Texas Tribune
Mangroves are expanding along the Texas coast
by By Emily Foxhall, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-06 05:00:00
SUMMARY: The Texas coastal ecosystem is undergoing significant changes due to climate fluctuations. The intense winter freeze of 2021 led to the demise of mangroves on Harbor Island near Port Aransas. However, climate change has generally boosted temperatures, allowing black mangroves to proliferate and expand northwards beyond their usual range in Texas. Mangroves have both positive and negative impacts; they offer coastal protection and habitat for wildlife, yet they displace salt marsh plants crucial for certain fish, shrimp, and whooping cranes. Scientists are closely monitoring how these changes affect local species and habitats while recognizing that the overall coastal ecosystem will continue to provide services, adapting to the rising temperatures and altered landscapes. Conservation of species like whooping cranes, which favor open marshland, remains a challenge as mangroves potentially encroach on their habitat.
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This story is part of the Pulitzer Center's nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. For more information, go to pulitzercenter.org/connected-coastlines.
PORT ARANSAS — Dead mangroves cover Harbor Island near this coastal city, creating a bleak landscape that contrasts with the calm, blue water that laps at the shore. The intense 2021 winter freeze killed these plants, which can tolerate some cold but not for that long. A few leafy, green saplings now sprout among them.
Black mangroves like these were expanding along the Texas coast for years before the freeze. The shrubs are native to the state, but, as climate change pushed temperatures generally higher, scientists saw them growing in greater numbers and spreading farther north than their typical range.
Biologists who study mangroves say little can be done about the plant's expansion. Instead, they are analyzing what changes the mangroves bring as they spread to new areas — good and bad.
In some cases, mangroves have shaded out salt marsh plants that some fish, shrimp, whooping cranes and other species rely on. And even though the freeze killed off many mangroves along the Texas coast, researchers expect them to return and keep growing in fits and starts as periodic freezes punctuate the generally warmer weather.
The way mangroves are re-making the Texas coastline is one more example of how human-caused climate change is already altering our environment. Like other animals and plants, mangroves can now live farther north because temperatures are warming.
“The expansion and also the contraction [of mangroves] is a really striking and powerful example of the role of climate,” said Michael Osland, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Anna Armitage, a professor at Texas A&M University at Galveston and a leading Texas mangrove researcher, said scientists have been evaluating how mangroves affect different species and the environment along the coast.
“Mangroves do some things better, and marshes do some things better,” she said. “But they're not the same.”
Why mangroves can be good: They could help protect against sea level rise because their stick-like roots help build up the soil height and their falling leaves decompose into soil. One study determined that they were better than salt marsh succulent plants at protecting against erosion. They offer habitat for migratory songbirds.
Why mangroves can be bad: They displace the marsh habitat that acts as a nursery for some fish and shrimp and where endangered whooping cranes spend winters. And when mangroves die during a freeze, they form a skeleton forest, as one scientist described it, leaving the shoreline vulnerable to the erosion they once helped prevent.
Mangroves expanded in Texas before the 2021 freeze
The white, shallow-water boat hummed where Victoria Congdon had navigated it to Harbor Island on a short, speedy trip from the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve office. Congdon, the reserve's research coordinator, was showing a reporter places where mangroves were plentiful and places where they had more slowly creeped in.
Congdon wore Chacos and toe rings on her feet. She grew up Lockhart and wanted to be a marine biologist as a kid. Today, she's passionate about plants because — although they lack the charisma and likability of, say, a turtle — they play important roles for entire ecosystems.
She gestured toward the thick tangle of mangroves that she thought could eventually rebound. “This is the future, essentially,” she said.
The mangroves here used to provide habitat and protect the shoreline, which made losing them a negative thing. But she said scientists could learn from that loss — and from their potential recovery.
“It is what it is; we can't do anything about it. All we can do is learn from it.”
Black mangroves have been in Texas forever, said Alejandro Fierro-Cabo, an associate professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who specializes in restoration ecology. They don't stretch as continuously along the Texas coastline as they do farther south in Tamaulipas, Mexico, but grow in patches.
Fierro-Cabo said it's possible that the Texas coast may begin to look more like Mexico's mangrove-covered shore as temperatures continue to warm.
Last year, the state's average temperature was the hottest ever recorded: 68.1 degrees. And last winter was the mildest ever recorded based on the coldest minimum temperature on average, according to research by Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon.
By 2036, Nielsen-Gammon's latest study predicts, the average annual surface temperature in Texas will be 3 degrees warmer than the 1950-1999 average.
“We need to assume and accept and embrace that this change is happening in the coastline, with change of vegetation from salt marsh to mangrove,” Fierro-Cabo said. “Some species will be displaced. … But the ecosystems, the coastal ecosystems, will keep functioning, will keep providing ecosystem services for us and things like that, like carbon sequestration, like storm protection.”
The plant transition can clearly be seen in the middle portion of the Texas coast. Katie Swanson, who is the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve's stewardship coordinator and acting manager, has been monitoring the transition of a study site on Mud Island from a mix of marsh and mangrove to mangrove-dominated. She said they were seeing a lot of that pattern on the mid-Texas coast.
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is using aerial images to determine how coastal habitat has changed. Comparing images from 2015 to 2018 around Aransas Bay with images from 2004, the agency found a net increase of 632 acres of mangrove, said Jacob Harris, a coastal ecologist on the agency's habitat assessment team.
Walking down a slope on the back side of the Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi campus, marine ecology professor Ed Proffitt pointed out the healthy, bushy mangroves near the edge of Oso Bay — one of the locations where he and students study mangroves. Marsh plants stretched out around and behind the mangroves.
Before the 2021 freeze, the researchers documented how plentiful and big the shrubs grew; some rose higher than graduate student Max Portmann, who is 6'7”. After the freeze, they thought many of the mangroves they studied were dead. But some sprouted up again from their old roots, reaching skyward. The scientists estimated about 40% of those they studied on campus survived.
Here the mangroves' numerous, small leaves extended from long skinny branches. The leaves are a darker shade of green than the lime-colored marsh plants. Three years after the winter storm, some of the mangroves reached waist-high or higher.
Wearing sandals, a wide-brimmed hat and a peach-colored Columbia fishing shirt, Proffitt, who has researched mangroves for 30 years, explained how he expects the mangroves to continue to fill in the shoreline by Oso Bay so long as there isn't another big freeze.
“They're coming back in some places faster than others, but they'll probably come back in all these places,” Proffitt said. “It's just going to take a while. The question becomes: Are they going to come back before there's erosion and subsidence that will convert it all to something else like open water?”
Portmann squelched in scuba boots across the marsh muck to get closer to the plants, squatted down and sorted through the tangle of green to show how the mangroves' roots spread more than three feet from the plant's trunk. This would help hold soil in place better than a dead mangrove — which could be blown away in a strong storm.
Portmann sees the mangrove's expansion as just one piece of a changing coastline: “With climate change, the marsh isn't going to stay the same way it is regardless,” he said, as the duo walked back to the parking lot.
And some animals here like the mangroves. When Texas Parks and Wildlife researchers used nets to collect species in the bays along the central coast, they found that spotted seatrout and brown and white shrimp preferred marsh. Red drum and blue crabs preferred the mangroves.
“It's not something that we can necessarily control — or should we be even controlling?” said Harris, the TPWD ecologist, adding, “There's a lot of mixed emotions with it because mangroves do provide very useful habitat. … But is it a good thing that some salt marsh is being converted into mangroves?”
That's something Harris and other scientists will be watching closely as mangroves march north.
“It's going to be good for some species and it won't be good for others.”
Mangroves could be a problem for whooping cranes
One species in particular that advocates worry about when it comes to mangroves is whooping cranes, which have been a success story after being pushed to the brink of extinction.
Carter Crouch, director of Gulf Coast Programs for the International Crane Foundation and Katie Fernald, an ecologist with the foundation, told the story as Crouch drove on a recent afternoon to get gas for the foundation's boat, “Crane Seeker.”
During the winter of 1941 into 1942, the number of whooping cranes in Texas dwindled to 15 or 16. Six other whooping cranes lived in Louisiana.
How did their numbers get so small? There probably weren't too many of the birds to begin with, maybe 10,000 before their decline. And people hunted the large birds, which stand around five feet tall, for their meat and feathers. They also snatched up their eggs.
Intense conservation efforts focused on teaching people why they needed to stop shooting the creatures — it was illegal. As it happened, land at the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge where the cranes spent the winter was also federally protected in 1937.
The cranes in Louisiana died, but the number of endangered whoopers in Texas rose from near extinction to around 550 in Texas. They make up the last wild population in the world.
Crouch wore a wide-brimmed hat and aqua fishing shirt as he put the “Crane Seeker” into the water and motored toward the refuge. He loved to hunt and fish growing up in Wichita Falls and has long been a “pretty big bird nerd,” he said. He spent time at the same reservoirs and rivers where whooping cranes sometimes stop when they migrate.
Crouch and Fernald are bird people: They paused to admire an American oystercatcher on its nest. They debated whether it was a sandwich tern (with a yellow-tipped bill that looks like it was dipped in mustard) or a gull-billed tern flying overhead against the overcast sky. Fernald heard a marsh wren that she said sounded like a sewing machine.
At the refuge, Crouch slowed the boat to point out the lush green marsh habitat where whooping cranes spend the winter. It was mid-April now and most, if not all, of the cranes had left for Canada. One could see clear across the marsh.
This is why whooping crane people are nervous about mangroves: The birds are known to prefer open landscapes, like a duck prefers water or a songbird might prefer a forest. Scientists aren't sure if the birds will avoid areas with a lot of mangroves.
“I don't think we really know what would happen,” Crouch said.
In some spots, dead mangroves dotted the shoreline. Crouch and Fernald got off the boat at another island covered more densely by dead mangroves. They expected mangroves would continue to expand again.
“It's tough because they are a native species; they're not intrinsically bad,” Fernald said earlier in an interview. “Mangrove habitat is also habitat for other wildlife species. It's just not what was typically and historically here.”
The mangroves are also just one of a number of problems they have to consider, Crouch said. Cranes are losing habitat to development and sea level rise. Drought can make the bay waters that the birds drink saltier, which can also mean fewer blue crabs for them to eat. The wetlands where they stop when they migrate are drying up, and the permafrost where they breed is melting. People still shoot them.
“It's a weird species to work with because there's a lot of reasons to be very optimistic, given (nearly) 70 years of data,” Crouch said. “But … we're not out of the woods, and the threats are increasing fairly quickly still.”
Scientists at the refuge have been aware of the mangrove expansion for years, said Andy Stetter, the refuge's supervisory wildlife biologist. But with 116,000 acres of land in their care, they don't really have good options to keep them out if they wanted to. And right now they're not sure that they do.
Stetter said that although mangroves theoretically may harm whooping cranes by taking away their habitat, how the plants could impact the marsh in the future remains an area of research for scientists. The mangroves may actually be helpful in combating sea level rise and benefit the blue crabs that whooping cranes eat.
“We're managing the habitat for the benefit of not only whooping cranes but other wildlife, of course,” Stetter said, adding, “We just don't understand the relationship between mangroves and how it's going to impact whooping cranes, and that's something we're trying to understand.”
Disclosure: Texas A&M University and Texas Parks And Wildlife Department have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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Texas Tribune
These Texans aren’t taking buyouts despite repeated floods
by By Emily Foxhall, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-20 05:00:00
SUMMARY: Recent floods in Harris County, Texas, have devastated homes along the San Jacinto River. Tom Madigan, who owns multiple properties, quickly started repairs without knowing the Harris County Flood Control District aims to buy out such flood-prone properties. The region has a longstanding buyout program to remove homes from high-risk flood areas, with about 800 out of 2,400 targeted properties purchased. However, buyouts are voluntary and often insufficient for low-income residents. Despite the program, many choose to stay due to affordability and community ties, while others like Madigan remain skeptical of receiving a fair offer.
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HARRIS COUNTY — After the floodwaters earlier this month just about swallowed two of the six homes that 60-year-old Tom Madigan owns on the San Jacinto River, he didn't think twice about whether to fix them. He hired people to help, and they got to work stripping the walls, pulling up flooring and throwing out water-logged furniture.
What Madigan didn't know: The Harris County Flood Control District wants to buy his properties as part of an effort to get people out of dangerously flood-prone areas.
Back-to-back storms drenched southeast Texas in late April and early May, causing flash flooding and pushing rivers out of their banks and into low-lying neighborhoods. Officials across the region urged people in vulnerable areas to evacuate.
Like Madigan's, some places that were inundated along the San Jacinto in Harris County have flooded repeatedly. And for nearly 30 years, the flood control district has been trying to clear out homes around the river by paying property owners to move, then returning the lots to nature.
The recent floods show why buyout programs can be important. These spots typically flood first and worse. Gov. Greg Abbott reported that hundreds of rescues took place in the state while the floods destroyed homes. A man drowned and a child was swept away into the floods. One Harris County resident described climbing on top of his motor home as the water rose before first responders rescued him.
But the disaster and its aftermath also illustrate why buyouts are complicated to carry out even in Harris County, home to Houston, which has one of the most robust buyout programs in the country. The flood control district has identified roughly 2,400 properties as current buyout candidates around the San Jacinto; the district and county have bought about 800 of them.
Nearly all of the district's buyouts are voluntary. If an owner doesn't want to sell, the district can't force them out.
Buyouts make sense for some people who can't be protected from floods, said Alessandra Jerolleman, director of research for the Center on Environment, Land and Law at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.
But buyouts might not provide lower-income people enough money to get somewhere safer, she said, and they could lose important support like child care from nearby family or neighbors.
“It's not as though it's a guarantee of reducing risks to that family,” Jerolleman said.
People who live near the river and who have endured repeated floods explained that they've stayed because it's affordable and, most of the time, peaceful. Where else would they be able to buy anything like it? Some said they didn't think the government would offer them what they consider a fair price to sell their land. Some didn't know the buyout program existed.
Madigan started buying homes more than 15 years ago in the unincorporated River Terrace neighborhood because they were cheap. On Tuesday, the Houston firefighter drank a Heineken and grilled hamburgers for his work crew outside his most damaged house, which he rents to his brother. Sodden rugs baked in the sun on the driveway.
Madigan said he might have taken a buyout if it was a reasonable offer — but he doubted it would be. He said he needed to get the properties ready again for his renters. “I can't wait,” he said.
Two blocks away, water had swept through a yellow house Madigan rents to a family with a teenage son. One of the workers fixing the property, 21-year-old Omar Reyna, watched the family throw out pretty much everything they had. Piecing together new laminate flooring with his dad, Reyna kept thinking about a trash bag of Teddy bears and stuffed toys he tossed out for them.
He wondered if the parents had been saving the toys for another kid they might have in the future.
“The faster we get it done, the faster they can come back in here,” Reyna said.
Some people choose to live with the risk of flooding
The San Jacinto is the largest river in the state's most populous county. For years before Harris County's first floodplain maps were drawn up in the mid-1980s, people built homes near its banks. Even today, people can still build in the vast floodplain if the houses are high enough and have enough stormwater detention.
The flood control district tries to buy out homes in pockets of the floodplain that are deepest, said James Wade, manager for the district's property acquisition department. Those are places where engineers can't easily fix flooding problems.
Buyouts are meant to get people out of flood zones before their property floods again, not to help in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. The process is slow: In some cases, it can take 18 months or longer to approve a buyout application, Wade said. The district pays owners the market value or pre-flood value for their house, determined by a third-party appraiser, plus moving expenses and a supplement to help them get into a house out of the floodplain, Wade said.
“It's a very equitable, fair program,” Wade said — but still some people don't want to leave.
Those who stay learn to adapt. They build homes on stilts. They monitor the river level and watch for releases of water from the Lake Conroe dam upstream. Some know intimately the routine of rebuilding: gut the house, clean it, put it back together.
The floor of 49-year-old Sean Vincent's house in the Forest Cove neighborhood in northeast Houston is 15 feet above the ground. Three feet of water flooded it when Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017. This month, the floods reached five feet high on Vincent's property. He cleaned out his waterlogged ground-level shed with help from church members. On Tuesday, he was building new shelves for it.
But most of the time Vincent, who works in railroad traffic control, said he enjoys the space surrounded by tall trees with room for his three kids.
“It's just really not a major part of our life,” Vincent said of the flooding. “Yes, it's inconvenient. Yes, it's now happened to us twice in seven years … It's sort of a trade-off for us. And it is lovely out here.”
“Where are you going to go?”
Then there are those who stay because they don't see anywhere else to go.
Jack St. John, 67, a retired long-haul truck driver, moved to Northshore 43 years ago and has had to clean up after two floods. He worries any time flooding threatens, but the neighborhood's advantages keep him there: He has no water bill because he has a well. His taxes are reasonable. The neighborhood has a fish fry in the spring and a barbecue in the fall.
“You know, when you leave, where are you going to go?” he said. “What's it going to cost to buy into another place?”
Farther northeast, in the Idle Wild and Idle Glen neighborhoods, the floods forced some residents to sleep under tarps. On one largely forested street, boats were turned sideways or flipped upside down. A small building was lodged in the trees. A car was in the ditch.
For several years, Elvia Bethea, 68, has driven from her home in Humble to check on people and pets here, and pick up stray animals. On Tuesday, she and other volunteers gave John Gray, 50, bamboo yard torches to fight the many mosquitoes, plus two trays of chocolate-covered strawberries.
Gray said he couldn't afford to fix up his destroyed house. He earns a living printing labor law posters for businesses. His printers at home were destroyed.
Gray said he had never heard of the buyout program but would consider taking one.
“Who do I call?” Gray asked. “I don't have a clue.”
From the back of a white SUV, Bethea handed some hot dogs to Jose Tabores, 68, who lives on Gray's land in a trailer now filled with mud.
“I'm coming for dinner, remember!” Bethea teased him.
Nearby, 51-year-old Veronika Scheid had been sleeping in a wet tent. The flood washed the shipping crate she lived in down the road and into the trees — along with her and her neighbors' belongings.
At a low point, when Scheid was crying over all she lost, she found a pink-and-white beaded necklace with stitching in the shape of a “V,” like her name. At the end was a charm shaped like a house.
She was grateful the person who owned the land where she stayed hadn't taken a buyout. Otherwise she would have nowhere to go.
“At least we have this,” Scheid said.
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The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Texas Tribune
Trump, Abbott speak at Dallas NRA convention
by By Annie Xia, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-18 19:24:41
SUMMARY:
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DALLAS— At the National Rifle Association's annual convention on Saturday, Donald Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott encouraged the thousands gathered to vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential election as a way to ensure their Second Amendment rights.
“The NRA has stood with me from the very beginning, and with your vote, I will stand strong for your rights and liberties,” Trump said. “I heard it a few weeks ago that if gun owners voted, we would swamp them at levels that nobody's ever seen before. I think you're a rebellious bunch, but let's be rebellious and vote this time.”
Trump and Abbott spoke to a room packed with NRA members, some of which sported supportive attire from the standard-fare red caps to a dress covered with photos of the former president.
During the convention, the NRA released its endorsement for the 45th president, and the Trump political campaign announced the launch for the “Gun Owners for Trump” coalition.
Abbott touted his track record on gun rights by pointing to Texas laws passed last year, such as House Bill 3137 which prohibits local governments from requiring firearm owners to buy liability insurance. To energetic applause, he said the law ensured people would not be forced to pay to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
Abbott also described the state's successful crackdown on the recent pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses, in which protesters are demanding the schools divest from from companies tied to Israel or weapons manufacturing amid the Israel-Hamas War.
“When they tried to pull that stunt in Texas, our Department of Public Safety cleared the area, arrested the protesters and put them in jail,” Abbott said. “Unlike some of these radical leftist universities like Columbia, UCLA and far too many others, in Texas we don't tolerate paid protesters who tried to hijack our college campuses.”
Almost to the day, the NRA convention takes place two years after the Uvalde school shooting, where an 18-year-old gunned down an elementary school with a legally purchased assault rifle. The shooter killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers with an AR-15 style rifle.
During the 2023 legislative session, Uvalde families unsuccessfully pressed Texas policymakers to pass a raise-the-age law, which would have upped the minimum age for buying semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21.
“Donald Trump and Texas Republicans made the gun violence epidemic worse, especially in our state, where we have seen nine mass shootings just in the last 15 years,” said a statement by Gilberto Hinojosa, the Texas Democratic Party Chair, on Friday. “Even after Uvalde parents pleaded with Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz for commonsense gun safety laws, they decided, like Trump “ that the NRA and gun lobby was more important.”
Instead the legislature approved a school safety bill that established preventative measures toward school shootings. The law included a mandate that every school must hire an armed security officer and the creation of a department within the Texas Education Agency that can compel districts to adhere to active-shooter protocols.
During his speech, Trump endorsed four Republican candidates who are fighting in late May runoffs to be their party's nominee: Alan Schoolcraft, David Covey, Helen Kerwin and Brett Hagenbuch. Each of them has already received endorsements by Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton or both. Schoolcraft, Covey and Kerwin are running against Republican incumbents in the Texas House who impeded Abbott's signature school voucher bill or voted for Paxton's impeachment based on accusations of corruption.
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Texas Tribune
Photos: Texas storms cause widespread damage in Houston area
by By Marie D. De Jesús and Antranik Tavitian, Houston Landing, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-17 14:45:42
SUMMARY: Severe storms hit the Houston area on Thursday evening, resulting in widespread damage, four fatalities, and power outages affecting nearly 900,000 homes and businesses. The Houston Office of Emergency Management is beginning recovery efforts, while officials discourage unnecessary travel. Reports from Houston Landing detail the extent of the destruction, which includes knocked-down power lines and damaged buildings, such as the Wells Fargo Plaza and the CenterPoint Energy Plaza. Photos provided by Antranik Tavitian and Marie D. De Jesús illustrate the damage seen across the region.
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Severe storms tore through the Houston area Thursday evening, causing widespread damage, killing at least four people and leaving hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power.
Gale force winds up to 100 mph knocked over power lines, blew out windows and toppled trees throughout the region. Houston Office of Emergency Management spokesperson Brent Taylor said officials will begin the recovery process once debris and damage are cleared. In the meantime, Houston Mayor John Whitmire and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo urged residents to avoid all unnecessary travel.
The storm ravaged Harris County — from transmission towers crushed in suburban Cypress to stricken oak trees blockading traffic to high-rise windows shattered throughout downtown Houston.
Here's a look at some of the damage wrought, reported by Houston Landing:
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