This project will integrate information on ecosystem stressors and predator-prey interactions into the fisheries assessment and management process in the Gulf of Mexico.

This project investigated the influence of the Mississippi River and its delta on the oceanography, ecology, and economy of the Gulf of Mexico; identified gaps in data collection, model availability and model integration that would allow managers to better sustainably manage and monitor the Gulf´s natural resources; evaluated the role of extreme events and potential climate change impacts on the oceanography, ecology and economy of the Gulf of Mexico; and disseminated the results of this work. The investigators also compiled historical outputs from physical oceanographic models to provide an overview of the Gulf of Mexico and the role of riverine and deltaic forcings. The environmental drivers that the investigators examined include variability in magnitude of Mississippi River discharge, changes in the direction of river plume, variability in coastal currents, extreme weather events (cold fronts and hurricanes), and nutrient and carbon loadings.

This project will develop a decision-support tool to aid resource managers, municipalities, and a county with decisions related to the preservation and restoration of mangrove, marsh, and beach habitats; water management; and coastal planning, zoning, and land acquisition.

This project will adapt an existing computer model for assessing the suitability of a site for construction of a living shoreline, apply the model to Perdido Bay/Wolf Bay/Ono Island complex in coastal Alabama; Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana; and Galveston Bay, Texas, and develop an interactive decision support tool that allows for a rapid assessment of a site.

This project explores how oyster, blue crab, and spotted seatrout populations respond to human and environmental changes with the goal of improving the management of these economically and culturally important species.

This project will determine where the corals in different mesophotic (50-150 m) and deepwater (150-2400 m) populations in the Gulf of Mexico originated from, which is critical information for conserving and restoring these important habitats that were damaged by the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) Oil Spill.

This project will evaluate the importance of Sargassum as a nursery habitat for fish in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

This dataset includes outputs from an ecosystem model, which is a tool for regional science managers to explore marine spatial planning scenarios in the context of static and dynamic environmental covariates. The dataset includes predicted fish biomass from the Ecopath with Ecosim and Ecospace model set up over the Florida Reef Tract, during eight scenarios and across 36 trophic groups during the time period between 1994 and 2012. Simulations considered all pairwise combinations of changing the size of Marine Protected Areas (‘existing MPAs’, ‘large MPAs’), varying rates of movement via modeled diffusion (‘low diffusion’, ‘high diffusion’), and increasing fishing effort (total effect multiplier; ‘low TEM’, ‘high TEM’).

This dataset is a collection of files containing the necessary inputs to, and relevant outputs from, the U.S. Gulf-wide ecosystem model, developed using the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) modeling software package. The spatial extent of the model is 25°-30.5° N and -81° to -97.3° W and hindcast simulations were run in Ecosim from 1980 (the Ecopath snapshot year) to 2016 at a monthly timestep. Input parameters for Ecopath include biomass, consumption, mortality, diet, landings, and discards for 78 functional groups included in the model. Each input or output parameter type is included as its own csv file with informative names.