Helping protect Caribbean region’s coastal zones an exciting adventure

NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management’s Aranzazu Lascurain leads a technicolor life.

Her position frequently takes her to the Caribbean, where she networks and shares information about funding opportunities and technical assistance — all to support the office’s mission of enhancing U.S. coastal resilience.

Lascurain is the office’s Southeast and Caribbean regional lead, and she is helping to implement the Coastal Zone Management Act within the region. Passed in 1972, the goal of the legislation is to “preserve, protect, develop, and where possible, to restore or enhance the resources of the nation’s coastal zone.” Lascurain describes her role as having ears and eyes on the ground and building trust with partners.

The National Coastal Zone Management Program was created by the Coastal Zone Management Act. The program is implemented by coastal states — including those bordering the Great Lakes — and U.S. territories. The legislation outlines the steps that states and territories need to take in order to create a program, and NOAA provides funding so they can execute their plans.

The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico is located in the Caribbean, which makes it vulnerable to extreme weather events, including hurricanes. The Southern end of the island has been particularly affected by two events within the past 10 years. Hurricanes Irma and Maria were classified as category 5 storms on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale, and they impacted the island September 7 and 20, 2017, respectively. The storms uprooted and destroyed a considerable number of mangroves in Jobos Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.

The reserve comprises a string of 15 mangrove islands surrounded by reefs and extending westward from the southern tip of the mouth of Jobos Bay. Mangroves provide vital ecosystem services through their extensive root systems that hold soils together; the groups of trees and shrubs minimize coastal erosion, buffer wave action, and filter pollutants from the surrounding ecosystem. Dense mangrove roots also provide a refuge and habitat for marine life and keystone species, such as the West Indian manatee.

Lascurain suspects the hurricanes’ impact was diminished in that southeast section of Puerto Rico that lies beyond the research reserve because the mangroves took the first hit. That theory may also help explain why the mangroves were decimated in the reserve. Some of the funding her office provides allows local partners to implement effective ways to rebuild the mangrove cays, or the small islands of mangroves.

One of these projects is to build up the soil to a certain elevation; the most favorable elevation for mangroves is just above the average height of the high and low tides. Then the soil will be planted with mangrove plants, and Lascurain says their growth will be monitored and documented over time so optimal mangrove growing conditions can be recreated in other parts of the island that were impacted by storms.

Many projects in the program focus on bolstering, rebuilding, and restoring the natural capacities of ecosystems because these ecosystems support human communities. The systems deliver multiple benefits, unlike hard infrastructure, such as an artificial sea wall, which is likely created for just one purpose. A living system like a marsh, oyster beds, or mangroves can provide a range of economic, environmental, and social benefits to human society.

For Lascurain, the most exciting part of her job is listening to people's lived experiences in the region. She thinks it’s both important and sobering to hear about the challenges, which can involve anything from budgetary difficulties to loss of island populations to the growing sense of unease about the impending impacts of climate change on the archipelago. She says the challenges are usually offset, though, by the “amazing creativity and ingenuity, especially in entrepreneurship” that take place in Puerto Rico and throughout the Caribbean islands, and which she hears about with increasing frequency.

These successful adaptive and innovative activities become known as “lessons learned” or “best practices.” She hopes that many lessons learned, such as how to successfully restore the mangroves in the research reserve, are shared with her so the National Ocean Service can share them with other communities in the Caribbean.