The work presented in this report is foundational. Like all research, it both improves understanding and highlights deficiencies. Important lessons were learned, which led to several recommendations for building upon this foundation:
- Combining climate change information across disciplines (e.g. social and biophysical) provided a much more holistic view than would have been offered by any one of these areas by itself. By design this project involved reserve staff whose expertise was critical in estimating the ecological resiliency of the reserves, helped focus attention on the management concerns of individual reserves and the implication of our climate change finding relative to those issues, and provided valuable input on the strengths and limitations of the water quality monitoring data. Future efforts to assess conditions across the NERRS should employ this multidisciplinary and collaborative analytical approach.
- This effort involved the compilation and processing of data in new ways and for purposes outside the original intent of the NERRS System-wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) sampling framework which was originally established to assess impacts from non-point source pollution and changing land use practices across the NERRS. The relationship of water quality variables to climate can be strengthened by the centralization and standardization of data related to SWMP stations (e.g. water depth, distance from shore, tidal amplitude and current velocity) as well as watershed characteristics (e.g. water volume, land-use dynamics, and average elevation).
- One unexpected limitation we encountered in analyzing the SWMP data was that we couldn’t incorporate nutrient data into our analyses due to the variable coverage of that data set between reserves. We strongly recommend the continued, systematic collection of SWMP water quality data (both physical and nutrient), which will allow the inclusion of reserves and stations that had to be excluded from the biophysical sensitivity analysis and improve the characterization of those that were included. We think the Sentinel Site approach being adopted by the reserves is a good approach to strengthening the data set for assessing climate change impacts in the reserves.
- This synthesis has applicability to climate change planning and monitoring at both the NERR system and individual reserve levels. Opportunities to expand the analysis beyond the NERRS stations should be sought, since the process we employed for development of the social and biophysical indices, as well as the understanding of climate sensitivities in estuarine systems, could be applied to analyze other estuarine networks such as EPA’s National Estuary Program.
- The focus of the research presented in this report was on long-term climate change impacts (e.g. over years). Profound impacts to reserve conditions also result from more short-term weather events, such as hurricanes and other severe storms. An analysis of extreme event sensitivity should be conducted to examine these types of impacts as well.