Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority

System-Wide Assessment and Monitoring Program (SWAMP)

Duration:
Completed September 2019

The State of Louisiana and its partners have allocated considerable resources and have made long-term commitments to the restoration and management of wetland and aquatic resources in the coastal zone. There are currently hundreds of coastal protection and restoration projects being planned, designed, and built throughout Louisiana’s coastal zone. Measuring the overall and combined impacts of these projects at a basin-wide scale and identifying unintended consequences has to be part of any long-term ecosystem and community resilience program such as what is outlined in Louisiana’s 2017 Coastal Master Plan.

The Challenge

Since the early 1990s, a number of project-specific monitoring efforts have been established by state agencies and other entities. Comprehensive monitoring of social and environmental factors became challenging as adequate reference areas were difficult to identify and what was being monitored for was not consistent among these efforts. With the continued development of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan, a more comprehensive, systematic monitoring program is needed to meet the needs the state’s coastal protection and restoration program. To address this need, the System Wide Assessment and Monitoring Program (SWAMP) was envisioned as a long-term monitoring program to ensure that a comprehensive network of coastal data collection activities is in place to support the development, implementation, and adaptive management of the coastal protection and restoration program.

The Approach

This program, which is currently being implemented in southeast Louisiana and was developed for the rest of the coast, outlines where and what kind of monitoring already exists along the coast and where it needs to be installed. This monitoring system accounts for both the human and natural systems and includes water quality, sediment movement, economics, wetland vegetation type, fisheries, and changes in where people live, among other things. Incorporating the human as well as the ecological dimensions into the monitoring program allows a more complete picture about how Louisiana’s coastal program is progressing.

The framework for this system was completed in 2013. That was followed up by applying the framework to focus specifically on the Barataria Basin in 2015 and then with a subsequent application to the Breton Sound and Pontchartrain areas, effectively covering southeast Louisiana.

Using this framework, monitoring plans were developed for western basins (incudes Calcasieu, Sabine, Mermentau, Vermillion, Atchafalaya, and Terrebonne basins) for both the natural and human systems using a process to identify the monitoring variables, objectives, and sampling design. Ultimately, this long-term monitoring program ensures a comprehensive network of coastal data collection activities is in place to support the development, implementation, and adaptive management of the coastal protection and restoration program within coastal Louisiana.

The Water Institute worked with collaborators from Dynamic Solutions, LLC, and U.S. Geological Survey. Currently, CPRA is implementing the coastwide monitoring plan.

The report can be found here: https://cims.coastal.louisiana.gov/RecordDetail.aspx?Root=0&sid=23567

Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority

System-Wide Assessment and Monitoring Program (SWAMP)

The Challenge

The Approach

KEY TEAM MEMBERS