David Burke, Acting Superintendent for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about the sanctuary.
NOAA is basically the parent organization of the sanctuary.
Burke said, “The Office of National Marine Sanctuary is organized underneath NOAA on the National Ocean service and the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. There’s actually 18 sanctuaries. I like to think that we are the gold standard of sanctuaries, but I encourage listeners to go see as many as you can.”
The Maritime Heritage Shipwreck Trail needs continuing preservation.
Burke said, “The shipwreck trail is one of our really interesting things, which tends to be sort of, I guess, attractive to niche adventure communities and the folks who are interested in things because it really does tell a great story of the history of the Keys, not to mention they tend to be really interesting places to go dive and go get to see something that’s that you can’t really see everywhere. One of the downsides that we’ve experienced recently is realizing that as much as a lot of our wrecks are accessible and people can go down and see them, for a lot of years, we’ve been able to have people go look, but not touch. But over the last couple of years, we’ve noticed some bits and pieces being removed from some of these historical artifacts. Unfortunately, not only once those pieces are removed, they’re no longer there, but that removal process tends to create openings for other deterioration, either by the elements, or it exposes something else that somebody else may pick up. So we had a recent visit out to the North America, which is out by Delta Shoal, and realized that we’ve seen significant deterioration on that site over the last couple of years. So we’re asking for the people who like to go participate in the National Marine Sanctuary and get in the water and go see things, just to help sort of police our own and help people to understand that take only pictures, leave only bubbles and leave the wrecks and everything that you find on them for future generations to be able to go enjoy.”
The advisory council met recently.
Burke said, “We had a great meeting last Tuesday. We’ve shifted our schedule from an every other month program to a quarterly meeting. So September was the first meeting since June. Our next one we project will happen in December. But with the extra space in between meetings, we’re putting a little bit of emphasis on let’s make these meetings a little bit more focused and hard hitting. The purpose of the council is to gather information that helps me as the acting superintendent and my team, make good decisions about what we need to do for resources, resource protection, and kind of accommodate all of the interests of the many, many different user groups within the sanctuary. So this particular meeting, we had an opportunity to dive into what we are calling the adaptive management working group. That body has been stood up, sort of as a part of the restoration blueprint that went into place in March. But one of the challenges that we had with the restoration Blueprint was that we spent close to 15 years putting this thing together, and it ended up being sort of a everything goes into the regulation, and we realized that that’s not necessarily the easiest way to do things, and so we have shifted gears and set up a program to go after targeted solutions to acute problems, to go after things in a more timely manner and a less comprehensive manner. So hopefully that serves us well. We also had an opportunity to listen to some experts on lobsters in the Keys, both from an ecology and a fishery perspective. We heard from our various law enforcement agencies. We’ve got joint enforcement agreements between NOAA, Office of Law Enforcement, Florida Fish and Wildlife and US Fish and Wildlife, not to mention additional help from the sheriff’s office, so we’ve got a lot of folks who are helping us provide enforcement and visibility for protecting the environment that we’re in and it was great to be able to hear from different perspectives, from different levels of law enforcement.”
How are the sea surface temperatures?
Burke said, “We’ve got great monitoring capability up and down the Florida Keys, and we actually have those temperature stations that people can find on our website. We have been hovering near the limit for our coral out planting program, and fortunately, because of all of the rain that we’ve had and some other factors, in terms of currents and other things that are going on in the greater environment, we seem to not be exceeding the temperature levels by significant amounts. It tends to go up, stay there for a couple of days and then come back down. So I would say that that’s good news. We’ve seen some bleaching, but not extensive bleaching across the reef system, and so we continue to watch that and we’re out there either electronically monitoring for the things that have remote sensors, but we’re also out there collecting water samples and sediment samples to make sure that we understand what’s going on in the environment. But so far, it looks like the 2023 heat wave will remain the 2023 one, and we won’t see a resurgence of that this year, but we’ll continue to monitor. I just want to give a shout out to my teams, we’ve got teams in in both Key West and Key Largo, who go out and do everything from buoy maintenance to science monitoring, to grounding responses, and, of course, the mission iconic reefs teams and those folks have just been humping it over the course of the summer. Big shout out to our boat maintenance teams. They keep everything running for us, and they have just done a fantastic job throughout the season, to keep our boats running, keep our crews outfitted with what they need, and keeping our missions successful. The support that we get from the community has really been tremendous, and is the significant part of what we’re able to do. We’re able to be successful because we’ve got so many partners who are out there picking up a piece of whatever it is that’s their corner of maintaining the sanctuary, and we couldn’t do it without them. So thanks to the community for making it a success.”
For more information, click here: https://floridakeys.noaa.gov/