average of that and you multiply it by 50 years, and you end up with 433 millimeters of potential elevation change or 1.42 feet in that region. You do the same thing for the scrub mangrove type of environment where we do have flow like in Taylor slew. And you have a potential of six millimeters and four millimeters due to different drivers within average of 5.3 millimeters per year with a potential increase over a 50 year period of 0.87 feet. You do the same thing for the fresh marsh. So, in the BBC footprint we also have the image here on the right is showing dense model lands fresh marsh, and that has the potential to create 200 millimeters over 50 years. And then a very sparse type of system the best it could do would be only two millimeters per year for a point three three feet. And so what you take these four levels and you spread it out over the map. And then the BBC or footprint boy flows better on my computer. We mostly point eight seven feet of offset for the mangroves point six six feet for the fresh marsh, and then further up like in sparrow habitat. The best it's going to do is point three three feet. And that is how the RSM is initialized at time zero, once we put sea liberal rise in the system. And we can talk about why that's bad and why that's good when we have the Q&A section. All right, Jennifer. Fred and Walter mentioned, we learned an awful lot about what the system was doing from our round two evaluations. And from that, we were able to make some comparisons and evaluations and then ultimately some decisions to move us into our round three alternatives, which is what I'm going to talk about next. We learned that the round two alternatives did make a lot of improvements to the natural areas and to our near shore, but there still are some additional benefits that can be realized from the project. And a lot of places maybe on a scale of zero to one we could get to point four point five up to point six, but we really would like to get all of our benefits up to that that full one which represents 100% towards our target of restoration. But our project does need more fresh water, and that additional volumes would be better able to combat rising sea levels. We know that evaluating and comparing the performance of alternatives broken out into the different zones instead of bi alternatives. The team was able to see what types of features were giving the best results of moving water, where it is needed, and then in step six, which is our decision making in our selection, we were able to see features that were not working. And so we screened them out from further consideration. In steps one and two we kind of restarted our iterative plan formulation process again. And we looked at where the round two alternatives fall short for project benefits and our objectives. And we did what sorts of changes we could make in our infrastructure for our different project alternatives that would give better results as we move forward. And so now we are back again in step three this is our plan formulation step. We have round three alternatives that were actually just turned into start being modeled we don't have results yet. But we're anticipating them soon so that we can keep going in our planning process. So in round two we had four alternatives and then we evaluated for sensitivity runs. We had screening decisions of measures that were not working. And so we are not carrying them forward. We did have measures that we wanted to keep in our alternatives but some of a lot of those needed refinement. So we had recombination of measures from our different round two alternatives to put the best options together into one. And then we also wanted to make sure that we had our operational optimization. So from round two we're moving into round three where we have two alternatives. But we are also looking at two sensitivity runs on top of those where we're utilizing wastewater reuse as an additional source of water. And we also do have our yellow book component that will be evaluated on the yellow book component are those six components that Nicole described at the beginning of our presentation. And those have already been modeled in an earlier round. So we don't need to model them again, but they will be included in our final array when we compare. So in this round our round three is our final round of modeling from these modeling efforts and these alternatives we will be selecting our recommended plan for implementation. And we wanted to be sure that all of the round three alternatives and the sensitivity runs associated with them had components that our whole project and public team want to have when we do select a recommended plan. We also want to have water sourcing from the Northwest. We, when we compared our alternative 24 that didn't have any of those sources of water, the wet season benefits were okay. But the dry season benefits were very limited. And the dry season benefits are very important for what we would consider our project success. We wanted to look at the maximum amount of rehydration in the natural areas, which would then go to help the near shore. In some previous rounds of modeling's we looked at some varying intensities and amounts of rehydration in our natural areas, but we do want to have the best amount and the most amount that we can to put forward for the largest acreage of benefits as possible. We want to know that we want to be a little bit more nimble and adaptable with some infrastructure so that we can be resilient to sea level rise. And we want to make sure that we're balance balancing our objectives for rehydration, while also protecting some critical habitat. For example, for the Cape Sable seaside sparrow that has a subpopulation within our footprint. So this water reuse is being added to both of our round three alternatives, it is being added as a sensitivity run, and will be continued to be evaluated. This is a more higher cost and a higher risk feature, which is why we're adding it in as a sensitivity run and not a full part of our alternative. We want to try to walk through our different geographic areas and kind of just describe verbally how we're doing some differences between these two alternatives and how they are included to to address sea level change and some climate change while also going towards our project objectives. So this is the Northwest in alternative 31, which is one of our round three alternatives. We recombined and revised some features to try to hold some more water in the Northwest, so that we could get dry season carry over. And then compared to our other alternative all 32, we are looking at being able to tap into those Northwest water sources, but without the holding of that water. These are still aiming to get more water out of the Northwest and bring them south across the coastal Ridge and East to be redistributed into the coastal wetlands. And this additional water will work to combat the rising salinities in the natural areas due to sea level rise. Next is wastewater reuse we are adding this as a sensitivity run again to both of our alternatives. This is a direct source of year round freshwater that would be made available to the project. And it does have the same purposes as additional water from the Northwest. We know we need more water to be able to put the salinity into a more estuarine system instead of a more marine system in our Biscayne Bay near shore areas. Next just touching on our conveyance and our operations. In previous rounds we had looked at again kind of different levels of conveyance routes through the regional and the regional canal system. A couple of additional canal conveyance pathways. Not all of the alternatives had looked at every pathway, but again we are working in a little bit of an uncertain situation. And we also don't quite have the information for varied precipitation yet so the team really wanted to make sure that we were utilizing every single possible pathway that we could to maintain the maximum amount of flexibility within the project. So our redistribution and rehydration features. We really wanted to maximize in this last round of alternatives, we weren't looking to have only certain features that were working in one alternative versus another. We also didn't have water as Walter described on to the landscape and maximizing the green line transect and passive flow is really what can help put water into those lower salinity areas in the near shore. And so we put them the most amount of redistribution and rehydration features into both of our alternatives. In the next round we are looking a little bit more at some adaptable features in the southern Glades were proposing to do some backfill of a canal that discharges at the very, very southern end. We're looking at doing more of an incremental backfill as sea level rises to prevent some of that saltwater intrusion. So a recommended plan eventually we do understand that we have some culverts and some conveyance features from western wetlands into eastern wetlands and gravity might not particularly be our friend in 4050 years. So we're looking at some small pump stations to be able to keep that gradient moving from west to east. And then finally and Carlos is going to come and talk a little bit more about this but we are looking at putting thin layer placement on to the landscape. And this put small amount of materials into some subsided areas to keep the vegetation from drowning. And so Carlos is going to come up and talk about the Emma project which is Everglades mangrove migration assessment. Did not log off just don't touch. Okay. Okay. Okay, thank you very much. Good morning everybody. My name is Carlos Coronado and I've been working at the district for many years. And there are reasons behind this idea of thin layer placement is based on what Fred was explaining earlier today. Using as it is in the field as it is as you know, helps to for us to understand how fast there is a change in elevation in the system. And the thing that we have learned by doing that kind of studies in the field is that elevation capital is very important. So we have in the in the area of BBC we have more than 20 different independent sites where we've been measuring elevation change for more for more than 20 years. And one of those studies, what we have seen is that areas where mangroves are below the mid means for the levels, those sites do not agree very well. In contrast sites where we know where they are a little bit elevated relative to the mean water levels, those sites, I think much better and increase the elevation in a very good way over the last 24 years that we've been measuring elevation change. So using that information, we decided to test this concept of thin layer placement, the layer placement placement is a technique that has been used in many different mangroves, marshes in the United States, except in mangroves. If we go to this Emma project, it will be one of the first projects applying to label placement in mangrove ecosystems in the United States. So the basic question of the label placement is the label placement is a viable method to maintain ecosystem of mangrove ecosystems. That's the basic question of Emma. So we want to try to understand whether or not we can use this technique in mangrove ecosystems. In order to do that, last year, with the help of Gina Ralph, we went through series of different workshops at meetings with different people with different expertise, including engineers who explained it to us how thin layer, the, the, the rich material in this case can be used as a, as a sediment, new sediment into the system. So those, all those workshops that we have, we learn how difficult is to move the rich material from in the ocean on in the base and move that material and place that sediment into the coastal marshes. So that's something that we learn from these series of workshops and these workshops produce a very good report that I think is available for everybody. And in that report, we explained very well everything that we discussed and all the other results that we obtained by doing all these workshops that report really includes everything in a much, much detail way. than this presentation. So one of the aspects that we learned the map on the right showing Florida. Every single yellow dot there shows the different places where we were considering bringing the rich material and move the material into any study site in the BBC footprint. And they have all the pictures on the, on the left shows a different methodology not using the rich material for using material that is next to the sites where we want to apply this, the thin layer placement. So we were, we were looking at different ways to place that sediment from either the rich material or from our material next to the, to the, to the study sites. Based on those workshops, we went into the field looking for different places where we can carry out this project. And we decided that there are there were two really good sites where we can really apply the neighbor placement and the picture on the right shows the Charlie site. That is at the very end of the C111 the L the C111 canal and it shows this the particular site where we were considering applying the thin layer placement, the picture all the way to the left is the C111 canal that we call the pocket site. That's the other second site where we were considering what we are considering applying the thin layer placement. The main difference between those two sites is Charlie site is divided into public lands and private lands, and we still don't have the whole ownership of the site so that we can apply the thin layer placement. In contrast, the pocket site is owned by the district, and we know we can we can give us permission to do anything we want in that in the pocket site. So we have less problems instead of applying the label placement in the pocket site. So those are the two different sites where we are considering doing the thin layer placement. And the material for those two particular site is coming from the material next to the, to the two sites. So it will be very easy just to remove that material, pulverize the material and apply the material next to the next to the site, making the project less expensive also. So this is a closer look at Charlie site and Charlie site something that we realized that for Charlie site, there is a really big difference in the macro topography. And based on that we, as all the workshop that we had, we decided that based on the macro topography that we observe in Charlie site, we will apply the thin layer placement at three different, three different layers. One point five point 25 feet. The other one point 25 feet of sediment and the deeper side, we will put one point five feet of sediment, which is a lot of sediment, but based on the, on the material that is next to Charlie site. We considered that the material is enough to apply into into these three different sediment groups. In contrast, in the pocket side, which is lowering elevation, the material will come also from the material next to the pocket side, and we will apply only one food of sediment. And in this particular site, we have a control site where we will not apply any sediment, and we will see the difference between the sediment and the control site in the response of the other of the mangrove community. So where are we today with Emma, Emma has completed we have a really good understanding how we can pursue this project, and we have submitted the project to different agencies for funding. And also today, we still don't have money to carry out this particular aspect of Emma, but we are still applying and we are hoping that we will get some money sometime this next year or sometime in the future. So the other aspect, very important aspect of the thin layer placement is, can we apply thin layer placement within the BBC footprint. If their answer is yes, the question is where we can do something like this within the BBC footprint, as we can see, there are three different zones, a B and C. And we are looking into those three different zones, where we can apply the thin layer placement. So zone A has four different indicator regions, going from the freshwater area 509 all the way to the coastal area 508. And what we can see in the figure in the middle, all the indicator regions are circulated by the red color. That means, based on the three different parameters that Fred presented for the Resilience PM, those three indicator regions do not have the conditions, proper conditions in terms of water depth to apply the thin layer placement. In particular, the indicator region 508, as we can see, after water presentation, fresh presentation, this is a site that is inundated even today for very, very, very high water depth. And it will be very, very, not really good idea to apply any kind of sediment and indicator region where we see today, the conditions are not conducive for any successful thin layer placement. So that's why those three indicator regions in zone A are unread, because conditions are not conducive for any successful thin layer placement. So zone B, zone B has three different indicator regions, and the one in red is the freshwater zone indicator region in zombie, zombie, and that indicator region doesn't have the conditions either for a successful thin layer placement. Indicator region by 20, which is close to the bay, using water depth flow and salinity that indicator region has the conditions to a very successful thin layer placement within this particular zone. And moving into zone C, some Z, there are two indicator regions, which are in green in the figure in the in the middle, 516 and 514 that have the conditions in terms of water depth flow and salinity where we consider a thin layer placement project within those two indicator region could be successful. And those are pictures from the week to when we were looking for sites where to carry out this project, pretty beautiful from the air. And if you have any questions, please ask Gina or Fred. Thank you. Thank you, Carlos. I think we had a q amp a scheduled for this, this time, but we're going to skip that we'll hear from Eric and Bonnie and then we'll take up with the q amp a with everyone from this session. So, next is Eric Stabenow, the National Park Service, and he's presenting with Bonnie Irving. And this is DOI perspectives on an adaptive process for BBCR for the Cape stable seaside sparrow, considering climate change issues. But while we're getting started. So I'm Eric Stabenow with the National Park Service, been doing this work for the federal government for almost 20 years now. And here today with one half of the DOI perspective on this so when we do get the slides up and running we're going to see some things here that are repeats of some of your slides with some new context brought into play about the way DOI is thinking about this and my partner here is And I'm Bonnie Irving with the US Fish and Wildlife Service Everglades program supervisor and ecological services. Born to keep my hands just on the keyboard part for paging. See, or not. And here we go. Alright, so I'll run through just a real quick overview on this and then hand it off to Bonnie to get things started so what we've really got here is kind of five main points, throwing down on the page that that bring together a lot of the concepts in the last hour and a half or so, and that is that we're trying to bring more water into the coast with these projects, and we have this generalized idea inside Everglades restoration about fighting water with water when we think about sea level rise we'll put more fresh water in on one end and holding the salt water back from the other end, but recognizing that that's going to elevate the waters on both sides of it and that gives us a bit of a pinch. So the DOI issues and regulations and land management concerns that we have there are, there are portions of the system that are going to be very challenging for us to manage. And this BBC your project is give us an opportunity, kind of looking across the set to think about particularly this one tiny birds wonderful little habits that we're trying to protect. And live up to all of our regulations requirements associated with that, while we're also trying to meet these other kind of project objectives and we're having to having to think our way through how do we do that how do we meet our mandates and get through this process. So, last point on there is recognizing and responding to anticipate a future conditions and just as a pitch to what we're talking about here is I'm going to express some things about the uncertainty that's coming. And we're not going to do this in a numeric sense I'm going to do this in a generalized sense talking about what we understand from the modeling and what we expect and see level rise and these other issues. And we're going to talk to that uncertainty in some of the physical parameters we deal with results and fairly large uncertainty and turning of the temporal steps that we're working out so we get that kind of cross walk of those two issues and so that's what we're going to be heading with this to give you the heads up. Thank you. And so one of those key components is that there is a critical habitat area within the project footprint, and it's known as keep stable seaside sparrow population D. So one of our staff did a quick graphic, just to indicate the hydro period, kind of on a sliding for your average. And that's taken from 1995 to 2023, it looks like on here. And from basically from this slide, what we can see is in this critical population area, or critical habitat area. The hydro period is actually a little bit high. It's, it's running a little bit wetter than what would be optimal for the needs of the capes able seaside sparrow. Got the right button. Alright. So the key takeaway on this graphic. And just to show that Jay saw does vegetation surveys in these critical habitat areas and in 2011, we had a lot more kind of dispersed vegetation types. I would say look to the orange and the red and the pinks, but that's not really the case. So one of the staff and I were looking at this and cladium is actually also part of that orange dark color. And that's freshwater marsh, but it's actually a little bit too wet. So keep stable seaside sparrow we'll see in another slide, it kind of needs this Goldilocks zone, and that's not really being indicated in that recent vegetative survey which is on the right. And that's showing that really the trend is moving wetter. The mule grass is kind of dispersed and really you just don't see it anymore in the recent vegetation surveys. And so we have this lovely graphic. This is one of kind of a series of graphics that we have is just a cartoon to kind of depict kind of the ideal habitat range that we need for this particular species. And it kind of indicates that Goldilocks zone that I mentioned of mule grass. So the hydro period that we're really trying to target is between 90 and 210 days. Again, if we look back at that earlier graphic it showed that it was really at that upper limit and over that limit, quite a bit of the time, and that is kind of borne out by that vegetation survey that indicates that it is transitioning wetter already. Transition back to Eric. All right, so, so here we have this idealized. I'm going to borrow your slide. Here we have this idealized habitat that we're trying to reach for recognizing that it's a bit too wet and we're trying to protect the habitat. And so we had, you know, National Park Services talking about increasing water level and flow through particular areas in the southern end of the project. And the Fish and Wildlife Service is speaking up and saying, hey, but protect mule grass, protect this 10 centimeter little free space that they need for the habitat. And that seemed to go successfully. And the Army Corps of Engineers wisely wrote a letter to us that said, can you two please get together and tell us what do we want to do? What do we really want to do? And we spent some time on that because it was communication issue. We felt that we were doing a pretty good job on communicating internally, but we weren't necessarily getting it across into the PDT and it translating to how we wanted to look at the project features over time. So we really, we really spent some time thinking about how do you protect the habitat and protect the bird and yet allow for this future resilient condition with sea level rise. And so this is really what we're going to be talking about a little bit here. This graphic was up a little bit earlier. So I turn this mic a little bit for us. And I'm going to kind of borrow it in a little bit off-table use for it. So there's a line drawn on this page at zero. This is not to be equated with ground surface elevation in the habitat of this Cape Sable Seaside Serial Sub Pop D. But it should be thought of as a ground surface elevation and the fact that as sea level rise occurs over time, there will be a moment when we cross that water level crosses, not just that ground surface elevation, but that critical period that's that 10 centimeter depth. And then it starts to cause us these very long hydro periods on that. So in the intermediate curve, we're looking at the current conditions and then modeling again at the 2085 conditions so we don't actually have a midpoint modeling assessment that's hitting us we weren't thinking of that project in this way we're doing really new modeling here but we're not doing that so in some point we're going to cross that. So we have to evaluate based on that intermediate curve at 2085. We have to have some flexibility in the project to recognize that we could be wrong, and it could be running at higher or lower rates than that. And if we go up to some of those that streams we have to start thinking about what does the project look like in those extreme situations such as the highest curve at 2085 and coming back through time on that. What does that mean for us in terms of this this habitat we're trying to protect. This plot, again without this Cape Civil Seaside Sparrow habitat was shown in an earlier part of the presentation today as well. So now we're looking at where sea level rises influence the landscape we're looking at where the accretion rates are anticipated spatially across the landscape. It's a little more uniform than we'd actually expect on any given specific plot right we would look at some of those images and spoke about the sparse landscapes that are in the coastal system so at the best. These are the highest accretion rates for each of the areas we're dealing with in kind of an optimized condition and so even there when we look at it you can see the round outlines the little red outlines are the Cape Civil Seaside Sparrow subpopulations and the one down in the bottom right that looks bit like a starfish is sub pop D and you can see that it's setting across multiple accretion rate zones and impacts from sea level rise and impacts into project so it's a it's a really critical piece to look at. The second part that stands out to me when we look at this is that the soil type is critical to get newly grass to get the right habitat, we'd have to have the right conditions to get there. And we don't necessarily know that that's going to happen with the project so we have somewhat optimistic look at the total accretion rates on the page. We have a little bit of a call it an optimistic or questioning view, looking at the type of habitats we might create over time, and recognizing what that might be for the sparrow in that area and so we on the department side and fish and while I say we had to think about National Park service, what we were going to do for that bird in the future how can we do our best for that. And we started thinking of it in this way I've inverted the graph for us right now we're looking at curves that go down to the right and that is the free board, the depth above the high water level that we're looking at so you can see that we lose free forward over time. And depending on which one of the sea level rise curves we're looking at, it makes a big difference when sea level rise comes into a critical height for us a critical elevation for us. The second thing that stands out on here so first let's identify that the green line on the top right is the intermediate sea level rise curve. There are heavy lines and there are thin limits associated with the green curve is a thinner line that is that curve with accretion. We get to the case that in the habitats that we're interested in, we could potentially have surface elevation that's very close to you know getting us to 2085 without going underwater substantially on the alternative, you know, most optimistic view on the most pessimistic view, the things happen a lot faster. So, our approach to this has been in this project something really unique, most of our projects if we have really different conditions and different phases. We would be thinking of the project as one project for now and then we would put the other projects whole planning modeling every other effort off to another time or another effort to look at. In this project we're looking at both pieces of it and thinking about a phased implementation. So, going to the little blue bars at the top of the page you'll see that there's a time period when we want to maintain the current sub pop habitat. And in fact we have to. That's our mandate by law. So we're going to protect that habitat as long as we can at some point that habitat gets impacted by sea level rise and our capacity to maintain that habitat is no longer in our hands. And then we have to go to a different phase we have to think about what the connectivity and accretions could be at the other end of that, and somewhere in between the two we have some sort of a transition state that we have to get across where that transition state is going to be a critical piece that requires us to be watching the data, making an adaptive type of choice along the way with the project so I think this plot really, really draws it out the data on the plot is queued together to the SM element that's the triangle which lines up right inside the northern pieces of the habitat population that we're looking at. So what we decided to do to address this is come up with a two phase there's an adaptive implementation phase where initially we would look at the southern end of the C 111 canal so that canal is in the red line, going down to the coast. So to think of it for the water management district for flood management as the major drain the big plug that you can pull to get water out of the system. And we would like to maintain as long as we can as much of that flexibility as we can but over time there's a partial backfilling that comes into play, and eventually a complete backfilling of that. When we get to that stage we need to really be making adjustments on where the water goes. So back to the, you know the features of our SM we can look at the whole water management system and all the features. We can look at what the outcomes are likely to be as we adjust between different spreaders and different solutions there is one interesting piece on here looks like a distribution line and blue on there I think we've moved away from thinking of pipes right now but it's. I left it in place, it was in the presentation at the time it was given to to us and it is a way to think about how we have to adapt our approaches how we have to change over time one and be flexible again with the process. And I would anticipate that we'll see a lot of changes with how we do that we are doing something really unique here, and that we have this kind of stage implementation it's trying to protect the sparrow down to this end. So, again, just kind of sharing one of these last spots on it. We're going to meet the current heads that be good stewards of the adjacent lands hold it as long as we possibly can give the sparrow that opportunity to to move or to be moved or whatever that is going to be over time, and we're going to manage the areas in the future the water management for in the future. So I think that's us for today correct. Thank you. Thanks Eric and Bonnie. Now I think we'll move to a Q amp a with the panel with a panel discussion. So if we could have all speakers from this session up in front. Yeah, it might be a little tight. Okay, thanks to all the panelists that was a really great set of presentations. So I think we'll start with Matt. Thanks for all of that time. So I have just sort of two high level planning kinds of questions and, and maybe this is for Jennifer. I've heard the phrase hold water for dry season carry over. Is this storage, the way we talk about storage and other parts of the system. Is that the same thing. You're on your on that was working. So at the beginning I think yes that our intent was to create some sort of long longer term storage. And it's also what was thought about in one of our yellow book components the North Lake about storage was looking at lining rock mines. And we've come to realize that one that's not actually engineeringly feasible. And the geology of the Northwest region is really making it very very difficult for us to provide that long term storage. So we're looking at different options to, if it's not going to be wholly long term, if we can at least slow it down enough to move some of that water. At a later time frame, we still consider that to be a benefit which is why we're trying to look at some of those rock mine is more flow through and the wetland flow through to kind of slow it down a little bit more. So within a within annual cycle is what you're talking. Okay. My second question was Gina mentioned that water quality evaluation was to come down the road and from a different team. I haven't heard anything about any needs for water quality treatment. Is there any needs for water quality treatment for this water going into the natural system. I could probably take that one. So there are a couple things water quality is not an objective of the study but it is evaluated as a constraint, along with water supply and flood protection so for water quality we cannot degrade the existing water quality. Some team did perform an evaluation on round two. Moving forward there is a need for the wastewater reuse obviously that would have water quality treatment component to it. And then we do need to meet water quality criteria or at least not degrade it from existing water quality. So the team did evaluate it relative to numeric nutrient criteria in the coastal waters and the existing water quality. I could add just a little touch on that one. And I think that in water quality and we talked about being a use as constraint. I appreciate in general and make the argument for continuing to do evaluation so sensitivity style runs on things where water quality is indeed a constraint something we'd have to consider over time be that groundwater use recharge be that the wastewater reuse program that this listed in here in this round of modeling right now. So we, we have that ongoing interest in it and we've recognized there's a really hard cost there and there's a really big lift that we're already seeing out of the projects in a few different places. So not to be a mark against the project but I'm always looking for a little opportunity to do a little better so the sensitivity runs to keep us looking at that are really great too. Yeah, and there will be ancillary benefits to like the water preserve areas and rehydration features, even though the objective may not be water quality improvement. They will offer nutrient uptake. Thanks, Margaret and Casey Ellen, and then John. Thanks for the presentation. My question is for Jennifer. So Jennifer on your two slides you've had stakeholder involvement at the center. What is the purpose of that? What is the purpose for involving stakeholders and how effective is it in defining alternatives? Yeah, no, our stakeholder involvement is critical to the success of this project. So we do have about monthly PDT meetings I'm sure Nicole can talk a little bit more about that. We also have eight or nine different sub teams that can work a little bit more specifically at things that we do have a plan formulation sub team, ecological modeling, engineering, water quality, all that sort of things. And those are weekly or bi-weekly depending on what kind of process we're in at the time and what process of the plan formulation cycle we're in. So we have utilized many different ideas and features from our alternatives that have come directly from our stakeholders. And so it's kind of become like a mishmash of different people's ideas that get combined by other entities and then work together to create a full alternative. It's very much a group effort. Also, Neva, that Gina said. So as part of the National Environmental Policy Act stakeholder engagement, we do have scoping meetings. We do have a comment box in which we'll take anybody's comments and then at the eco sub team or at all of the sub team meetings as well as the project delivery team meetings, there is not just the engagement by the project delivery team, but there's also an opportunity for public comment. We have done several workshops between the alternatives, which also allow for group interaction as part of that gathering of the data, reviewing the data, taking the information from the modeling and then turning it into the next round. So we have had those types of engagements that are both agency as well as members of the public can attend. Casey. Thanks, Jim. I have a couple questions just stopped me. Thanks for those presentations really clear tons of information really appreciate that. We were just talking about the savings clause constraints and I was curious. Flooding seems like it might be an important one with the changes, especially in the flows to the coastal structures changing and so I'm just curious how was the change in flood risk evaluated and how does how do those constraints factor into decision making between the alternatives relative to the performance metrics. Yes, me. Yes, so for flood savings clause we have to honor both flood protection and water supply criteria. It's actually a different phase of the project so we're in the formulation phase right now what we're trying to answer is, what do we want to build eventually, and what does it look like the 2085. In the last selected plan we move into a different phase of the project, which is known as the project assurances phase, and that's where the savings clause analysis performed. The mindset there is we will move to 2035 and Eric slide actually kind of showed one of those check in points at 2035. The idea is that as we build the project, we will continue to look at the savings clause and the flood risk assessment will occur at the action when we're actually turning on the features in the field. And when things are built because there's a lot of moving pieces as you can imagine between now and 2085 BBC is not the only project trying to address resiliency. We don't know everything that's going to happen from a flood risk, you know infrastructure perspective of what the county is going to do what the state of Florida is going to do what the federal government is going to do. So we put in all the information that we have that's available in our 2085 condition but when it actually comes to the check for savings clause. We get a 2035 condition which is much more certain, and we make sure that when we turn on the features when we turn on the pump that we're not creating those adverse impacts. And so we're looking at it as is infrastructure capable of providing flood protection, adding a bunch of pumps to a system that isn't going to work and gravity seems going to be a good idea. And then specifically how do you set up the operating plans, how do you operate those infrastructure will be analyzed 2035. And then incrementally, as things continue to get built, and as other project features happen that the process continues to update those operating vehicles of those, those, those features over time. Great, thanks. Yeah, that makes sense and then as you envision doing that. I'm curious. Maybe we'll have new precipitation scenarios that might be used by then, and I'm just curious you don't have them now but from a thought experiment perspective. You know what happens if this, if it gets 5 to 10% water, let's say, do you think it's what happens to performance metrics how robust this plan just the thought experiment to like 5 to 10% water. I think it's interesting because I think that the performance measures now you're talking about the metrics themselves I think they're built that they would capture the changes in the ecological system when that when that if that would occur so I don't think that we have to go back to what we're sampling or measuring or how we're tracking that both in the project funding and in the recovery process of, you know, tracking I think that those are are solid in place. I think that related to the last answer is that there's this periodic process of looking at the combined operating plan not officially just that one that we're doing now but in general the combined operations of the water management system throughout and I think that that this gives us space to capture. If we're seeing climate related changes and increases of precipitation or maybe we're getting that shortages because we're having some of the battle transpiration type of piece that's affecting us and it could be spatially explicit these things that happen to us we are talking about Lancelot sticking down here in Florida so we have to think about that as well so I think that's in the operational plans that that is where that would be being addressed. Yeah, and I'll just add from a technical perspective on the on the modeling side in particular, there's two kind of elements to climate scenarios right one is extreme events, and the other is really longer term changes in, you know, drought precipitation you know drought periods things like that right. So we have a lot of regional modeling tools suite these daily, you know long term simulation models, when we talk about the climate scenarios that you've heard about from Dr. Opsicara last time and that we're trying to get that group together. Those are really focused on adding things beyond the current climate variability that we have in our 52 year climate record right so we have a lot of droughts we have multi year droughts we have really wet periods those are already built into our analysis that climate we're getting to like the really, really, really severe drought that could happen in the future climate change scenario, you know so this particular project to answer your question about robustness. As we said, the reality of the system that we're dealing with is that it's not a multi year carryover system. It's seasonal at best, you know, so I think we're in very good shape for being here in terms of that robustness. And, you know, as we do the savings laws assessment as we do the Miami data and we do have some tools to do the event based, you know, as you heard from Kelly Moran and others last time that we have some tools to do those types of assessments, and they will be applied. So those longer term climate scenarios I don't feel like we're missing them for BBC here but they would be very critical for Central Africa, it's Western Africa, it's, you know, larger landscape. Marsh. Okay, thanks. Okay, we'll go to Helen next. So I'm Casey asked one of my questions. The other question I have is so I'm an ecological model and in the fields that I work in the results of my models are never used. There's a report written, and it all sounds lovely and then it's put on a shop and it's never used so I'm very curious, because I haven't actually ever seen it with my own eyes, how you go from the alternatives and all of the scientific information that you've presented here through all of the stakeholder groups. You know, and scientists and so forth to and I know this is a long winded question and probably a long winded answer and I don't expect a long winded answer but two recommendations and that get put forward. And how fundamental disagreements or disputes over the handle. I don't know who can answer that. I'm going to pump this somebody else in the room, certainly at this panel real quickly, but I will say that in our team we recognize that this area of connecting between ecology and ecological modeling and making decisions that that process needs to come together a lot stronger in the process of putting staff on board to do that to help us make address this exact issue so I think you're seeing an issue that we were also seeing a long way. But again, I'll punch others on how the decision making process is not Gina. So I think that's me. I've been around four of engineers. So, as I showed in my initial slide habitat units are one piece of the puzzle. So the habitat units are what take all of that scientific information from the performance measures that we've developed, and we roll it up we Jennifer showed how we can alter how we can look zone by zone so that we can match the ecological performance and hydrologic performance we would like to see roll that up into or connect it with a specific management measures specific engineering solution that we can then mix and match, pull it together until an alternative. All of our rounds are vetted to the multi agency project delivery team. They're also vetted with the public we collect input we collect feedback. We try to do consensus based recognizing that you know different agencies or different communities have different desires or ecological goals within their region. So if we take that information that we get as part of the habitat, that's one piece. We then have to also apply those savings plus constraints where that's part of the assurance space. We also have to come up with a design of preliminary engineering design, and we have to cost it out. So for each one of those features there is a price tag, a rough order of magnitude cost associated with that feature. That then we take the costs from that estimate with the benefits that we are showing from the habitat unit calculations, and we plug that through that economic model, the cost effectiveness inner incremental cost analysis tool so that we can tell you that each alternative per habitat unit is going to cost X amount of dollars. In addition, we also take those tools that the joint ecosystem modeling group, we apply our constraints such as water quality, we look at the other ecological benefits that are captured as part of those habitat units. All of that weighs into the decision making to lead to a tentatively selected. That tentatively selected plan is put out for, again, stakeholder engagement stakeholder comments it's all documented in a national environmental policy act document. So in this instance, it'll be an environmental impact state. We then collect comments from the public, the public gets a 45 day review period. They provide their comments we incorporate as appropriate. And at the same time, while all of this is going around in the background we are coordinating all the way up to our vertical team in Washington DC, so that they have. We're moving out with in that national environmental policy act documentation so there's lots of discussions there's lots of pieces of the puzzle in which we make our determination. We strive for consensus based and in the core of engineers we always say if everybody's a little bit angry with us then we've done our job effectively. Okay, we're, we have more questions more time but I think we can get to a few more. Okay, so I wanted to just come back to Matt's question about water quality issues and ask if there's if the water if there are there any water quality predicted linkages or impacts on accretion or other vegetation responses that you know that could be incorporated into the models. Currently, there is no water quality. The, the accretion measurement is strictly looking at elevation change. And like Nicole said, there, as we mo