South Florida Fisheries Habitat Assessment Program (FHAP-SF)

The South Florida Fisheries Habitat Assessment Program (FHAP-SF) provides spatially explicit information on inter-annual variability in seagrass communities and establishes a baseline for understanding ecosystem responses to environmental fluctuation, perturbation and Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP)-associated, water-management alterations. Specifically, FHAP-SF documents the status and trends of benthic macrophyte distribution, abundance, and species composition in Florida Bay and the southwestern Everglades, as well as providing data on turtlegrass reproduction and shoot characteristics. Resource managers will be able to use these data to address ecosystem-response issues on a real-time basis, and to weigh alternative restoration options. FHAP-SF objectives are to: 1) develop a basic understanding of the relationships among water quality parameters (e.g., salinity, water clarity, nutrient levels) and seagrass species distribution and abundance in south Florida, 2) provide baseline data for parsing anthropogenically-induced changes from natural system variation, and 3) help verify model predictions on species and ecosystem-level responses to water quality changes associated with CERP.