ST. PETERSBURG — A key indicator of the health of Tampa Bay is the spread of sea grass, which has shown more improvement in the past year — although those measurements were taken before tens of millions of gallons of sewage was dumped into the bay since last summer.
3 Months Ago
4 Months Ago
5 Months Ago
Sea grasses in the bay have increased by more than 1,360 acres, or nearly 3.3%, since 2014, according to the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, a bay science and advocacy group first created by the Environmental Protection Agency but now operating independently.
Decades of pollution had wiped out thousands of acres of sea grasses in the bay, which is Florida’s largest open-water estuary, stretching 398 square miles at high tide. When the estuary program was created in 1991, it set a goal of returning the bay to at least 38,000 acres of sea grass, the amount it had in 1950.
The bay has now surpassed that goal. Sea grasses cover 41,655 acres of bay bottom.
However, the aerial surveys that form the basis of this latest sea grass estimate were conducted during the winter of 2015-2016 — before last summer’s torrential rains caused St. Petersburg and other municipal sewage systems to release waste into portions of the bay.
The largest gain, 874 acres, occurred in Old Tampa Bay, in the north end of the estuary, which has historically lagged behind the rest of the bay in water quality.
The only section of the bay that lost any acreage was in the so-called "middle bay," south of the Gandy Bridge, including Hillsborough’s South Shore to the Manatee County border, and coastal St. Petersburg to Coquina Key. It lost Ultrabet 42 acres between 2014 and 2016.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
