Data and Reports Explorer

This report presents seasonal distribution maps of selected seabird species off the Pacific coast of Washington. Maps were created to support state-led marine spatial planning by identifying ecologically important areas for seabirds. Seabird distribution maps were constructed by predicting relative density across the seascape using associative models linking at-sea seabird ...

Management of marine and estuarine fish and shellfish would benefit from a numerical approach that quantifies the impacts of climate variability and eutrophication. We present a proof-of-concept habitat volume model that incorporates predictions from a 3-dimensional biophysical model. Using temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen, habitat volumes were calculated based on ...

We developed a spatially explicit, individual-based model to analyze how hypoxia effects on reproduction, growth, and mortality of Atlantic croaker in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico lead to population-level responses. The model follows the hourly growth, mortality, reproduction, and movement of individuals on a 300 × 800 spatial grid of ...

Quantifying the population-level effects of hypoxia on coastal fish species has been challenging. In the companion paper (part 1), we described an individual-based population model (IBM) for Atlantic croaker in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico (NWGOM) designed to quantify the long-term population responses to low dissolved oxygen (DO) concentrations during ...

Whether mesophotic reefs will behave as refugia for corals threatened by global climate change and coastal development depends on vertical exchange of larvae between diverse habitats. Here we use a biophysical model of larval dispersal to estimate vertical connectivity of a broadcasting (Orbicella faveolata) and a brooding (Porites astreoides) species ...

Deep-sea corals are important components of the benthos in the Gulf of Mexico, because they provide structural complexity to associated species of fish and invertebrates, and they serve as proxies for environmental conditions on millennial time scales. In the Gulf of Mexico, large colonies of the black coral Leiopathes glaberrima ...

In June 2009, a workshop was convened under the auspices of the Global Ecology and Oceanography of Harmful Algal Blooms (GEOHAB) program to develop strategies for using observations and models to address the science questions articulated in the Open Science Meeting Reports for each of the GEOHAB Core Research Projects ...

Through its promotion of coordinated international research programs, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) has facilitated major progress on some of the most challenging problems in oceanography. Issues of global significance—such as general ocean circulation, the carbon cycle, the structure and dynamics of ecosystems, and harmful algal blooms—are so large in ...

This report describes the creation and assessment of a moderate-depth benthic habitat map for the Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument (VICRNM) south of St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands. The objective of this effort, conducted by NOAA's Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment's Biogeography Branch in partnership with the U.S ...

A major impact of global climate change has been the marked increase worldwide in the incidence of coastal hypoxia (dissolved oxygen, DO<2.0 mg l-1). However, the extent of hypoxia exposure to motile animals such as fish collected from hypoxic waters as well as their molecular and physiological responses to environmental ...

Neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) catalyzes production of nitric oxide in vertebrate brains. Recent findings indicate that endothelial NOS and reactive oxygen species (ROS) are significantly increased during hypoxic stress and are modulated by antioxidants. However, the influence of antioxidants and steroids on nNOS upregulation by hypoxia is largely unknown ...

Cyanobacteria blooms caused by species such as Microcystis have become commonplace in many freshwater ecosystems. Although phosphorus (P) typically limits the growth of freshwater phytoplankton populations, little is known regarding the molecular response of Microcystis to variation in P concentrations and sources. For this study, we examined genes involved in ...

Deciphering molecular structures of dissolved organic matter (DOM) components is key to understanding the formation and transformation of this globally important carbon pool in aquatic environments. Such a task depends on the integrated use of complementary analytical techniques. We characterize the molecular structure of natural DOM using an ion mobility ...

Mollusks were sorted from samples of shell hash (obtained as bycatch during NOAA-sponsored studies of larval and juvenile fish distribution), and analyzed to gain qualitative insights on species composition, distribution and habitat affinities of the molluscan fauna on the continental shelf off Georgia. Samples came from beam trawls at 37 ...

The dynamic bio-optical and physical ocean properties within the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) have been identified by the Ocean Weather Laboratory. Ocean properties from VIIRS satellite (Chlorophyll and Bio-Optics and SST) and ocean-circulation models (currents, SST and salinity) were used to identify regions of dynamic changing properties. The degree of ...

On the U.S. west coast, blooms of the potentially toxic diatom Pseudo-nitzschia can cause amnesic shellfish poisoning (ASP), resulting in economic impacts to coastal economies and public health concerns. The transfer of toxin, via filter feeding of Pseudo-nitzschia or ingestion of filter feeding organisms, to shellfish, crustaceans, seabirds, finfish, and ...

Hawaii's coastal marine resources have declined dramatically over the past 100 years due to multiple anthropogenic stressors including overfishing, coastal development, pollution, overuse, invasive species and climate change. It is now becoming evident that ecosystem-based management, in the form of marine protected areas (MPAs), is necessary to conserve biodiversity, maintain ...

The accumulation of domoic acid (DA) and saxitoxins (STX), phycotoxins produced by some species of Pseudo-nitzschia and Alexandrium, respectively, in coastal food webs are a focus of research on the West Coast of the United States due to the deleterious effects they have on coastal ecosystems and economies. Results are ...

This study assessed morphological variation of the depth-generalist coral Montastraea cavernosa across shallow and mesophotic coral ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) using thirteen corallite metrics. While corallite structure differed significantly across sites, we observed that mean corallite diameters were smaller and spacing was greater in mesophotic corals as ...

Fish movement and the spatial and temporal dynamics of hypoxia determine hypoxia exposure and the effect of poor water quality on nursery habitat function. Although water quality criteria for dissolved oxygen (DO) are well defined, hypoxia exposure of juvenile estuary-dependent fishes in situ is largely unknown. Thirty-one juvenile weakfish Cynoscion ...