The Indian River Lagoon held steady in 2025, with overall conditions largely unchanged from last year, according to the Marine Resources Council’s annual lagoon health report, which will be released Monday, Nov. 17.
Laura Wilson, executive director of the Marine Resources Council, said this year’s results reflect consistency rather than major change.
“I mean, I think the biggest message is just this year was a year consistency compared to the previous year,” Wilson said.
The 2025 Indian River Lagoon Health Report found that overall basin health remained unchanged for four of the lagoon’s five basins. The Central Indian River Lagoon — from Rockledge to Sebastian — improved from “poor” to “okay” due to lower algae concentrations and increased seagrass coverage.
“In terms of overall water quality, we really saw it kind of hold steady where we use Environmental Protection Agency's EPA standards for rating what the pH is, what the total nitrogen or total phosphorus is. So by EPA standards, it was okay,” Wilson said.
Wilson said that stability marks an important step in the lagoon’s long-term recovery.
“Seeing steadiness and seeing steady increases, especially when we're seeing water quality being acceptable levels to support fish populations, to support seagrass populations, that's really important for kind of building a healthy ecosystem,” she said.
She said the consistency may be linked to continued restoration and facility improvements throughout the lagoon system.
“Anecdotally at least, we've seen these kind of consistent improvements since 2020-2021 when we had our last big kind of super bloom and fish kill events. I think that definitely is being affected in a positive way by the restoration and facility upgrades that we're seeing across the lagoon,” Wilson said.
Nutrient pollution, however, remains a major concern.
“I talk a lot about the two biggest pollutants to the lagoon being nutrients, so nitrogen and phosphorus, and fresh water. Both of these come from land. So how we treat water on land is of utmost importance to lagoon health. And so that's really where we're seeing these issues is having water that hits land, gets filled with pollutants running off of our roads, off of our lawns and roofs, and then that goes into the lagoon without any sort of filtration process to remove those harmful nutrients, bacteria,” Wilson said.
The annual digital report assesses sediment health, water quality, harmful algal blooms, seagrass coverage, and wastewater spills across the 156-mile-long lagoon using data collected between August 2024 and August 2025 by eight organizations.
“The report we're looking at algae bloom conditions based on the amount of time that chlorophyll a concentrations stay above a certain threshold. So we do see high bloom conditions within the lagoon. We just aren't seeing them lasting a really long time that are going to lead to the dissolved oxygen dropping which leads to the fish kills,” Wilson said.
This year’s report also added a new metric to its assessment.
“One thing that we actually changed in 2025 is that we added salinity as one of these kind of health indicators that we're looking at. Salinity is really important for certain species especially plants and animals that can't easily and quickly move to avoid harmful conditions or environmental shifts,” Wilson said.
While most of the lagoon’s basins stayed the same, the central region showed measurable improvement.
“The one place where we actually saw kind of a change in the assessment was in the central Indian River Lagoon,” Wilson said. “It still has the lowest water quality of everything in the lagoon as it did last year but we actually saw improvements so that things like the algae levels weren't as bad and we saw notable seagrass coverage which we hadn't seen in previous years.”
The full 2025 Indian River Lagoon Health Report will be available at LoveTheIRL.org.