Director’s Note: Palma Sola Bay – how’s it doing lately?

July 11, 2024 – By Sarasota Bay Estuary Program director Dave Tomasko

Our staff spent yesterday morning measuring the amount of seagrass and macroalgae in Palma Sola Bay, followed by an afteroon visit to one of our ongoing restoration projects designed to continue to protect the health of that same system.

As you know, our Ecosystem Health Report Card is based on four individual metrics of the health of our local waters. Two of those are typical water quality parameters – the amount of nitrogen in the water, and also the amount of phytoplankton (floating microscopic algae). Then we add in the amount of macroalgae, and also the acreage of seagrass. For Palma Sola Bay, we had no macroalgae data until just a few years ago, after we decided to implement a bay-wide macroalgae monitoring effort – as recommended in the 2021 Macroalgae Workshop the SBEP hosted.

Across Sarasota Bay, volunteers trained by SBEP (using an EPA-approved Quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) Plan) sample >40 sites twice a year – in the spring and then the early summer. At each site, volunteers lay out a 50-meter transect, and then determine the percent of the bay bottom that is covered by macroalgae at six stations per transect. Across the bay, this gives us several hundred values from which we can quantify the amount of macroalgae in the bay.

Palma Sola Bay is not very well-flushed, as it is a bit of a circulatory dead-end. The rate of water circulation in Palma Sola Bay is behind only Little Sarasota Bay. Also, Palma Sola Bay has those horse rides – people who ride horses on the east end of the causeway, on the north side. That site has had higher levels of fecal indicator bacteria than the portion of the causeway on the south side.

Low circulation and horses? Sounds like a potential hot spot for degraded conditions, right? Well, maybe not.