Port Everglades, Coral Restoration, and Certifications with Erik Neugaard

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick!

On today’s episode, we talk with Erik Neugaard, Environmental Program Manager for Broward County Port Everglades about Port Everglades, Coral Restoration, and Certifications.   Read his full bio below.

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Showtimes: 
1:25  Nic & Laura talk about Florida

10:20  Interview with Erik Neugaard Starts

10:39  Port Everglades

18:38  Coral Restoration

30:31  Certifications

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This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Erik Neugaard at https://www.linkedin.com/in/neugaard.

Guest Bio:
Erik Neugaard has more than 30 years of experience as an environmental professional and is currently the Environmental Program Manager for Broward County Port Everglades. Previous experience includes positions at Miami-Dade County Department of Environmental Resources Management, Florida Department of Transportation, and as a consultant. He holds a BS degree in natural sciences and a MD degree in marine biology, as well as certifications as a land use planner, wetland scientist, wildlife biologist, fisheries professional, protected species observer, GIS professional, scientific diving safety officer, trimix scuba instructor, and USCG master captain. He is also very active in the South Florida Chapter and is helping establish community coral nursery, oyster gardening, and seagrass nursery programs.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-transcribed

[Intro]

Laura 
Hello and welcome to EPR with your favorite environmental nerds Nic and Laura. On today's episode, Nic and I discussed the state of Florida. We talk to Erik Neugaard about Port Everglades, coral restoration and obtaining professional certifications. And finally, humans have three types of cones in our eyes, allowing us to see the colors red through violet. Mantis Shrimp, on the other hand, have 16 types of cones. While scientific research shows this does not necessarily mean mantis shrimp perceive minute differences in color, or see colors we can imagine it does indicate that mantis shrimp is a total badass, in Nic's opinion.  Don't believe us, just Google mantis shrimp punch.

Nic  
It's pretty cool. I'm just saying.

Laura 
It sounds cool. Hit that music

[NAEP Event News]

Nic 
Registration is now open for NAEP's 2022 annual conference and training Symposium on May 16 through May 19 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We're going to have our annual update on recently the case law with Pam Hudson, Michael Smith, and EPRs very own Fred Wagner. It's always a fantastic session, so please check it out at www.naep.org We appreciate all of our awesome sponsors and they will keep this show going. If you'd like to sponsor the show, please head over to www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com and check out the sponsor form for details. Let's get to our segment.

[Nic & Laura's Segment: The State of Florida]

Nic
Yeah, no, I mean I have a long history with Florida too. So we can definitely do Florida.

Laura
Do you? What's your history with Florida?

Nic
So speaking of like living living things, vacations on the cheap, right like when you when you don't have a lot of money you find creative ways to do vacations and so every other year we would go to Daytona Beach. We had a friend of a family who had a house there and they let us stay for about 10 days every every other year we had to pick when you know and just coordinate all that stuff but then we just go live like it was we were just living in there. And it wasn't on the beach. It wasn't near the beach. But it was, you know, free, you know, essentially so the only thing you had to do was cut the grass except, their lawn mower was about the same age as me and they're the thickest grass in the universe grew in that front yard. It was brutal.

Laura
Yeah, well it's Florida.

Nic
And of course, you know it's Florida, as far as so doesn't matter what time of day it is. It's humid and you're going to like you sweat the second you step outside. And yeah, my dad wasn't about that action. So it was just me and my brother cutting grass and he'll be like it was stuck and you're just so that's one of my my very fond memories of Florida but the funniest part about it is the second we hit that Florida border. My dad would plop in his one Beach Boy's tape. And that's what we listened to for 10 straight days. I mean we're going to Orlando we're doing whatever we're doing. That's what we're listening to. So I still know all the words to every Beach Boy's song as a result. Um, Yeah so you actually grew up there?

Laura 
So did you guys actually do like the gator land or some of the fun like Orange Grove stops or anything?

Nic 
No, no, we did the beach. Which was also free. And then we would do theme parks every like every once in a while you'd go like you know Disney World and Orlando or a Universal Studios. . And that was really fun.

Laura 
Those are not free so your parents were like free stay but let's spend all our money in the parks.

Nic
Yeah, exactly. Yeah

Laura
Which is one way to experience Florida. Parks is the thing. There's lots of them. It's not just Disney World. And but yeah, that doesn't, you didn't get to see all the cool stuff. Florida has the most amazing habitats, the most incredible changes and habitats you can be on the same hike in a wetland in upland scrub, in areas with a ridiculous number of insects, birds. You know obviously looking for gators. Martha and I, Martha who lives in North Carolina by you know, we were joking about how even still five years in Syracuse and I'm still looking for gators in every waterway. You get conditioned for that in Florida. There can be gators in a storm pond. I've seen otters crossing four lane highways. I mean it's, it's a wild place and it's it's kind of crazy to see how much population explosion is really encroaching on everything. But there are still some really wild spaces. And I'm with Eric, our guest today he, Florida's just amazing on the coast inland. There's so much diversity.

Nic 
Well, I think you know, like I said in my professional career I've actually worked a lot in Florida as well. And one of the places that I've worked at I think you've worked with too is MacDill Air Force Base. And you know, it was built in the 40s in a lot of what they did in the 40s was like this seems like a good spot. Why not here, right? And then it turns out Oh, that's where every endangered species in Florida lives both the birds and in the water. It's just impossible to build their 40%, no 90% of it's in the floodplain. They basically have to when they want to build a new building, they have to take another one down because there's nowhere for them to put it really. So it's a really unique ecosystem and it's a really, really cool place to be, to work. Because it's so so concentrated.

Laura 
Yeah, basically everything in Florida started in the 40s and 50s. Yeah, it was a lot of things. 1950 is the baseline for a lot of restoration projects, because that's where they have aerial imagery to and that is before mass population came up. And prior to that even the sewage systems were on the water some still are and they mostly directed their output right into the water.Directly. There's still a lot of cleanup efforts in a lot of areas. But yeah, manatees I mean, there are species unique to the whole world in this place. It's so, if you can get to Florida and really get to the those places, see those things. It's a magical place, but you have to filter through the people, and the traffic, and the mosquitoes that sometimes are very very thick also.

Nic  
So yeah, so interesting. Yeah. Like okay, so you grew up in a part of Florida.

Laura  
Dunedin, Florida. It's directly west of Tampa.

Nic 
Okay.  I mean, so come on, give me a sense of and so there's like Pensacola, there's Tampa, Miami, all completely different places, right.

Laura  
And so, very different cultures.

Nic 
How do you experience all of Florida Can you do that in one trip?

Laura 
One trip? Well, kind of I mean, I didn't realize even I grew up in Dunedin, which is on the western side of Tampa completely developed. I think recently they've just pretty much developed one of the last remaining natural areas in the county. Yeah it's crazy. Um, but then when I started working for Hillsborough County, I had no idea Hillsborough was a giant acreage wise County. And I had no idea that east of Tampa itself was completely rural farms, tons of just miles and miles of trails and wetlands galore, all kinds of amazing habitat. No clue of course, they're building out that way now. But when I started there, I would get in a truck and drive around and get totally lost. I had no idea where I  was and be out in, you know, Florida wilderness essentially. So I think you can. I think if you visit a city, you have to just get in a car and maybe drive. Ocala is in the middle between Tampa and Orlando. So you can go to the parks but then get in a car and drive more central to the state and there are still a lot of really amazing parks. And I think to that there's some preserve lands too. There's a place called Florida Forever, and they are a working ranch, but a lot of it has been donated to the state and you can do all these really cool tours, zip lines, horseback riding, Old Florida cracker horses, which are small for use for that were used for herding cattle. So much fun. So there's a lot of stuff you can do. If you just take some time to get outside of one of the cities. Plus you know diving snorkeling all those great things.

Nic 
Yeah, of course. Oh gosh. Yeah. Like it's funny though. You kind of just reminded me like one of the NAEP conferences we had. There was a talk about when we had it in St. Pete, and there was a conversation about Tampa and how all this development had created, and it's the same thing is going on for lots of cities, right where you build a bunch of infrastructure and you don't plan for how the water drains it creates significant flooding issues, right. It's a really huge problem for Florida because the highest elevation in the entire states like 300 feet. But it was really interesting to see they're trying to come up with really creative ways of dealing with this problem because it is a really big challenge and it makes you know, having clean water a really difficult thing when you take in all the oils and all this stuff. So you have farmland outside of the city, and then you have all of the junk in the city and then it goes straight out into the water body like you said. It's a really significant challenge. So they are doing they are all dealing with.

Laura 
Yeah, totally. And I guess as far as like, can you experience Miami and Tampa? You can't. Florida's a big state, long crosswise from top to bottom. It's long. It's short across, it's only like three hours you can go you can be in Florida, and maybe do St. Augustine which then they have historical stuff and pirates and forts and cool things there. But if you want to do, you'd have to spend some time to do the whole state plus the Keys. It's an amazing, amazing place. Right? Yeah, Miami is a completely different world than Tallahassee is kind of being like in Georgia. You know,

Nic 
I think Miami is its own world compared to anything else. Really. It's a unique space. But yeah, I mean, what is it? I think it's actually 12 hours from the top of the state to the Keys. And it's something like that. It's an extremely, extremely long state.

Laura 
Yeah, when you drive there from the north, it's like cool. We're in Florida. Awesome. That means we have only six hours to go.

Nic 
Yeah right, that's enough. Florida gushing for now so. We can always come back to because there's still so much more but, let's get to our interview.

Laura
Sounds good.

[Interview with Erik Neugaard Starts]

Nic
Hello, and welcome back to EPR on a very special Earth Day recording. today. Yeah, really excited to be recording on today on Earth Day and obviously not coming out on Earth Day but hey, we're doing our part. So very excited to our interview today with Eric Neugaard, the Environmental Program Manager at Port Everglades. Really happy to have you on the show. Eric, thank you for being here.

Erik Neugaard 
Thank you for inviting me looking forward to this.

[Port Everglades]

Nic 
Yeah. So tell us a little bit about the port itself. I don't know too much about it. So what is it?

Erik Neugaard 
Well Port Everglades is located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is the third largest or most active cruise port in the world. It's the 11th largest container port in the United States. And it's the I think the second largest petroleum port in Florida. We supply petroleum to all of Southeast Florida 13 different counties. We supply all the fuel to Fort Lauderdale International Airport as well as Miami international airport. So there's a significant amount of equity here. The name is a little confusing Everglades to the west but has a long history behind it. And we're actually on the ocean. We're not in the Everglades.

Nic  
Yeah, that's gonna be my next question. So why do they call it Port Everglades?

Erik Neugaard 
Well, it has to do with going back to the 1920s when there was a lot of commerce that came out of the Everglades. It has had many different names. It's on like Mabel. So that was actually part of the name at one time and Port Everglades stuck. And we've been here since 1928.

Nic 
Wow. Well, yeah, Port Everglades is much cooler than Port Mabel, I don't know. I'm not going to disparage the name, but I get it. I understand. So, what does it mean to be the Environmental Program Manager for Port Everglades?

Erik Neugaard 
It means anything that is either environmental, or people consider to be environmental that comes to my desk. So I get calls about birds that are attacking people in the parking lot. Yeah, I get calls about bees and we are trying to manage our bee population we're a significant produce import port. And because of that, there are a lot of bees that come in. So we tried to figure out what GIS mapping on the bee colonies trying to determine where they're most actively showing up. We have traps set up in the areas where they're most problematic around our cruise terminal parking garages. Last thing we want is someone who's getting on a cruise to be sung in the face by a bee. So we're doing our best to manage them. We're also working with our local Florida Department of Agriculture who's out here trapping as well. They have found that we have extremely high percentage Africanisation and some of the bees that are coming in here basically their killer bees. So it is a little problematic, and we definitely want to keep them away from the cruise ship passengers.

Nic
Yeah, for sure.

Erik Neugaard
You would really think about that as an environmental issue but it is something that I engage in because there isn't anybody else here to take care of that.

Nic 
Yeah, so that's definitely very important thing for your job but you have other things you do as well right? Like it's a it's like it's like it's a catch all. So what else do you guys, what are your big things you work on?

Erik Neugaard 
Well, like separating my titles and work environmental program manager but I like inserting compliance and stewardship and they're so environmental compliance, the stewardship program manager, and I differentiate between compliance and stewardship compliance with things we have to do by law. That means taking care of all the contamination issues that we have, like I mentioned, we are a very significant petroleum port. It has a long history of you know, we've been a petroleum ports in the 1930s. There is contamination here, there are contamination issues that have to be addressed. We have a lot of activity, there's discharges pretty regularly that have to be addressed. So that's on the compliance side. We do have environmental permitting also for our infrastructure improvements. We have a very significant project coming up the deepening of the board, and that has a lot of planning and also compliance issues associated with it. We're trying to advance the project forward. So right now we're very focused on coral impacts, and that's probably taking up almost 90% of my job right now is dealing with the coral issues that we're going to be contending with. But on a stewardship level, we get to do some fun things. It's maybe 10% of the work I do is stewardship, but we are collaborating with a lot of different nonprofit organizations, one in particular the South Florida chapter of NAEP, we just had our Earth Day photo at our community oyster gardening lot where we're collecting shells from different restaurants. We're drying them on the lot. We're going to have bagging events with the public to put the shucked oyster shells and bags and then hang them behind people's docks the sea walls to help filter the water and kind of spread the oysters around a little bit and the next phase will be finding areas where we can put the oysters on the bottom to replace oyster beds that historically existed here. So it's a multi step process has been several years in the making. We're to the point now we're actually collecting shells. And we're very excited about engaging as many different nonprofit organizations as we have. We have, I think, five so far. So there's quite a bit of synergy with this.

We're also involved with the SFAEP, that's the South Florida chapter of the NAEP. They have a community coral nursery program that started and we have a lot of coral issues we're dealing with there. So we're, that's a project that SFAEP kicked off about seven years ago and then went through about five years of permitting and now it's really starting to get some traction and we're very excited about that too. And opportunities where we can collaborate with them on that. The bees is another example of something that that's not compliance, it's just stewardship, you know, and we're also going to be setting up a community seagrass nursery we have one of the largest one of the largest manatee aggregation areas in Florida. It's the second largest one in Broward County. We had like 600 some manatees this year at our peak, and currently the manatees are struggling because the loss of seagrass throughout Florida. So we're hoping that we can supplement the seagrass that we have in the aggregation area, they come into a power plant cooling canal that's on our property. And we're hoping to supplement the seagrass that exists there and so when they come in in the winter hungry, there's more seagrass for them to eat. So that's another example of a Stewardship Initiative. So there's a lot of them going on. They'll actually be giving a presentation at the NAEP conference about this. We won an award in 2020 because of the stewardship initiatives and we're very excited about the programs we're engaged in and we look forward to finding other opportunities to do more stewardship here.

Nic 
Yeah, wow. I mean, that's that's a lot of really great stuff to hear about him. You know, that's the impact too. And so, would you say the challenges for the port you know, you say it's been around since the 20s. And does the water table being so high in Florida? Does that influence like how you guys do remediation and cleanup for spills?

Erik Neugaard 
Well, yes, it does. We're about three to seven feet to groundwater depending on where we are on the board and the area where we have the larger contaminant plumes that is about three feet. It's a lower elevation area. So we have free product recovery systems that are picking up the product. Right now. We have a Memorandum of Agreement with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection on advancing different segments of areas that have contamination. We're bringing a lot of them to closure, but we have this large area where there's a very large contaminant plume, and we're currently reconfiguring that area to allow larger tankers to come in, and in doing so, we're going to be more actively doing remediation at this site. But it just it's ongoing out here. I don't know that I'll ever be complete. And then we have the issues of PFAS that's a national challenge and we have the largest PFAS fire department here in Broward County. PFAS is the only firefighting foam that's effective. And because of our petroleum holdings and our cruise ships and everything here, we don't have another choice. And it's going to be a challenge. We haven't, it's long history and I think we're in the same boat as everybody else. We don't know what's gonna happen?

[Coral Restoration]

Nic 
Yeah, it's just really wild. But like I say, it's really cool that you get to do multiple things, right? So you Yes, you have to do the cleanup and the compliance. But those stewardship projects are really impactful and really interesting as well. So how did those come to be? How do you start working on those kinds of projects?

Erik Neugaard 
Well, some of them are just like magic is really a word that comes to mind and just really is magical how all these things just fall into place. I mean, I brought a lot of stuff with me and when I came here, like I mentioned the coral nursery was a project that is a SFAEP started about seven years ago, I've only been at the Port five. So that's something that came with me when I came here. I had no idea that there was the potential for so much interaction with the Port with that coral nursery project. That interaction hasn't truly fulfilled its ultimate level of participation. But we're trying to make sure I have to be very careful because we're a county agency and we have rules about conflict of interest, and I have to be very careful about where I step on things. So the coral nursery is something that is a completely community oriented program. It is intended to give the public an opportunity to get hands on experience, propagating cultivating corals, to make them more stewards of our coral reefs and actually just even educate them about the fact that we have our coral reefs offshore here. I don't know the exact statistics or if anybody's even tried to determine them, but I'm guessing maybe 80% of the population in Broward County and Fort Lauderdale area, doesn't even know that we have coral reefs within swimming distance of our shore. They just think just sand that goes out to the Bahamas. And we have the most spectacular coral reefs there and we want to do everything we can do to protect them. I mean, I do we do have this deepening project coming up that will impact corals. It's unfortunate that that has to happen but we also the population of Florida has stopped growing since the 1940s and this deepening project is really just keeping up so we can talk more about that if you like the deepening project has, I just looked it up. It will be 26 years old on May 9th. So it's been a long term project. It's gone through considerable agency review, interagency review. And we have developed a significant program with this deepening project, in that we have established an interagency working group that has been phenomenal and working together in a collaborative effort and trying to find ways that we can minimize the impacts from this project. And I'll actually at the NAEP conference, I'll be discussing that in more detail. But it's been remarkable. And so corals is a huge part of what I do. I do have a degree in marine biology so it's kind of a good fit. I don't you know, just it's sometimes hard to differentiate between work and pleasure because when on the weekends when I go diving, I'm doing all the work for the coral nursery. So I don't know sometimes which hat to wear, or which had to be wearing when I speak.

Nic  
I hear you I hear you. So how did you end up working at the Port then is

Erik Neugaard 
It's  a long story? My bachelor's is in natural science, biology, and I graduated during a recession that's kind of hard to find a job in the field. I've worked for a while as a dive instructor on a cruise ship and then at a dive shop, managed a dive shop, and Captain a motor yacht taking you know the owner and his family diving. And then I started with the Dade County Department environmental resources management as a pollution control inspector and then very quickly became a hydrogeologist there which had nothing to do with my educational background. Well, a little bit but not you know it's more of a natural biological scientist than a physical scientist. And then from there, I went to the Florida Department of Transportation and that was quite a unique move for me because in that position, we were required to do everything NEPA, so that just everything that you could imagine environmental I was dealing with and I did that for a while then was recruited by a consulting firm I did consulting for 15 years and then I decided to come back to government and this opportunity was available and it's been a pretty perfect fit.

Nic 
Yeah, I mean, it really does sound like it what you're doing on the weekends still helps your job your day job. Yeah, I would say so.

Erik Neugaard 
Yeah, I should have mentioned that somewhere in between I got my master's in marine biology, so that made it an even more perfect fit.

Nic 
Oh, that's so awesome. Well, I'm glad that that Yeah. Thank you for walking us through that. But the I had a curiosity question too, because a lot of coastal areas are dealing with climate change and impacts from those such as the sea level rise. Is that happening at Port Everglades? Are you guys taking measures to,

Erik Neugaard 
Well, it's happening across the globe? Of course, it is. It is something that we're we take into consideration. Our state legislature has a requirement that we look at the 50 year planning horizons watch 2070 For example, with the new bulkheads we're putting in the new sea walls. They're designed so we can add up to six feet of additional seawall to them to accommodate up to six feet of additional sea level rise. But a lot of the infrastructure at the Port is more than 50 years. Old. And we also have to be concerned about what happens after that 50 year planning horizon. And SFAEP is actually planning to put a workshop together to discuss sea level rise planning beyond the 50 year planning horizon, and that's where things get kind of crazy. And I mean, sea level rise helps with the depths of the water in terms of bringing ships in and we have a lot of infrastructure that will flood. But we have some areas now with the high king tides are already starting to flood. So we're already being impacted by sea level rise. And we have ongoing studies trying to determine at six inch intervals where our infrastructure is most susceptible and we plan accordingly with our future development, taking those infrastructure challenges into consideration. But it's hard because it's a moving target. I mean, it's we don't know for sure what's going to happen. It could go the other way. But we have to plan for the worst. And that includes looking beyond the 50 year planning horizon because we hope that some of the infrastructure we're putting in now will have a life expectancy of more than 50 years.

Nic 
Yeah, and that's that's a big challenge, I think for a lot of different places and

Erik Neugaard
Yeah, all coastal areas.

Nic
Yeah, yeah. And so, like, I know, for example, sometimes even where you can build totally changes, right. So are you having to plan for it kind of thing where you're not even building new buildings. You have to kind of remove old buildings as well. So it's not even just, you know, new infrastructure, but getting rid of old infrastructure safely as well.

Erik Neugaard 
Well, not so much yet. Within the 50 year planning window. We don't foresee any of those type of impacts. We haven't really evaluated everything that closely yet. But it's after 50 years that things start really, sea level. The NOAA sea level rise predictions significantly increase after 2070. And we have to look at the whole region to see what's going to happen and I think we have to plan start planning now for where we're going to be in 2080, 2090, 2100. It just seems prudent to do so because we shouldn't be making decisions now that might adversely affect the decision that would have to be made later to be able to accommodate those type of changes. And 60, 70, 80 years. Some things like our barrier island. I don't know the exact elevation of it, but I believe it to be less than five feet. So with six feet of sea level rise, we're going to lose our barrier island and that's going to affect our port, you know, we're no longer going to be protected. So we have those type of issues that we have to look at beyond the 50 year planning horizon. And those kinds of things fall on my shoulders too, because it just everybody thinks sea level rise is an environmental issue and it is but,

Laura 
It's definitely specifically a port issue. Are you the only person on the team is it just you doing all the environmental stuff or do you have a team there?

Erik Neugaard 
I have one staff member, working on two and we have a lot of consultants support. So we have in house consultant, one full time environmental person Plus, there's almost an infinite number of people that can be drawn upon depending on what's happening. Plus for every one of our projects we typically have environmental consultants on it. So there's a tremendous amount of environmental support from our consulting partners.

Laura 
Yeah, that's great. I did a lot of work with MacDill when I worked for EBC. Do you get most of your projects through grants and or government funding or do you decide that you want to do something in your plan and try to get grants for it?

Erik Neugaard  
We are very regularly pursuing grants, and grants are a substantial component of the funding for our projects. But like with the deepening project that's coming up that's a cost share program with the Army Corps of Engineers. It really is their project. And I can't remember if it's an 80/20 split, but they're bearing the burden of most of the cost and we're contributing to it. And so that is grant related, although there are some grants associated with ancillary projects associated with it. It's very complicated when you're doing stuff on that scale.

Laura 
All right, awesome. Well, I went on a cruise in December on the Carnival Mardi Gras, the one with the roller coaster on it. And I think there's only like, I don't know, they were telling us about the other ships. There's very few other ships that are bigger than that one currently, but there's this like race to build bigger cruise ships. I mean, does that ever end is that part of the navigational improvement project? You know, or how's that gonna end up, or play out?

Erik Neugaard 
That's interesting, usually only by six inches to a foot every time and we happen to always get the largest cruise ships there right now. It's the Wonder of the Seas which is the current a Royal Caribbean ship. And before that, it was Lure of the Seas I don't recall if it was Freedom of the Seas maybe was the one prior to that. And they come here to Port Everglades and we're thrilled to have them here. But the cruise ships actually don't draw that much water. They have to have a shallower draft to be able to get into remote islands, their their docks and seaports. So I think the Wonder of the Weas only has a draft of about 30 feet. It's really the tankers in the large post Panamax or Aframax freighters that have the greater draft and require us to deepen. It's not the cruise ships.

Laura 
Okay, so what else is going on with that navigational improvement project?

Erik Neugaard  
Well, we have all sorts of impacts. We have impacts to seagrass and other SAVs, submergent aquatic vegetation and we have mangrove impacts. We have a large mitigation area we're doing in one of our county parks in West Lake Park, we're taking some of these soil areas, that  result of when the intercostal waterway was dredged, they took the dredge material and put it on the adjacent, either on adjacent land or they filled adjacent surface waters immediately adjacent to it. Those became colonized with some of our more invasive upland vegetation such as Australian pine, Brazilian pepper. So the project there is going to be scraping those areas down to either mangrove elevation or seagrass elevation and either planting or was natural recruitment creating those habitats. So that's part of what we're doing here as well as managing that project.

[Certifications]

Laura 
Awesome. So I was scoping out your LinkedIn and you have a ton of certifications. Like a list of probably, if anybody wants to know what kind of certifications you could get, just go look at Eric's LinkedIn. It's pretty impressive. And as a career coach, I get asked all the time, I think it's actually one of the most searched pages on my website is the list of certifications. People want to know if they need to get them if they should get them especially recently after they graduate. So I thought you might be the perfect person to ask about certifications. And what you feel the worth of them is.

Erik Neugaard 
I'm a strong proponent of certifications because they've certainly contributed to my career advancement. Some of those are just in the beginning, just tongue in cheek, I just did them for fun. And then I started realizing that there was economic value in them. So I can't remember where I started. But as especially as a consultant, I noticed that there were a lot of contract opportunities where there were specific certification or requirements, you know, like for Certified Wildlife biologist or that I saw that many times that inspired me to get that certification, or a professional wetland scientists like it's very common as well. So I fortunately have the correct academic background. A lot of these are they have an academic background requirement where we have had have taken specific courses and I just was very fortunate in that I had all that, and I had the experience and I was able to put it all together. Some of them have exams you have to take and I was able to pass those and some of them are just really stretches. I didn't have a background and for example, I'm a certified photogrammatrist. And I qualified,

Laura
What is that?

Erik Neugaard
Well, photogrammetry is basically taking aerial imagery and tying it to real world, you know, so we're so used to that now we don't even think about it whenever you like do GIS you get your aerials or if you go on to Google Earth, you can look through all the history of the ariels that's basically photogrammetry but it's also measuring and calculating and just working that has a full spectrum of components to it. Everything from setting up the airplane with the cameras to take all the photographs and setting up the targets and then bringing everything in and geo referencing it. So I was never involved with the camera and the airplane part of it. But going back to the beginning of my career, probably until the early 1990s I was working with photogrammetry and just out of the necessity of looking for contamination sites, just trying to figure out prior land uses. So I was qualified to take the exam and I did it but that was probably one of the harder exams I had to take because there was so much new learning for me. But every one of those certifications has helped me in one way or another or just really, if nothing else, demonstrate the depth and breadth of my experience and knowledge. So definitely recommend getting any certification you can just so you so people have a fundamental background understanding of what your, where your expertise are.

Laura 
Awesome. And I think one of the reasons people are afraid to is that they don't have a lot of worry that this certification doesn't bare weight or this one isn't certified enough or prestigious enough, I guess. So. Any thoughts on that?

Erik Neugaard  
Well, I think it's important to see what the culture is in your area. Like in Florida, there is a lot of competition for different contracts. And as a contract or someone is putting a contract out in the street especially with a an agency. You want to have as many things in the solicitation, to be able to differentiate the entities that applied for the contract or the grant, whatever it may be, and having requirements that they have scientists that are professional wildlife biologists or fisheries professionals, or professional wetland scientists, if you're looking for that type of work to be performed. It is something that you can use to differentiate between different consultants or entities that are applying for the grant or the contract. So it's useful from a contractor's perspective. So we see a lot of that here in Florida. I don't know if that's nationwide if that's if it's common, but I could probably list probably a dozen or so that I've seen in different solicitations. And then sometimes they just pick them up for fun. The fun might not be the right word, but just for personal enrichment.  Like I became certified as a arborist. And that was just really for personal enrichment. I didn't really plan to go and evaluate trees for diseases. There's more I just wanted to learn more about it. And because I was a certified arborist and I don't know if I can say this on the radio, but the company I was with we made over $200,000 in fees from tree surveys that we wouldn't have been able to get if I wasn't a certified arborist. I was the only certified arborist in the company. And that worked just floated in, and we were basically handed that because I had that certification. So there are definite economic benefits to certifications. But in saying which one is best, or it really depends on circumstance and what your area of expertise is in. So just opportunity. Sometimes opportunities just present themselves.

Laura 
And we've had a string of ocean scientists on the show lately in all of them are divers. So we were thinking we were going to switch it up bringing you on with the port. And it turns out you're also a diver which you mentioned earlier. So you didn't say that you do that for fun of how often are you diving, and do you do it locally? What kind of diving is your favorite?

Erik Neugaard 
Well, I've been diving, since gonna give away my age, at least 40 years. And

Laura  
So, since you were three cool.

Erik Neugaard 
Yeah, that works. So I'll go with 43 Thank you. It actually might be closer to the 50 now but, my first job out of my undergraduate degree was as a dive instructor on a cruise ship. And then I managed dive shop and as I mentioned captained a motor yacht that the owner just he liked diving as well. And when I went back to get my master's degree, which I did here in Broward County at NOVA oceanographic center, I was interested in the fish assemblage on the deeper artificial reefs. So I got certified as a Trimix diver to be able to dive into those depths and later I became a Trimix Instructor. And that was just interesting, because we saw I saw a significant difference in the fish assemblage once you get past like 240 feet, and there was actually a species of fish that dominate some of the deeper wrecks that we didn't even know occurred here in Broward County. So that was interesting, but to be honest, I am for this coral nursery I mentioned. I'm trying to get a lot of data on what our nearshore reefs look like. So I'm spending most of my dives now just wading off the beach diving in 12 to 20 feet of water and I'm so happy they're finding the most stay down four times as long you don't have to decompress you don't have to worry about a boat. And I've seen the most incredible just imagery I'm taking photos of that as well. But like a month ago, I went out and drove the dove this intact Acropora cervicornis reef, it's the staghorn coral. And as far as you could see in clear visibility, so probably 100 feet all you could see was perfectly pristine Acropora cervicornis and I have a picture on my Facebook page and I think by LinkedIn pages of background it's just one of the more just especially considering how much impact our coral reefs have sustained in the last few years seeing something that remarkable is just so refreshing and uplifting. So I don't know what it is but all of a sudden, I'm enjoying just the shallow stuff now.

Laura 
That's awesome. Coming from Tampa Bay where I was the reef manager I think a little bit jealous. Our visibility was about six inches.

Erik Neugaard 
I grew up in Tampa actually. And did plenty of dives off. Yeah, plenty of dives off of coast there.

Laura
Nice.

Nic 
Well, you're also a member of the South Florida NAEP chapter, which you mentioned earlier. When did you join and what benefits do you have from that experience?

Erik Neugaard 
Oh, I could go, this is only like an hour podcast. Right right. Right. I'm actually giving a presentation at the NAEP conference. I'm one of them is about SFAEP and the different programs that have been developed in habitat restoration. I mentioned earlier the coral nursery and the oyster gardening and the seagrass nursery and they're just been a tremendous amount of opportunities to do things that I can't do in the workplace. So I have a I'm in this field because I have an intrinsic interest in it. And I didn't do this for the money. And so I really enjoy the public outreach. I enjoy sharing what I know about our natural resources and our environment with the public and I don't get to do that much. I do more than in this position, but less than as a consultant and some of the other positions. So these chapters allow you to do things that you're sometimes restricted about doing in your workplace. And we've done some wonderful things with the South Florida chapter. And there was a question about how long I've been involved. The South Florida chapter I think was incorporated in 1992 or 91'. And I became involved in it shortly after sometime in 92'. I wasn't there in the first day, but I've been there some it's maybe six months after it started. And it's out of all the organizations you can see for my certifications. I have a ton of other organizations I'm involved with, the local chapter of NAEP, the South Florida chapter here has just been remarkable in terms of opportunities to do enriching activities. So we've done at one point I was an instructor for the Florida Master Naturalist program and we were offering the full suite of classes through SFAEP that was extremely rewarding in terms of we had multiple other instructors from our board of directors from our membership that also participated so it gave us an opportunity all to get together and share our knowledge with the public through these classes, and that was extremely rewarding. These habitat restoration projects we have going on are very exciting. They're getting a lot of attention now locally. And it's just exceptionally rewarding opportunities that I could not find do any other organization.

Nic 
Yeah. Which is great to hear.

Laura
That's awesome.

Nic
Yeah, it really is and really appreciate it. That's why we wanted to ask. So yeah, we're rolling through our questions here and now and I'm gonna take a second here to just double check. So the coral nursery program, I'm gonna ask you about that. If we've already covered enough of it and you don't you know, there's more to say that's fine, but I did want to ask it. So we'd like to ask questions that are fun or memorable about stories and working in the field. So I want to hear a little bit more about the synergy you've encountered with the South Florida chapters community coral nursery program.

Erik Neugaard 
It's a great question, because I'd love to share what happened the last few weeks. I mean, as I mentioned, this is something we started seven years ago we started when we were teaching the Florida Master Naturalist courses because we're teaching these courses on coastal ecosystems and we're teaching the students about corals, but we didn't really have any hands on opportunities. There were programs don't have the keys where there is some access, but we wanted to provide complete access for the public to be able to actually fragment corals and cultivate corals and do different types of reproductive strategies and do science experiments. And that resource was not available. So our main objective was to provide that resource for the public. We have a lot of members in our research that have degrees in marine biology, and they're working in upland environments and they're not really utilizing their expertise or their educational background as much as they would like. So another objective was to provide that opportunity for our members to do things that they can't do, because there were constraints. So we went through about five years of regulatory permitting. It's a pretty complex project. It involves about 2 million tires that had been deployed off of the on the reefs off of Broward County. The county is actively removing about a million, maybe one and a half million of them, but there's still plenty on the reefs and other areas where they just can't get. So a key component of this nursery program was actually going down taking the tires off the reef, taking the corals that are growing on the tires, putting them into our coral nursery and then disposing of the tires properly. It's kind of grown beyond that because we'd have additional opportunities to get corals and it's moving very quickly now. And you were asking about the synergy. Two weekends ago we went to the Tortuga Music festival and had a booth in their conservation village. And there were a number of reasons we did that the concert, the Tortuga Music Festival, they share the proceeds from their merchandise sales and the sale of alcohol with the conservation village members. So there was an income opportunity. But that wasn't the only reason we went there also because was opportunity to show what we had going on. And just connecting with the other exhibitors in the conservation village we made all these contacts that have just exploded in the last two weeks. It was just really amazing and I I could go on for hours about it, but it just it's actually mind numbing the magic that synergy created and all these partnerships have developed and everybody's very excited about not just what we're doing but what they're doing and how it relates to what we're doing. We're all basically trying to improve the quality of our reefs and the ocean, conserve our ocean habitats and just collectively we're all getting together and it's it's quite magical. It's the best way to describe it.

Nic 
It's almost like you're saying, be creative in the way you conduct outreach and good things will happen.

Erik Neugaard 
Yeah, so it was just the minor step. We may have to sign up for it, but the rewards have just been tremendous. So on Sunday, we're going to another event it's a ocean conservation day we're gonna have a booth there and and two weekend after this. I'm going on a Key Largo for the Florida Marine Science Educators Association to share with them our coral nursery and just really remarkable how much synergy is developing around everything.

Laura  
That's awesome. And you've only just started so I can imagine in a couple of years you'll be amazed at how far you've gotten. 2 million tires and all that coral to replace off of that. Isn't it nice to someone who have left that there for you to do.

Erik Neugaard  
The answer to that is no, but

Laura 
That was a very sarcastic comment. Yeah. Well, that is, you know, speaks to the networking. We're always talking about here. Get out there and meet people who are like minded and magic will happen like you said. So we're pretty much out of time. Is there anything else you wanted to mention before we go?

Erik Neugaard 
No, it's really been exciting talking to you. Guys. That's always fun. And I wholeheartedly recommend that being involved with our local and NAEP chapters. I mean, that is there's so much opportunity. You can do anything you want with these chapters. You can it's like a blank slate and you can go out there and do all these habitat restoration projects or you can do community outreach. And it's just wonderful to be able to engage other environmental professionals with very diverse backgrounds and these things and we have someone who is a archaeologist who is very much engaged in our coral nursery program now and you know, we have chemical engineers that are getting excited about the coral stuff. And it's just, it's really, I think that in terms of the environmental profession, our local chapters are where it's at, and I'm really hope that everybody's out there engaging in them as much as possible.

Laura 
Yeah, that's awesome. And I agree with you. There are some chapters who are I mean, if I would say your chapter is one of the role models out there, so if there's another chapter struggling, you can also reach out to Eric and that group and see, you know, how can we do what you do? And I would love to see the chapters more actively engaged with each other even. But, Eric, so that said, Where can people get in touch with you?

Erik Neugaard 
Well, can you put my email address up?

Laura 
Yeah, in the, it's  audio, so we can't put it up but we'll put it in the description.

Erik Neugaard 
My email address is on E, and then my last name so it's eneugaad@broward.org.

Laura 
Awesome. Thank you. Well, thanks so much for being here today. This has been a lot of fun.

Erik Neugaard 
It has. Yes, thank you very much. Happy Earth Day.

Nic 
Happy Earth Day.

[Outro]

Laura 
That's our show. Thank you, Eric, for joining us today. It was really fun to learn about port life. Be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. Bye.

Nic
See you everybody.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai