Data and Reports Explorer

Mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs) were compared between La Parguera and Ponce, off the south coast of Puerto Rico. In contrast to La Parguera, Ponce has a narrow insular shelf and hosts several river outlets, a commercial port, a regional sewage treatment plant with associated deep water outfall, and three deep ...

Lake Erie is the most socioeconomically important and productive of the Laurentian (North American) Great Lakes. Since the mid-1990s cyanobacterial blooms dominated primarily by Microcystis have emerged to become annual, late summer events in the western basin of Lake Erie yet the effects of these blooms on food web dynamics ...

This chapter reviews research on ecosystem metabolism in coastal environments, focusing on the history of methods development, spatial/temporal variations in rates, controlling factors, and application of these methods to address diverse scientific questions. Essential concepts and widely used terms are defined and explained. The wide range of ecosystem metabolism methods ...

Polychlorinated biphynels and chlorinated pesticides are ubiquitous marine pollutants that are bioaccumulated by marine mammals and are biomagnified through the food chain. Marine mammals, at the top of their food chain, carry very heavy body burdens of these potentially toxic anthropogenic contaminants. In cetaceans and pinnipeds there is some limited ...

The goal of this NOAA Coastal Ocean Program-funded project is to transfer to environmental management practitioners information about consideration of cumulative impacts in environmental decision-making. This report views the issue from the perspectives of science, law, and environmental management. It provides a brief overview of key concepts, methodologies and techniques ...

An understanding of the mean and maximum dispersal distances of target species and subsequent scaling of management efforts to dispersal distance can be key in slowing, containing, or eradicating invasive species. However, dispersal distance is often difficult to measure. Patterns of genetic relatedness can be interpreted to understand realized genetic ...

Microsatellites are the markers of choice for a variety of population genetic studies. The recent advent of next-generation pyrosequencing has drastically accelerated microsatellite locus discovery by providing a greater amount of DNA sequencing reads at lower costs compared to other techniques. However, laboratory testing of PCR primers targeting potential microsatellite ...

In August 2014, in situ measurements revealed an intense salinity drop impacting South Florida coral reefs, between Pulley Ridge (Southwest Florida Shelf) and the Florida Keys. The low salinity waters had a surface signal of 32 (down from 35.2) and extended over a 15–20-m deep lens. Satellite observations showed that ...

Anthropogenic nutrient overenrichment, coupled with rising temperatures, and an increasing frequency of extreme hydrologic events (storms and droughts) are accelerating eutrophication and promoting the expansion of harmful algal blooms (HABs) across the freshwater-to-marine continuum. All HABs—with a focus here on cyanobacterial blooms—pose serious consequences for water supplies, fisheries, recreational uses, ...

An activity book designed to introduce elementary school children to the animal life, plant life, and ecology of Mobile Bay ...

A simple improvement to objective analysis of hydrographic data is proposed to eliminate spatial aliasing effects in tidally energetic regions. The proposed method consists of the evaluation of anomalies from observations with respect to circulation model fields. The procedure is run iteratively to achieve convergence. The method is applied in ...

This dataset was created for potential use as an environmental predictor in spatial predictive models of deep-sea coral habitat suitability. Deep-sea corals are of particular conservation concern due to their slow growth rates and vulnerability to disturbance. This is a derived product. Modeling can lend insights into the environmental factors ...

A persistent gyre at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy results from a combination of tidal rectification and buoyancy forcing. Here we assess recent interannual variability in the strength of the gyre using data assimilative model simulations. Realistic hindcast representations of the gyre are considered during cruises in 2005, ...

Mesophotic hard corals (MHC) are increasingly threatened by a growing number of anthropogenic stressors, including impacts from fishing, land-based sources of pollution, and ocean acidification. However, little is known about their geographic distributions (particularly around the Pacific islands) because it is logistically challenging and expensive to gather data in the ...

This data set is a compilation of modeled seabird prevalence predictions for a selection of species including Razorbill (Alca torda), Greater Shearwater (Puffinus gravis), Wilson?s Storm-petrel (Oceanites oceanicus), Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus), and all auks (Alcidae), and relative abundance of cetaceans including humpback whale (megaptera novaengliae), right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), ...

Marine birds have the potential to be affected by human activities in the ocean environment such as offshore wind energy development. This report describes a project that developed maps of the spatial distributions of marine bird species in U.S. Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) waters that can be used to ...

This report describes the first phase of a project aimed at producing maps of the spatial distributions of marine bird species in U.S. Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) waters that can be used to inform marine spatial planning in the region. Visual sighting survey data from over three decades were ...

This book provides a snapshot of representative modeling analyses of coastal hypoxia and its effects. Hypoxia refers to conditions in the water column where dissolved oxygen falls below levels that can support most metazoan marine life (i.e., 2 mg O2 l-1). The number of hypoxic zones has been increasing at ...

Pygmy sperm whales are the second most commonly stranded marine mammal in the Southeastern Unites States (SEUS). They most often strand alive and the causes of these events remain largely unknown. Generalized linear models were built to identify potential relationships among environmental factors and the occurrence of pygmy sperm whale ...

The urban development of coastal areas and the increased use of chemical fertilizers over the last century have led to a worldwide expansion of coastal eutrophication and a significant increase in the occurrence and intensity of human-induced coastal hypoxia. Proportionally, nitrogen load has often increased more severely than phosphorus load ...