Gulf of Mexico Alliance All-Hands Meeting

Gulf of Mexico Alliance All-Hands Meeting

Ecosystem Integration and Assessment Priority Issue Team Agenda

Biloxi, MS

February 15th, 2012

Wednesday, February 15th

Breakfast on your own

Welcome and Meeting Overview - Larry McKinney

Larry gave a brief overview of the GOMA Alliance Coordination Team Meeting held February 14th:

State of the Gulf of Mexico Summit 2011, December 5-8th held in Houston, TX, was very successful.
A series of workshops held around the gulf will help finalize the definition of an economically and ecologically healthy gulf and identify existing policy frameworks where gaps exist and to prioritize restoration projects in light of the DWH oil spill.
State of the Gulf of Mexico Summit 2011 Web site has more information:
Gulf of Mexico Report Card Initiative – see below (also a link from the Gulf of Mexico Summit Web site)
Gulf Restoration Task Force is working with GOMA to move their task force forward.
GOMRC (Gulf of Mexico Regional Collaborative) was introduced at the Gulf Summit. This group consists of 66 research institutes gulf wide and was put together to provide natural resource managers and policymakers in the US and Mexico with tools to manage the Gulf’s marine and coastal environment. More information may be found on their Web site:
NOAA RFP will be out soon and GOMA will be submitting one proposal as a group. As with the last NOAA RFP, there will be two sections: Focus Area I – Projects, Focus Area II – Coordination. GOMA will submit one for each Focus Area with Focus Area II being exactly the same as the last submission. Each PIT will put forth two representatives to be on the writing team for the GOMA proposal. It was emphatically stated that the turnaround time for submission will be quick (~4-6 weeks). The RFP will again be centered on CMSP.
The GOMA All Hands meeting will be June 19-21, 2012, in Corpus Christi, TX with the EIA PIT meeting Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning (more information to follow when it becomes available).

Working Groups Updates- 20 minutes each

EIA Action Item 1 - The Gulf of Mexico Master Mapping Plan -Jennifer Wozencraft
Looking at planned mapping activities and identify mapping required that is related to the Gulf Initiative.
Looking to incorporate feedback from users, please provide.
Using GDAPT to help harvest new mapping data
Looking to harvest mapping data from GOS and GoMRI.
EIA Action Item 2 - Data Access and Acquisition -Russ Beard
Kate Rose gave a presentation/overview of the NOAA Data Atlas. Her presentation is attached.
Provided link to the Data Atlas:
Plans are to move the Data Atlas forward with more plates; kick off meeting will be February 29th at Stennis Space Center, MS.
EIA Action Item 3- Living Marine Resources - Dave Reed
Continue to update and add more studies to Dr. James Simons’ Trophic Fish Bibliography, 746 records are available and all but 6 have been geocoded with a shapefile and point location.
All of the FWC-FWRI metadata records (~1800) have been review and are available in the GAME catalog.
Efforts are now focused on incorporating the FWC-FWRI SIS (Species Information Services) Collections database into the GAME catalog. The reference collection of fishes and invertebrates contains approximately 100,000 catalogued lots of about 5,700 species and almost 380,000 lots of larval fishes.
Efforts are underway for the LMR stakeholder meeting to be scheduled sometime in May, 2012 (more information to follow when it becomes available).
EIA Action Item 4- Emergent Wetlands Status and Trends Report -Kate Spear
The first chapter of the Emergent Wetlands Status and Trends report plus comprehensive Literature Survey on Gulf of Mexico emergent wetlands has been posted on their Web site (
Need to update GOMA Action Item Web page with ‘public’ friendly text and links (if available).
EIA Action Item 5- Ecosystem Services Valuation -Cristina Carollo
All aspects of this project are on schedule.
Mustang Island Project is on schedule: (1) Map and Characterize habitats in a barrier island system typical of Gulf coast areas (Mustang Island). (2) Develop procedures and tools for identifying and assigning ecosystem services (ES) to habitats and apply to a typical barrier-island system. (3) Develop a scalable and transferable tool for valuing and mapping value of ES.
Galveston Bay Project is on schedule and is looking at the change in services provided by marshes over time.
Awarded a $650K from SeaGrant and still waiting on funds to arrive before work can begin.
2nd Annual Ecosystem Services Workshop was held focusing on Ecosystem Services in Restoration Activities and was a huge success. The outcomes from the workshop are still under review before they will be published on the Harte Web site.
Looking to host a possible organized session at the ACES (A Community on Ecosystem Services) 2012 conference December 10-14 in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

Gulf of Mexico Report Card- Larry McKinney

Larry provided a handout, “A vision for the Gulf of Mexico Report Card”, that outlined the Report card process (link from the Gulf Summit Web site has Report Card Prospectus).
Partial funding for the Report Card has been through the Walton Foundation.
Next steps for the Report Care are to discuss and decide on appropriate scale and indicators to run the analysis. Unfortunately, only about 10 – 12 indicators will be able to be used in the analysis.

Unscheduled presentation by Mike Carron, Director, Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative

Mike gave an update/overview of GoMRI activities to date. His power point presentation is attached to this email. Updated information about GoMRI and funding can be found on the GoMRI Web site:

Fisheries Management Council Collaboration Presentation - Steve Bortone and Dave Reed

Steve Bortone gave a presentation on what the Council’s plans are moving forward in developing Ecosystem Based Management (EBM) and how they are moving toward identifying indicators to establish an EBM framework. His power point presentation is attached to this email.

GOMA Portal and State Data Collection Efforts- Seneca Holland

Seneca gave a presentation on the GOMAPortal. For more info visit:

Discussion of Restoration Task Force Workplan–Alyssa Dausmanpresented on this.

The Task force wants to coordinate with the structure of GOAM, going to the PITS and pull individuals interested in participating in restoration projects.
The Task force wants interaction with either state, federal, or tribal partners; however a GOMA PIT representative will have the pull of getting information/suggestions/support from the PIT.
For more information please see the Task Force Web site:

EPA GOMA RFP Update - Diane Altsman

Diane gave a quick update on the GOMA RFP and stated that 98 proposals were received and that the review process was complete and EPA is now reviewing the QA/QC of scores each proposal received. The announcement should be made in the next few weeks.

NOAA 2012 RFP ROP and Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning EIA Workplan Integration-Laurie Rounds and Seneca Holland

Laurie discussed the Regional Ocean Partnership Funding and the National Ocean Policy planning tools with a focus on Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning.
There is a need for Regional Planning bodies to focus on CMSP and the Regional Ocean Partnership is an avenue to help fund the formation and work of these bodies.
Recap of the NOAA 2012 RFP with the two Focus Areas.
Seneca has the comments from the last NOAA RFP that GOMA submitted under and will provide them as an attachment to the meeting notes (attached to this email).
GOMA will submit the same Focus Area II proposal that addresses Coordination
GOMA will submit on project for Focus Area I that looks to collect data that is already available that could support CMSP and hold a series of workshops that look for useful data and data gaps.
Sharron Mesick, from NOAA NCDDC, commented on using national level experts that have been involved with CMSP data and tools and pointed us to the following Web site ( for more information and suggestions. She also suggested that we pay close attention to the RFP and be specific to its requests.

Update EIA Workplan

Individual Action Item teams broke into groups to update their action items.