Cooling Water Effluent Restriction Effects on a Mid-Atlantic Estuarine Infaunal Invertebrate Community

Piper, S.; Grothues, T.M.; Petrecca, R., and Taghon, G., 2026. Cooling water effluent restriction effects on a mid-Atlantic estuarine infaunal invertebrate community. Journal of Coastal Research, 42(5), 853–861. Charlotte (North Carolina), ISSN 0749-0208. Benthic invertebrates are essential to estuarine trophic interactions, nutrient cycling, and ecosystem engineering, and understanding how benthic communities change with shifting environmental conditions is critical, especially in the mid-Atlantic Bight of the U.S. eastern seaboard region where marine warming is occurring faster than the global mean. This study uses the closing of a nuclear plant as a case study to investigate the effects of changing temperatures on infaunal communities through local cooling. A before-after-gradient design is applied to determine if whether closure and distance from the plant were correlated to a change in the infaunal total abundance and assemblage. The abundance of animals declined because of the closure. Factors aside from the plant closure had the largest determining effect on the infaunal community, accounting for 12.82% of the variance. A second mode of variation, almost equal in magnitude to the first and accounting for 11.89% of the variance, was correlated with distance from the plant and was strengthened by an interaction with the plant closure. Effects are likely weakened by the life history of estuarine infaunal species in the already highly dynamic mid-Atlantic Bight and location of the plant for exposure to extreme tidal and seasonal variations in temperature, salinity, and hydrodynamics.