3.2 SGA Specific Trends
To further understand spatial relationships within the results, the data for stations within SGA name groups were pooled. There are 8 total SGA groups (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H) that were used to aggregate the station results. Correlations between all considered variables were calculated for each SGA (Table 2). From the correlations describing FC trends with LULC changes, we saw strong negative correlations between FC trends and developed land use change in SGA letters C and A despite the weak positive correlation represented by the coefficient calculated from all data (i.e., full coast). Negative correlations between FC trends and wetlands land use change were also observed, being especially strong in southern SGAs (A, B, C, D). βPrecip and βFC had a weak positive relationship for most SGAs, with the exception of SGA C. The correlation between βPrecipand βFC was broken down further for SGA C (Figure S1), which revealed a strong correlation attributed to negative βFC values occurring in conjunction with high βPrecip values. Shore distance had a fairly positive to fairly negative relationship with βFC moving from the southern SGAs (A, B, C, D) to the northern SGAs (F, G, H). The relationship between shore distance and βFC is shown in Figure S2. Salinity trends were negatively correlated with β­FC along each SGA with the exception of SGA E (Table 2). Due to the ecological importance of salinity when it comes to water quality and predicting FC concentrations (Souedan et al., 2021; Florini et al., 2020; Liu et al., 2012), our understanding of salinity integrating the effects of both land use and precipitation, and the consistent directionality of the correlation coefficients, we analyzed this SGA-specific relationship further (Figure 6).