PROJECT MISSION STATEMENT Since 2009, University of Miami ecologists, Exuma Foundation staff, and Exuma residents have worked to clean Lake Victoria, and restore the natural wetland environment in the center of historic George Town. Lake Victoria (aka " the Pond ") has suffered from a lack of coordinated management and poor coastal development practices; Victoria Pond was polluted and had been altered by roads, filling of wetlands and development for over 200 years. The hurricane events of 2015 to 2017 have presented a new urgency to manage coastal wetlands as a tool to mitigate sea level rise and storm-related flooding. Victoria Pond was the largest and deepest of a series of connected mangrove lakes that provided a critical habitat for wildlife like tarpon, bonefish, herons, egrets, and osprey, and that provided controlled flooding along the eastern ridges of Great Exuma. The overall vision for the Victoria Pond restoration project is to demonstrate that a highly-altered coastal wetland can be restored and can regain ecological function. The project is designed to show the value of a protected wetland and coastal environment within a populated settlement; demonstrating that people can live alongside mangroves and their associated wildlife. The goals are: 1. To establish a local mangrove preserve that includes the Pond, an appropriate coastal buffer zone, channels, and associated embayment and ponds that will function as an ecological unit. 2. To complete the necessary clean-up, excavation, and restoration needed to restore natural drainage and tidal flow through the wetland preserve system; ultimately, the cleanup of Victoria Pond will improve the coastal water quality of Elizabeth Harbour. 3. To delineate the preserve area with markers and signage and restore native plant communities to the coastal zone of Victoria Pond. 4. To develop long-term community outreach and coastal stewardship programs to help maintain and finance the management of the Victoria Pond mangrove preserve. 5. To document measurable improvements in coastal water quality and near-shore fish habitat in the George Town environs over the ten-year project.

The Chesapeake Bay Program (" the СВР" or" Program") has been widely celebrated as a model of collaborative management for large multijurisdictional watersheds and for ecosystem management more generally. 1 In an article published six years ago, I joined in ...

The traditional goal of stormwater management is to reduce the threat of flooding to life and property, and so most landscapes are engineered to maximize the speed at which the unwanted water leaves the watershed. This has been effective in landscapes with some topographic gradient. This often involves the installation of drainage ditches that disperse runoff from urban areas to receiving water bodies; in coastal areas this means a tidal creek, estuary, bay, sounds, or the coastal ocean. This practice reduces flood hazards in some cases but results in unintended effects on the natural hydrology in the watershed and downstream tidal dynamics. For low-gradient watersheds in humid climates, ditch systems also lower the water table of an area, increasing infiltration to recharge and groundwater discharge to streams (baseflow), and larger volume of freshwater delivered downstream yearround. Ditches also create unintentional avenues for the incoming tide from a tidal creek or tidally-infl...

Roanoke is addressing problems that confront many small and medium sized cities in the U.S., especially disparities in health and life expectancy between neighborhoods. These disparities are often legacies of decades of racial and economic segregation, resulting in low-income or disinvested communities. Typically, such neighborhoods have fewer parks, higher vacancy rates and less stable affordable housing stock, inadequate public transit systems, too few clinics, too many fast food restaurants and insufficient access to high quality schools. In Roanoke these are the northwest and southeast quadrants, both federally designated Medically Underserved Areas, and characterized by a large proportion of the city’s low-income individuals and families who may be uninsured, underinsured and/or Medicaid recipients