Through a joint competition with the U.S. Coastal Research Program (USCRP), ten new projects were selected for a total of $3.9 million in funding to translate research into application for communities. Additionally, Sea Grant programs across the nation received an additional total of $4.2 million in NOAA Sea Grant funds to increase local capacity, engagement, research, and implementation for addressing resilience challenges.
Sea Grant-supported researchers will produce data allowing decision makers to see the ecological and economic impacts of removing oil rigs or creating artificial reefs.
The National Sea Grant College Program and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement have awarded over $795 thousand to Texas Sea Grant and a team of researchers from Texas A&M University and LGL Ecological Research Services to produce information that could lead to the development of a decision-support tool modeling the ecological and economic effects of changing the composition of oil rigs in the gulf.
The National Sea Grant College Program has announced that a regional collaborative of Sea Grant fisheries extension specialists, university scientists and fisheries managers will receive $2.4 million to develop and implement extension and outreach programming related to data and information from three large research projects focused on estimating the number of reef fish in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
A team of scientists, selected through a peer-review process organized by the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, will conduct an independent study to estimate the number of Greater Amberjack in the U.S. waters of the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico regions. The team will also investigate the fish’s movement and how it is distributed by habitat, including artificial, natural and uncharacterized habitats.
Sea Grant and its research partners announced two updates on efforts to better understand red snapper populations in U.S. coastal waters today. These complementary projects, which are interdisciplinary and connected to multiple partners and stakeholders are being conducted by external, university-based teams and administered by Sea Grant.