Christopher D Reich (Former Employee)

The Loxahatchee River and Estuary are small, shallow, water bodies located in southeastern Florida. Historically, the Northwest Branch (Fork) of the Loxahatchee River was primarily a freshwater system. In 1947, the river inlet at Jupiter was dredged for navigation and has remained permanently open since that time. Drainage patterns within the basin have also been altered significantly...

To separately quantify the roles of fresh and saline submarine groundwater discharge (SGD), relative to that of rivers, in transporting nutrients to Tampa Bay, Florida, we used three approaches (Darcy's Law calculations, a watershed water budget, and a 222Rn mass-balance) to estimate rate of SGD from the Pinellas peninsula. Groundwater samples were collected in 69 locations in the...

The fragile coral reefs of the Florida Keys form the largest living coral reef ecosystem in the continental United States. Lining the shallow outer shelf approximately 5 to 7 km seaward of the keys, the reefs have national aesthetic and resource value. As recently as the 1970s, the coral reefs were the heart of a vibrant ecosystem. Since then, the health of all ecosystem components has...

A highly detailed digitized map depicts 22 benthic habitats in 3140.5 km2 of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Dominant are a seagrass/lime-mud zone (map area 27.5%) throughout Hawk Channel and seagrass/carbonate-sand (18.7%) and bare carbonate-sand (17.3%) zones on the outer shelf and in The Quicksands. A lime-mud/seagrass-covered muddy carbonate-sand zone (9.6%) abuts the...

No abstract available.

Thirty-one samples of transported Holocene Acropora cervicornis "sticks" sampled from carbonate sand tempestite accumulations at 19 sites along a 180-km-long stretch of the Florida reef tract were dated using the radiocarbon (14C) method. The "modern fossils" collected from just a few centimeters below the surface ranged in age from 0.5 to 6.4 ka. The majority lived between 3.5 and 5.5...