Data and Reports Explorer

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), ...

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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 ...

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 ...