Tampa Bay and Saint Joseph Sound

Nearly 2 million people live in the Tampa Bay region, and the bay is the largest estuary in the State of Florida. The bay is home to the third largest port in the United States (in terms of domestic tonnage), and nearly 100,000 recreational boats are registered to owners in the counties surrounding the bay. Tampa Bay is also home to approximately 40,000 breeding pairs of shorebirds and over 100 bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) (Tampa Bay National Estuary Program, 1996). In the years following World War II, the human population in the Tampa Bay region increased at a rapid rate. Accompanying this population growth was a significant loss of native upland, intertidal, and subtidal plant communities. Perhaps half of the bay’s seagrass meadows were lost between 1950 and 1982 because of combined impacts from dredgeand-fill activities and degraded water quality (Tampa Bay Estuary Program, 1996). The loss of seagrass acreage is thought to be at least partially responsible for declines in commercial and recreational fisheries for various species of finfish and shellfish. In southwest Florida, seagrass meadows have been the focus of a significant amount of research on the relationships between pollutant loads, water quality, and seagrass health. In Tampa Bay, historical losses of seagrass coverage have been linked to both direct and indirect impacts (Lewis and others, 1991; Haddad, 1989; Lewis, 1989). In contrast, recent increases in seagrass coverage have been linked to improved water quality, which has in turn been linked to reductions in nitrogen loads caused by humans (Johansson, 1991; Avery, 1997; Johansson and Ries, 1997; Johansson and Greening, 2000). Recent improvements in the treatment and disposal of wastewater discharges by the city of Tampa, the city of St. Petersburg, and the city of Clearwater have been identified as major causes of improved water quality in the bay (Tampa Bay Estuary Program, 1996). To the north and west of Tampa Bay are the areas of Clearwater Harbor and Saint Joseph Sound (fig. 1). While adjacent to Tampa Bay, Clearwater Harbor and Saint Joseph Sound have not yet benefited from a detailed examination of Tampa Bay and Saint Joseph Sound