These products will include: 
FY03 State of the Science report on nutrient food web relationships in Coastal Systems (AED, 
GED, MED, WED). 
FY04 Interim report on sensitivity of food web response to nutrient loading in coastal systems 
(AED, GED, MED, WED). 
FY05 Recommendation on use of food web related endpoints to predict effects of nutrients on 
important fish and shellfish populations (AED, GED, MED, WED). 
Benefits of Products 
This research will provide the basis for setting ecologically relevant nutrient criteria for 305b 
reporting and TMDL development that supports the protection of aquatic life as mandated under 
CWA. By providing standardized methodology, it will provide guidance to the States and EPA 
Regions for developing appropriate monitoring protocols. In addition, a better understanding of 
nutrient-food web response relationships will significantly improve our ability to predict 
ecosystem response to other nutrient endpoints (DO and SAV loss). 
Gap Analysis 
In order to focus on what can be accomplished with the available resources, we have chosen the 
four coastal regions described above. There are other major coastal regions we are not covering 
such as Mid and South Atlantic systems or Southern Pacific coastal waters. In addition, this 
research is focused on coastal receiving waters. It does not directly focus on understanding 
nutrient response relationships in streams, rivers, lakes, inland wetlands, or headwater seeps, for 
which additional research is needed. Longer range plans do include an integrated watershed 
approach as resources become available. We are not developing DO criteria for any freshwater 
species of fish or SAV light requirements for freshwater SAV. 
Currently we do not have sufficient understanding of how the biological components of an 
ecosystem interact to process nutrients to be able to predict how differences in these components 
affect the capacity of an ecosystem to assimilate nutrients. To do this more effectively, we need 
to improve our skills in the area of ecosystems ecology and ecosystem modeling. In addition, the 
presence of a database manager to establish a central database or linkages between Divisional 
databases would significantly improve the transfer and sharing of data to be used and tested in a 
variety of approaches (models and classification schemes). It is hoped that NERL will provide 
nutrient loadings for receiving water bodies that will be considered by NHEERL; however, if this 
is not possible then NHEERL will need to determine or estimate loadings. 
References 
Boynton, W.R., Hagy, J.D., Murray, L., Stokes, C., Kemp, W.M. 1996. A comparative analysis 
of eutrophication patterns in a temperate coastal lagoon. Estuaries 19B:408-421. 
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