Hurricane impacts to the environment reported in scientific journal Estuaries and Coasts
2004 is a year many will long remember as Florida’s year of the hurricane. Five named storms impacted Florida within two months.
Many area scientists and managers studied the affects of the hurricanes and published their reports on hurricane impacts on coastal ecosystems, primarily from studies focused on the 2004 and 2005 Florida hurricane season, in a special issue of Estuaries and Coasts that has recently been released.
Estuaries and Coasts is the journal of the Estuarine Research Federation, a non-profit professional society whose purpose is to promote research in estuarine and coastal waters, to promote communication between members and affiliated societies and to be available as a source of advice concerning estuaries and the coastal zone. The journal publishes manuscripts presenting original research on physical, chemical, geological or biological systems as well as management of those systems at the interface between the land and the sea. The interface is broadly defined to include areas within estuaries, lagoons, wetlands, tidal rivers, watersheds that include estuaries and nearshore coastal waters.
Special Issue Guest Editors Holly Greening, Peter Doering and Catherine Corbett wrote
“This special issue of Estuaries and Coasts, which reports investigations of hurricane mediated disturbances, is an opportunity to describe the individual and cumulative effects of storms on coastal environments and component flora and fauna, to put effects of extreme events in the context of long-term monitoring data sets in multiple estuaries, to examine effects of storms on estuarine management and to provide the impetus for synthesis and generalization. Although the articles in this issue focus primarily on new findings related to the effects of the 2004 hurricanes on coastal systems, the effects of earlier hurricanes are summarized, and some preliminary reports on effects of the 2005 hurricanes are given. A prominent theme emerging from these articles is that many ecological components of estuaries and coastal systems, although initially severely altered by individual or multiple hurricanes, were quite resilient to the acute effects of the 2004 season hurricanes, in sharp and striking contrast to the long-term effects on human and social systems.”
The special issue includes 16 articles on topics such as:
Hurricane impacts on coastal ecosystems
An overview of the characteristics and coastal change of the hurricanes in 2004
A review of major storm impacts on coastal wetland elevations
Impacts and recovery of dissolved oxygen dynamics in Charlotte Harbor and its contributing watershed in response to Hurricanes Charley, Frances and Jeanne
Comparisons between Charlotte Harbor and Tampa Bay of red mangrove reproduction and seedling colonization after Hurricane Charley
Impact and response of southwest Florida mangroves to the 2004 hurricane season
Effects of the 2004 hurricanes on the fish assemblages in two proximate southwest Florida estuaries
Short-term effects of a low dissolved oxygen event on estuarine fish assemblages following the passage of Hurricane Charley
How attributes of multiple hurricanes and different coastal systems determine the extent of environmental effects
Because of sponsorship from Charlotte Harbor National Estuary Program and many others, the articles within this special issue of the journal are available as PDF files for all to access. This issue is posted on the Estuaries and Coasts website at http://estuariesandcoasts.org/contents/ESTU2006_29_6A.html
A 2005 issue of Harbor Happenings (volume 9, number 1) was devoted to the impacts of the hurricanes that crossed the Charlotte Harbor National Estuary Program study area. That issue, as well as a color map showing the paths of three of the hurricanes (volume 10, number 4), are also available on the CHNEP website.