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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....

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,...

The number and severity of hurricanes in the Gulf Coast are increasing, resulting in intensified disturbance to coastal forest communities. Atlantic white-cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides) grows no further than one hundred miles from the coast, making the species and associated plant communities partic...

Recognizing that coastal communities are at risk to natural, economic, and technological disasters, the Gulf of Mexico Alliance and Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium provided small grants for communities to build capacity for responding to future disasters in the Gulf of Mexico through the NO...

Coastal marshes, which provide a number of ecosystem services including flood control, nutrient regulation, carbon sequestration, and wildlife habitat, have been experiencing extensive loss due to sea level rise (SLR) in addition to other natural and anthropogenic factors. One way in which coastal m...

Oyster reefs are important ecosystems that provide invaluable services for coastal communities. Crassostrea virginica populations in the northern Gulf of Mexico have suffered heavy losses in the 21st century due to alterations in water quality from various disasters, including openings of the Bonnet...

The 8-county Gulf-Houston Regional Conservation Plan (RCP) is a long-term collaborative of environmental, business, and governmental entities working together to implement an ecosystem resilience plan for the large Gulf-Houston region through 3 Key Goals: 1) Increasing the current 14.7% in protected...

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...

The Mobile Bay National Estuary Program has been implementing a comprehensive management strategy to reduce the population of Island Apple Snails in an urban watershed in Mobile, Alabama. Invasive species management was identified as a priority for habitat restoration in the Three Mile Creek Watersh...

Natural shorelines provide ecosystem services that are integral to maintaining healthy and resilient coastal ecosystems and communities. However, anthropogenic and environmental stressors are reducing the extent of natural shorelines and, thus, their capacity to provide critical ecosystem services. ...

Federal fishery management is a complex regulatory world, full of acronyms and obscure processes. Decades ago, the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Legal Program (MASGLP) issued Understanding Fisheries Management, a manual last revised in 2005. Since then, fishery management has changed, as has technol...

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are highly harmful environmental pollutant particularly relevant to waterways. These molecules have characteristic absorption and fluorescence spectra; however, their low effective concentrations makes their chemical sensing and quantitation challenging. We es...

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 ...

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...

Dog River Clearwater Revival (DRCR) is a 25-year-old place-based nonprofit whose sole mission is to improve the water quality of and access to Mobile’s urban river and its many tributary creeks and streams. In order to successfully achieve its mission, DRCR realized there was needed to fully under...

The West Indian manatee, which lives at the interface of freshwater and marine systems, can serve as a representative model for potential vulnerability of nearshore species to in-water construction activities. In coastal Alabama, planned construction projects including the Mobile River Bridge and Ba...

Presentation will highlight the steps taken to formally adopt a Program for Public Information in the city of Orange Beach, Alabama. The Program for Public Information, also known as a PPI, is a public policy approach developed by FEMA to better coordinate flood risk and communication at the local l...

The Mississippi Sound and Bight is a dynamic region to the east of the well-studied Texas/Louisiana shelf. Riverine input, variable winds, tidal exchange, and a complex coastal geography all play a role in the ecosystem dynamics of this economically important region. The Mississippi Sound and Missis...

As part of the implementation of their EPA Gulf of Mexico Program grant to develop a Comprehensive Trash Abatement Program for the Dog River Watershed, Dog River Clearwater Revival (DRCR), a grassroots, place-based nonprofit began developing a protocol to determine trash transport routes throughout ...

The Sarasota-Manatee region is one of the most vulnerable areas in the United States to impacts from sea level rise and coastal flooding. A group of local environmental and science organizations were surveyed in 2018 to determine the extent of existing resources for climate change education and outr...

The City of Mobile, Alabama is using a multi-pronged, multi partner approach to attacking litter in their city. Projects include Trash Traps, Litter Boats, Marine Debris Interceptors, Vacuum ATLVs and Right of Way Litter Cleanups. Each project involves a unique partnership with different private and...

The Mobile Bay National Estuary Program (MBNEP) secured funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund (GEBF) to perform engineering and design studies to develop a solution to stabilize and protect priority in-river wetland spits and restore marshland ...

Hydrologic models were developed and calibrated for multiple watersheds in Mobile and Baldwin Counties. The models have been calibrated to real time events using weather stations and stream gauges with telemetry installed at strategic locations within the basins. These models can be used for storm w...

In 2019, a GIS analysis was performed to produce a status and trends report to measure habitat loss or gain from previous studies. In 2016, the MBNEP produced habitat maps of Mobile and Baldwin counties at one-meter resolution. Due to the higher resolution of the 2016 imagery and a new methodology f...

Submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) is often an important, yet understudied, process in coastal estuarine systems. In the western Mississippi Sound, samples were taken of surface waters for chemical species typically enriched in SGD (i.e., Ra quartet, Ba, methane, 222Rn, nutrients). Mass balance a...

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...

Wave energy is a key factor in the coastal environment as it influences multiple components including erosion and hydrodynamics. This importance highlights the need for wave climates to be considered in the design of conservation and restoration projects. Currently, the majority of site specific wav...

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...

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...

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...