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Nature's Kidneys: How Coastal Wetlands Stop Ocean Pollution · How To Protect The Ocean

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today we're gonna talk about nitrogen.
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And don't worry, it's not all bad news.
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There is some bad news in that excess nitrogen creates a lot of problems like algal
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blooms and red tide. But the good news is that we can solve those fixes.
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And nitrogen is a natural process.
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We just gotta make sure that we get keep it in control.
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and there are specific aspects of coastal habitats.
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That can help keep it in control if those coastal habitats are one present
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and are healthy. So we're going to talk about that on today's episode of
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the How to Protect the Ocean podcast,
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why these coastal habitats are nature's kidneys.
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All on today's episode, if you like this type of stuff where we talk about ocean
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news, ocean science, and how you can protect the ocean,
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then follow this podcast because it's exactly what we are here to do.
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All right, let's start off with.
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You know, just an idea, Green water.
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Nobody likes green water. It's a smell that just,
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you know, has a smell that won't go away.
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And then sometimes even like you'll get dead fish washing up on the shore,
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and it's gross, and that's what too much nitrogen does to our coastline.
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And here's what most people don't realize:
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a healthy stretch of marsh or mangroves can pull out the nitrogen.
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straight out of the water before any of it goes into the coastline and
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any of the green water happens.
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So as long as we keep those healthy and as long as those can keep up with
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sea level rise, we are okay. And that's what we're going to talk about
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all this week.
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yesterday's episode was an interview with Adam Langley,
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who introduced a lot of things about nitrogen and how it is taken
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up by mangroves and marshes in the U.S.
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We're gonna talk a lot of that.
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We're gonna focus on those two habitats,
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but there are also other coastal habitats like seagrass,
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salt marshes, mudflats that do very similar things just in different zones within
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our world. The key here is keeping them intact.
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And keeping them healthy. That's what we want.
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Keeping them present, keeping them healthy.
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That's the whole purpose of this episode today.
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And look, I get it. We see a lot of news that's happening around
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the world where we're talking about algal blooms that are out of control,
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green water, red tide, where people can't breathe on the beaches because there's
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so much dead in like dead fish and dead manatees and dolphins and sea turtles.
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It can get heavy.
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It can get really heavy. And when you see all this happening,
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especially with climate change bringing in this exaggeration
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of what's happening because we're seeing it more and more often,
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the thing here is it can actually be controlled.
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This is something that we as humans can control for a specific aspect.
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And now it's starting to get out of control because we're
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not following certain regulations,
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or we're changing the regulations,
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or we're not doing certain things that will keep it intact.
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But
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we can keep intact. And we're going to talk about that all this week.
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and especially today, because I think it's really important.
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Coastal wetlands, salt marshes,
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mangroves, we got wet ~ we got seagrasses,
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even coral reefs to a certain degree.
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all these types of coastal habitats play a role.
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You know, mud flats, but they all play a role in keeping not only carbon in place.
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Like they, you know, it's not just carbon,
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they actually store
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Nitrogen. They pull it straight out of the water into the roots because they need
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nitrogen to survive. They need nitrogen to feed their system,
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And they and they pull that out before it reaches any kind of bay or
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any kind of coastland. And I think that's that's an important aspect
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to to maintain is that these things are there to keep nitrogen in check,
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That's what if you learn anything about photosynthesis or anything about
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the health of animals of plants,
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and trees, they like nutrients.
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That's something that's that's important.
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So plants will take it up ~ into their roots.
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And then the waterlogged soil starves out any kind of bacteria that would release
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that new those nutrients back in.
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And then it locks away in the mud ~ for centuries.
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And it's the same reason. I know this kind of sounds weird,
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but it's the same reason why when you put a a body in like a mangrove or
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in a marsh or a peat bog or if it's somewhere where there's no oxygen in the soil.
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it stays preserved for hundreds of years.
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And so, you know, don't do that,
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I guess. you shouldn't be doing that anyway.
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But that's what happens. if you see an animal or anything like that's been dead
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and it looks intact, it could have been it could have been dead a long time ago.
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It just hasn't decomposed because there's no oxygen or bacteria to decompose it.
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So it's kind of kind of interesting.
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Now here's the reality of the situation.
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We have coastal wetlands that have been taken out a lot of the times because
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of development. And we're going to talk about a specific example,
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a couple specific examples in a minute.
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But we know that when they are put back in place,
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we know that they do well. Pretty much that's what happens.
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There was a study by authors called Skidmore and Kowarski,
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or Kowowski,
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sorry.
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~ where you know they restored a single 100 acre wetland and that cut ammonia down,
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like cut ammonia release down by 62% and a total nitrogen by 37%.
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And it saved local water systems about $17,000 a year in treatment costs within just
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three years. So you put a a restored area intact and you keep it healthy,
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and within three years, you're cutting down the release of ammonia and nitrogen.
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These are natural processes, it's not.
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A concrete wall. This is not like they harden it with rocks and things like that,
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or the engineers when they want to keep maintain like a specific area that's being
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eroded. No, these are natural wetlands that can not only secure
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the coastline and make sure it doesn't erode because it it keeps the soil intact,
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like close together and tight,
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it also reduces ammonia and nitrogen within just within three years
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in this example anyway. And we've and we find it's in other examples then ~ as well,
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So like a patch of wetland.
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Smaller than most farms, was doing the job of what municipal water treatments
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do for free. So think about that,
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Think about saving money and how that works.
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It's it's all done for free. that just because of the wetland is put together.
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Now, restoring wetlands and marshes and mangroves and all that kind
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of stuff is expensive. There's no doubt about that.
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That's why it's important to keep them intact right from the beginning.
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Now, I want to talk to you about an example.
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So actually two examples.
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The first one is Tampa Bay. So you know the city,
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Tampa Bay. The reason why it's called Tampa Bay is because there is actually
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a bay in Tampa Bay. in 19 in the 1950s and 1970s,
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Tampa Bay's population exploded.
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Sorry, I'm gonna start that again.
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From the 1950s to the 1970s, Tampa Bay's population,
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you know, exploded.
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it exploded for one reason. Once air conditioning was made available to households,
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people said, hey, Florida's liverable all year round,
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not just in the winters. So we can actually handle the summers.
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So it went from population of 400,000 people to over a million by like 1970.
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So in 20 years, it grew by 600,000.
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That's a pretty big, that's a pretty big jump.
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Now, when you have that jump in population,
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development like ensues.
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Right. So development paved over mangroves and marshes that had been filtering
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the bay's water for centuries.
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Now, all this now, untreated,
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you know, lightly treated sewage water,
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just poured into the bay. So nitrogen fed the blooms that blocked the sunlight.
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Seagrass, which you know needs light to survive,
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that was in the bay, collapsed to near nothing.
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between nineteen seventy four and nineteen ninety one,
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things started to change. There was actually a sixty minute segment that held
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the bay up as a pollution poster child.
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And and and public pressure followed too.
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So from that segment, you know,
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in Florida, they they came up with a regulation,
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an act. So Florida's 1978 Grizzly Fig Act forced wastewater treatment plants
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to strip nutrients out before the discharge.
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Before the wastewater treatment plants weren't looking at nutrients,
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it's actually like a third sort of process point that a lot of treatment plants just
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ignored. And for many times, this is not just Tampa Bay.
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I don't want to single out Florida as many people do.
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This happens all this was happening all over the world.
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Nutrients weren't being filtered out.
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So in 1991, the Tampa Bay Estuary Program formed a nitrogen management consortium
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and it coordinated over 500 separate nutrient reduction projects across industry,
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agriculture, and local government,
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plus active habit habitat restoration work,
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rebuilding mangrove and marsh acreages as part of its its long-term habitat plan.
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So essentially what they did is they got together and they said,
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Where are we seeing most of the nutrients coming out of?
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Let's start.
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regulating those those discharges and make sure that we do modeling,
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engineers will wastewater engineers will come up with all this modeling to say,
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hey, at at the end of your pipe of your industry,
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whether it's a factory or anything like that,
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at the end of that pipe, when it goes into the natural water,
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it has to be a certain value. It can't be above a certain value.
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If it's like if ammonia or nitrogen is above,
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like so they look at ammonia, nitrate,
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nitrate, if those are or nitrite,
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nitrate, because the way it goes,
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if those are elevated above a certain level,
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That industry's in trouble because it's going start to contribute
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to excess nitrogen. And that's what's going to happen.
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We're going to start to see algal blooms and seagrass is going to die
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and all this kind of stuff. So once you have that regulation in place,
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then everything good, everything's good because they look at all the industries
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as a whole system and they say,
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okay, if everybody stays below this level,
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we should be fine. Okay. And that's exactly what happened.
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So nitrogen flowing into the bay from wastewater sources dropped by about 90%.
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Just because of certain controls and certain monitoring,
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when you know what's coming out of the pipe from industry and from different places,
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you can do really well. Seagrasses went from roughly like covering 21,000 acres,
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just over 21,000 acres in 1982 to over 40,000 acres in 2015.
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Right? That's almost double what they what they were covering,
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covering an area close to that size of Manhattan,
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that's how big it
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was.
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a bay that was written off back in the 70s now is like the poster child.
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And it and it's about one it creates one in five jobs in the region because
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of that bay being healthy because of of tourism.
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the the bay is actually usable.
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So people come in, they want to go around,
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they they start to increase like ~ you know shops along the sides,
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along the bay. You get a nice walk around there.
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That's important. That's an important aspect of.
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How wastewater treatment upgrades,
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was one of the biggest levers to actually to do the initial turnaround.
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And this is just the stuff at the end of the pipe.
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that's what we call a point source because we know at what point they come out.
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Non-point sources, where you never know where it's coming out of,
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that can be taken up by all these coastal habitats,
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Because usually if it comes out of a pipe,
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a point source, it comes out literally right into the bay.
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or it comes into somewhere before it hits the wastewater treatment plant.
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But we know where it's coming out.
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And it's just a long pipe from that industry that goes into a specific water body.
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With non-point sources, it can come out of anywhere.
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It can go along roads. It can go into these little streams that can't really
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be controlled or monitored that much.
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Well, it could be monitored, but not a lot of times it's monitored.
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So then you you start to use those coastal habitats as the way to take
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up those nutrients. I mean, look at the Everglades.
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Everglades is a as a is a huge sink for nitrogen.
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Right. It just takes it up into its system and it works out really,
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really well, which is great to see.
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You know, that's what that's what we want.
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That's what we want to see. Now,
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there's another story too. When I talked about a little bit about going back
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to that Skidmore and Kowarski Kowski study,
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~ the what they looked at the wetlands along the Mississippi River.
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The Mississippi River is a beautiful place.
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However
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We've known for years that all of the fertilizers and anything kind
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of that contributes to nutrients along the Mississippi River goes down into
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the Mississippi and then it goes right into discharged right into
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the Gulf of Mexico. I was actually on a ship where we measured
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the consequences of all of those nutrients going at the mouth of
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the of the Mississippi in the springtime.
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phytoplankton blooms in the springtime where they're mixing and mixing because
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the winds are still there, mixing,
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and then the summertime mixing stops.
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The phytoplankton dies, it goes down to the bottom of the ocean,
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it gets taken up into the microbial loop where it gets broken down,
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and then oxygen gets taken out.
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But there's so much phytoplankton that oxygen is almost removed from
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the bottom 1.5 layer of the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in this area where this
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plume is. Now, the Mississippi is one of the biggest rivers in the world.
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It goes out pretty far. And so they would measure the the amount of area that this
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plume would take up and make sort of assumptions and measurements along those areas,
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along that area, ~ and see where there's you know lack of dissolved oxygen.
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Cause then you don't have fish or invertebrates or things like that,
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and you're not having a productive environment.
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And then what would happen is those results would go back to Congress,
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because it's all in the US, would go back to Congress.
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That scientist at the time, Dr.
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Nancy Rabelay, would go to Congress and it would testify on the results.
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And that would essentially regulate the amount of fertilizers
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and anything that causes nutrient overload that would happen along the Mississippi.
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So all those all those farms and any kind of in industry that would discharge
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nutrients, that would regulate what would happen at the end.
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And that would regulate how much fertilizer can be used.
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Now look, we use fertilizer. We have to use fertilizer to feed all
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the people in each and one of our countries.
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It's a matter of can we use fertilizer in a way that's sustainable,
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that we're not.
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adding extra or excess nutrients into the water to mess up our water system.
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And these coastal habitats like mangroves and marshes will actually help
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in the process. But they have to be there.
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If we zoom out a little bit, like to look at the world,
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I don't want you to over like take this too much,
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but the world has lost roughly 20% of its mangroves since 1980.
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You know, mostly because of coastal development,
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And it's the exact same thing that almost destroyed Tampa Bay.
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But global blue carbon habitat is still valued at close to $191 billion
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a year in climate benefit alone.
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That's not including the economic
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benefit that it happens that it brings in just like it did in Tampa Bay,
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It looked just like it does in Tampa Bay.
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Right. And that's huge. And that's not even counting the nutrient filtering.
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That's how important these these these coastal wetlands are.
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So the big thing is we need to keep these habitats intact,
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the ones that are there and not pave over them and not develop over them.
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And we also need to bring back the ones that were lost.
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Because there are certain things that we do as humans when we take certain things
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out that we don't know the ramifications of that.
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In the Mississippi Delta in the 70s and 80s,
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there was a huge thing to harden the coastline,
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meaning put in concrete or man-made structures to make sure that certain parts
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of the Delta were not eroding away.
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Cause that's what was happening.
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Certain parts of them were eroding away where people wanted to develop.
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But what we realize, or engineers realize,
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I remember this was at a coastal zone Canada conference a number of years ago,
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and I remember the engineers talking about it.
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What they realized is that when they harden that certain area,
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what was eroded from that area would build up something else in the Delta.
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A lot of times was air were areas where there was indigenous land.
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And so by hardening certain spots in the in the delta,
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that that sand or that that sediment wouldn't go build up the other.
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So all that other
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Part of like indigenous land would actually erode away.
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So there was a ~ new sort of push and movement to green
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the shoreline again and soften the shoreline in a way so that
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the delta could actually rebuild all the stuff that it did before.
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Right. So there are certain things that we do ~ preemptively,
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and then we have to react to the mistakes that we make because we don't realize it.
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And this is what happens when you try to develop.
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Very quickly. We've seen it with so many industries.
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We've seen it with housing. We've seen it with industry.
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we see it now, we're starting to see it with data centers.
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You know, data centers have to pop up all over the place,
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and we're now starting to pay attention to it because they've done it before.
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You know, people starting to put in underwater data centers.
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That's what they want to do. Doesn't make sense.
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It's not proven. We don't know what's going to happen to fish habitat
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or anything else that's that's done,
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and they're all done in small towns where there's not going to be a big kerfuffle.
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Basically, They're not going to make a lot of noise,
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even if they reject it or try and fight it.
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So there's there's a lot of and there,
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and of course, there's different tactics they use to entice certain communities
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to say, yes, let's do this because it'll benefit benefit us in the end.
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But the thing is that there's certain things that you can do right away,
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Like going back to
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not contributing nutrients, you can cut back on synthetic fertilizers.
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I know here in Ontario the government did that on their own.
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They said a long time ago, they said,
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hey, we can't use certain pesticides and nutrients because it's causing
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too much problems in the Great Lakes watersheds and in the Great Lakes essentially.
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But we also need to ~ move and and so sorry,
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instead of using synthetic, you can use to a slow release or organic option,
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Which is not going to be as effective on your lawn,
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but that's okay because it's for the betterment
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of.
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the entire environment that is around you.
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If you don't like green water in your lakes or in your streams and things,
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then maybe think about doing this.
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But it's not just tied to individually,
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We are looking at government aspects to help make sure that industry
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is following those point source numbers.
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There are a lot of times where government is just going to say,
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hey, you know what? We're just going to leave it alone.
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Where you can do your best management practices.
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Follow the best management practices to keep it as low as possible.
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Other that, you should be fine.
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And we're gonna talk about that tomorrow because that can lead to red tide,
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especially in an era of climate change.
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So I think that's where we're gonna leave for tomorrow.
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We're gonna end the episode here.
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But I want you to think about how Tampa Bay has changed,
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between the 1950s and 1970s, it looked horrible because of such massive growth
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and development and everything.
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And then we realize that we can fix this.
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This is fixable by human intervention.
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And we can continue to make progress on that in each and every area.
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If our government has our back and the people pressure the government to say,
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hey, you know what? We need to do this.
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We need to do this not from an environmental standpoint,
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but from a safety standpoint. The environment standpoint just comes together.
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It is how our our world works.
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We can't change everything to benefit ourselves.
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Without seeing the consequences.
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And we're starting to see those consequences,
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or we have seen those consequences for decades.
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It's a matter of can we fix them or not?
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We know there's a proven fix. We know that nature will figure out a way if
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we put it back or if we leave it the way it is,
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and that we'll be okay if that happens.
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So that's the episode for today.
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I hope you enjoyed ~ this episode.
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I would love to hear your comments.
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If you're listening to this on Spotify,
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please let me know your thoughts.
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By the way.
18:57
Starting a new YouTube channel with how to protect the ocean.
18:59
I know for those of you who've been following,
19:01
I did one on the channel that's now called Ocean Decoded,
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which I go live on every Monday to Thursday.
19:07
But I'm gonna start a new channel where I've where I've actually been posting
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all the audio to this, but I'm actually gonna start posting the videos to this.
19:15
It's gonna be the same episode,
19:17
but you get to watch the videos.
19:18
I'm gonna provide some editing.
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I hope you enjoy it. let me know your thoughts.
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I'm gonna let you know when this is.
19:23
And if you're watching this on YouTube now.
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I appreciate subscribe, you know,
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hit that notification bell. And if you're listening to this on audio,
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love you always for that. ~ if you want to give me a comment on Spotify or
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~ if you want to contact me through my socials,
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links are in the show notes. I want to thank you so much for joining
19:43
me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
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Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.