Environmental Monitoring and Aquatic Ecological Risk Assessment of Common Contaminants for Everglades National Park, Biscayne National Park, and Big Cypress National Preserve: Critical Information Need for the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan

Gardinali, Piero; Rand, Gray

The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) outlines a series of construction projects and water management changes to increase regional water supplies and restore the hydrological paths in the Everglades to pre-1900 conditions under the following overreaching goal: improving water, improving habitat, and making development compatible with the ecosystem. Although the quantity of water has been thoroughly addressed in the restoration management plans, the quality of water is an issue that has generated disagreement among scientist and the agencies involved in the restoration processes. The most recent GAO report to Congress on South Florida Ecosystem Restoration (US GAO, 2003) clearly indicated that among the 200 restoration projects within CERP, the assessment of contaminants other than nutrients and mercury was not adequately addressed and constituted a significant gap with potential to hinder the availability of adaptive management tools required for the successful restoration of South Florida. In particular, the presence of contaminants, and the risk associated with their presence in waters that will be re-distributed and spread through the entire ecosystem was mentioned as one of the areas where information was not adequate or no plans were in place for future assessment. The limited data generated in the last preliminary monitoring effort and screening level ecological risk assessment (SERA) in support of CERP (Rand and Carriger 2004; Fernandez, 2004) demonstrated several relevant findings and data gaps Surface water concentrations for endosulfan (organochlorine insecticide) and chlorpyrifos (organophosphate (OP) insecticide) presents a potential acute risk to arthropods in C-111, Joe Bay, Highway Creek and Card Sound. The results also indicate that the pink shrimp may be one of the most sensitive species to endosulfan and that endosulfan sulfate (oxidation product), the major persistent residue of endosulfan, accumulates in native fish from the Southern Everglades where tissue residue concentrations reached up to 196 ng/g (dry weight). The SERA identified two data gaps needed to conduct a definitive ecological risk assessment (ERA) in ENP, BNP and BCNP- intensive analytical exposure monitoring for contaminants and toxicity (effects) studies with field samples. To fill in these data gaps and to be able to provide much needed environmental assessment guidelines for scientists and managers involved in the restoration effort, this three year project will focus on achieving three major goals: a) Assessing the identity, occurrence, and spatial and temporal distributions of common organic and inorganic contaminants in sediment/soil, surface water and biota from ENP, BNP and Big Cypress National Preserve (BCNP); b) conducting a comprehensive suite of laboratory assays to determine the potential detrimental effects of field-collected sediment and waters to freshwater and estuarine fish and macroinvertebrates; and c) produce a definitive ecological risk assessment (ERA) for ENP, BNP and BCNP, under the current U.S.EPA framework (U.S.EPA, 1998, ECOFRAM, 1999), based on the collected exposure data from the contaminant monitoring, and the ecotoxicological assessment.

Environmental Monitoring and Aquatic Ecological Risk Assessment of Common Contaminants for Everglades National Park, Biscayne National Park, and Big Cypress National Preserve: Critical Information Need for the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan

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