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Our current aquatic resource management methodology is in dire need of modernization. While many animal rights and animal welfare organizations have seen great success in recent decades regarding certain species of marine life, such as marine mammals used in entertainment, there is still much work t...

Aquatic Care Team (ACT): Empowering Students to Take Action The Navarre Beach Marine Science Station (NBMSS), a Santa Rosa County District School, is dedicated to educating students in the classroom, through research, and community outreach. The NBMSS has received a grant from NOAA to monitor the wa...

Wave energy is a major driver for coastal processes, such as erosion, sediment transport, and hydrodynamics. For this reason, it is important for wave energy to be considered in the process of site selection, design, and implementation of conservation and restoration projects. In areas influenced by...

Almost overnight, the COVID-19 pandemic presented a host of new challenges for conducting business as usual for natural and cultural resource managers. As organizations strive to accomplish tasks in this time of uncertainty, most have had to turn to technological solutions for safely convening group...

GeoCoast is an interactive, web-based tool that allows for the simulation of coastal flooding and sea level rise along the Mississippi Coast. GeoCoast is publicly accessible and allows users to visualize sea level rise impacts in both two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) environments. In ...

Each year the Environmental Studies Center (ESC), which is a part of Mobile County Public Schools, holds special classes for high school Biology and Environmental Science students. This past year, the SEA ICE Program (Student Enrichment Activities in Coastal Ecology) incorporated the study of the im...

Low Impact Development (LID) is an approach to land development that preserves natural resources and uses natural processes in a designed approach to slow, disburse, and filter stormwater close to its source to allow for soil infiltration, thereby preventing flooding and protecting the water quality...

Sea-level rise (SLR) projections have a wide range, in some locations projecting anywhere from 2 to 11 feet of SLR. This range exists due to natural variability, uncertainty in carbon emissions, and continually improving ice sheet melt science. This range can make it difficult for planners and proje...

Have you ever been asked to participate in an outreach event about resilience but were at a loss for an activity for the general public? Are the planners and floodplain managers in the municipalities you serve constantly under fire for the actions they put in place? Does the general public in your a...

Rice husks (RH) are the hard-protective coverings of grains of rice and are removed from rice seeds as a side stream during the milling process. The disposal of RH generates a huge problem for rice industry since RH represents about 23% of initial rice seed weight. The valorization of this side stre...

Waves have profound effects on coastal geomorphology, but the understanding of wave climate effects on coastal ecology is limited due, in part, to the high cost of commercial wave gauges. High-cost gauges also limit the scope of coastal wave models and the ability of coastal land managers to design ...

Increasingly, coastal wetland restoration is utilized to offset wetland loss and degradation and to recover ecosystem services, making it important to evaluate the relative effectiveness and times to functional equivalence of different restoration strategies. Two critically important services provid...

The Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve is working with partners from the United States Geological Survey and Mississippi State University to comprehensively monitor constructed reefs in the Grand Bay Estuary. Reef construction, scheduled to occur in fall of 2020, is funded by the Natural ...

Are you a graduate student interested in managing ocean and coastal resources? The NOAA Sea Grant John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship can allow you to work in Washington, D.C., for one year to help protect marine resources while learning more about national issues that involve natural resources....

Gulf TREE is a filter-based search engine designed to match users with relevant climate resilience tools quickly, easily, and confidently. It does this by sorting through the over-100 tools relevant to the Gulf of Mexico and matching users with one that meets their criteria. The web resource, releas...

We estimate the effect on sales price of a FORTIFIED Home designation for residential properties in two coastal Alabama counties. Our empirical strategy is to approximate an experiment using matching and hedonic regression with a rich set of property characteristics to develop a reasonable counterfa...

Bays, estuaries, and rivers provide vital ecological, economical, and recreational services to coastal communities. These vital water bodies are under increasing pressures from urbanization, land-use changes, population growth, a changing climate, sea-level rise, and extreme weather events. Closures...

Few studies have quantified trophic relationships in seagrass environments at the regional scale, making it difficult to make comparisons of trophic structures across seagrass ecosystems. We conducted a large-scale study at six sites across the northern Gulf of Mexico (Lower Laguna Madre, TX; Redfis...

Salt marshes exist in shallow-gradient landscapes where microtopographic changes on the order of centimeters to decimeters can drastically alter plant species composition. Thus, salt marshes are highly vulnerable to the effects of relative sea level rise and altered sediment supply. Of increasing im...

Since January 2019, the Saint Stanislaus (SSC) Marine Science program has worked with the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve, University of Texas at Austin, in a global citizen scientist research project. The project focuses on the pollution epidemic regarding microplastics, specifi...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) does work that affects more than one-third of America’s gross domestic product, and provides information that helps people make decisions related to topics ranging from weather to coastal restoration to fisheries. We develop tools and info...

Advances in geospatial technologies have stream-lined data collection, analysis, and visualization for environmental and coastal resource management. These advances have helped to enhance geospatial education and outreach application development for issues related to coastal flooding and sea level r...

For the past five years, Gulf of Mexico states have dealt with nearly annual appearances of massive Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) that have impacted coastal ecosystems and dependent tourism, fishing and the larger economies of communities. The research objectives of this project focused on quantifying...

As sea levels rise around the globe, adaption is becoming increasingly critical to ensure resilience of our coastal communities, ecosystems, and economies. Though sea levels are rising around the globe, sea level is not rising at the same rate everywhere. In addition to the global rise in sea level,...

Marine debris discarded in or transported onto marshes can negatively impact vegetation and shoreline stability. Such loss of habitat is of concern to coastal areas in the northern Gulf of Mexico due to ongoing habitat degradation and erosion as well as receding shorelines resulting from sea-level r...

As living shorelines become more well-known as an alternative to shoreline armoring, the need to explain the benefits of and what living shorelines are is replaced by questions about design, permitting, and costs. To answer these questions, the Green Infrastructure Working Group (GIWG) – a sub-gro...

Urban development contributes to alterations in the thermal regime of a watershed. Stormwater exiting urban heat islands results in thermal pollution, and may alter the ecological integrity of receiving waters. This poster reports on assessing Low Impact Development (LID) stormwater control measure ...

The Community Rating System (CRS) is a flood mitigation program of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Recent research shows that the program has led to a substantial increase in flood insurance purchases and decreased claims payments, but our understanding of participation rate under speci...

The primary objective of the study I will present on is to reconstruct multi-century streamflow records of the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, utilizing standard dendrochronological techniques to better understand past and present trends in hydrologic and hydroclimatic extremes within the system. Tree-ri...

Organisms may adjust characteristics such as behavior or morphology to reduce predation risk, but in doing so suffer reductions in growth and fecundity. To balance conflicting needs of reducing risk with energy acquisition and growth, organisms often limit expression of predator avoidance or deterre...