Potential Biases and Limitations

However, there may be bias in this identification of Water Quality and Quantity priority prevalence in Florida due to the fact that Florida’s Water Management Districts make Surface Water Improvement, and Management plans (Appendix A—Plans 329, 333–337, 340–346, and 349–352) that are easily accessible through centralized websites, while in other states access to watershed planning documents requires a deeper exploration of available internet sources. For example, Watershed Protection Plans in Texas are authorized through multiple authorities including the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board as well as the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and can be difficult to readily locate.

In addition to the aforementioned potential for confounding effects of geo-extent with regulatory jurisdiction, sampling bias toward conservation-oriented planning documents may be causing underrepresentation of local development plans, which by their nature may contain a minimal emphasis on Habitat and LCMR priorities and much more focus on Community Resilience and Gulf Economy. We encourage careful use of these findings, and only with the understanding that this inventory of plans, though extensive, was not exhaustive, and analytical outputs should be interpreted accordingly.

This project mainly focused on the total number of plans as an indicator for the presence of focus of each RESTORE Council goal. However, there are exceptions in the Gulf Coast Region (GCR), for example, the state of Louisiana has a master plan that implements a large number of conservation actions each of which could be individual conservation plans in other localities (Appendix A—Plan 245). Another indicator could be the investment of financial resources to address these goals. Since the plans and projects proposed in GCR are cumulative and typically focus on multiple goals, it is challenging to differentiate the information on funds being spent per individual RESTORE goal. Thus, the analysis based on a number of plans is a safe alternative, and future research should examine ecosystem services provided by plans and projects at a goal-level to further maximize efficiencies in funding expenditures.