Rick Outzen August 26, 2025 1 Comment
The Pensacola and Perdido Bays Estuary Program released its 2025 State of the Bays Report today, revealing critical conditions for oyster populations in the Pensacola Bay System while showing stability in seagrass habitats across both watersheds.
- What? The biennial report, which serves as a comprehensive assessment of ecosystem health indicators, ranks environmental factors as improving, stable, declining, critical, or undetermined based on scientific monitoring data. The findings present contrasting conditions between the two bay systems, with water quality improvements in some areas offset by concerning declines in others.
- The Pensacola and Perdido Bays Estuary Program operates under a mission to restore and protect local watersheds through restoration, education, and unbiased scientific monitoring of bay, estuary, and watershed health.
Critical Oyster Decline Signals Broader Ecosystem Stress
Oyster populations in the Pensacola Bay System have reached critical status, indicating a significant concern for the overall health of the estuary.
- Why this matters: The shellfish serve as natural water filtration systems and provide essential habitat for numerous marine species.
Water Quality
Water quality trends vary between Pensacola Bay and Perdido Bay.
- The Pensacola Bay System shows overall stability across key metrics, including nitrogen, phosphorus, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, and chlorophyll-a levels.
- However, the Perdido Bay System presents mixed results with improving dissolved oxygen levels and stable nitrogen, while phosphorus and chlorophyll-a levels are declining.
- Turbidity measurements remain undetermined because of inconsistent monitoring protocols.
Bacterial Contamination
Beach advisory data reveals improving conditions in the Perdido Bay System, where fewer advisories have been issued due to reduced bacterial concentrations.
Conversely, bacterial levels in Pensacola Bay System’s urban bayous—including Chico, Grande, and Texar—continue to frequently exceed established standards, while overall bay advisory numbers remain consistent.
The Perdido Bay System has experienced fewer sanitary sewer overflows, while such incidents have increased in the Pensacola Bay watershed.
New Fisheries Data
This year’s report introduces fisheries monitoring as a new category, providing previously unavailable data on species richness across bay segments. The analysis identifies correlations between seagrass presence and fish diversity, with Perdido Bay’s lower areas—including Wolf Bay, Little Lagoon, and Lower Perdido—supporting higher species richness than open bay areas…