Water Quality for Healthy Beaches and Shellfish Beds
Oyster Photo credit: Texas Parks and Wildlife Division
Long-term Alliance Partnership Goal
Provide critical water quality information to Gulf of Mexico resource managers, in near-real time where appropriate, to help protect human health at beaches and to help ensure healthy shellfish growing waters.
The Governors’ Action Plan identifies three associated actions:
WQ-1: Improve harmful algal bloom detection and forecasting in the U.S. and Mexican Gulf States
WQ-2: Improve beach water quality management
WQ-3: Improve government efficiency in water quality monitoring.
WQ-1: Improve harmful algal bloom detection and forecasting in the U.S. and Mexican Gulf States
Action: Establish a cooperative, bi-national, coastal observing and decision support system in the Gulf of Mexico for the advanced detection and forecasting of red tide (K. brevis) and for notifying public health managers. Educate the public to help reduce the human health, natural resource, and economic impact of bloom events.
36-Month Outcomes:
- Improve the current HAB Forecasting System off the southwest Florida coast to better identify the onset of blooms and better predict the transport of blooms.
- Develop satellite detection, forecasting, and Internet-based notification capability for K. brevis off the southern coast of Texas.
- Develop a satellite detection and Internet-based notification capability for K. brevis off the coast of the Mexican Gulf State of Veracruz.
WQ-2: Improve beach water quality management
Action: Ensure safe bathing beaches by advancing a practical, field–ready standardized bacterial source-tracking method(s) to determine coastal waters with public health impairment and to identify the priority sources of bacterial pollution to remediate.
36-Month Outcomes:
- Conduct a peer-reviewed field evaluation of current bacterial source-tracking capabilities in an estuarine recreational area, and select two methodologies for intensive field-testing/validation.
- Implement pilot testing of these two methods in five Gulf of Mexico estuaries with varying environmental conditions (preferably one location in each Gulf state).
WQ-3: Improve government efficiency in water quality monitoring
Action: Maximize the efficiency and utility of water quality monitoring efforts for local managers by coordinating and standardizing state and federal water quality data collection activities in the Gulf region.
36-Month Outcome:
- Implement a regional pilot effort to coordinate and standardize state and federal water quality data collection activities in the Gulf region for one or more nutrient parameter(s) and/or one or more pathogens.
Highlights of Governors’ Action Plan Accomplishments
Mustang Island Photo credit: Texas Parks and Wildlife Division
Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB) detection and forecasting in the Gulf of Mexico
The HAB Forecasting System provided by NOAA supplies information on the location, extent, and potential for development or movement of harmful algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico.
Harmful Algal Blooms Observing System (HABSOS)
HABSOS is a regional, Web-based data and information dissemination tool. This Web site provides a secure data entry tool for collection of cell count observations of the algal species Karenia brevis.
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