Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Water Quality topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
FGCU's Water School outlines $25M Peace River pilot, maps septic hotspots and offers data tools for state water investments
Summary
The Water School told trustees it is using public 'big data', modeling and AI to identify nutrient hotspots, grade nearly 2 million septic systems and run cost-benefit scenarios for state-funded water-quality investments; a $25M Peace River project will scale the pilot.
Greg Tolley, dean of The Water School at FGCU, told the Board that a set of state-funded, data-driven projects will help legislators and local decision-makers prioritize investments to improve water quality and reduce nutrient loads.
Tolley and Assistant Professor and program coordinator Rachel Rotz said the approach aggregates publicly available datasets (demographics, land use, septic system locations, agricultural practices and monitoring data), normalizes disparate sampling methods, and runs models and artificial-intelligence analyses that identify "hotspots" where interventions will yield the greatest water-quality improvement per dollar spent. They described a Peace River pilot that has been used to test the methods and a proposed $25 million Peace River project intended to scale the work to additional watersheds.
Tolley highlighted a septic-system analysis: roughly 2 million systems statewide were evaluated and about 37 percent were flagged as high-risk because they were 40 or more years old, with a substantial share located within 150 feet of waterways. Those overlapping risk factors were shown as high-priority areas for interventions such as sewer conversion or septic-system upgrades, he said.
Tolley explained that the models can be rerun for scenario planning and cost-benefit analysis, enabling legislators and local leaders to compare outcomes across different investments (e.g., septic-to-sewer conversions, agricultural best-management practices, stormwater controls) to determine where funds will produce the highest returns in water-quality improvement. Rotz said much of the underlying data is publicly available and that in-field, experimental monitoring supplements the datasets to improve model confidence.
Trustees asked about timelines to see reductions in visible algae or red tide impacts. Tolley said estuarine and freshwater improvements can be seen relatively quickly in focused watersheds, but red tide is an offshore phenomenon with additional drivers; linking inshore nutrient reductions to nearshore red-tide frequency will require further study and sustained investment.
The presentation positioned The Water School's work as a state-scale decision-support tool to help allocate taxpayer funding for maximal environmental return on investment.
