Deep Sea Benefits supports DWH restoration

Hello everyone!

Unfortunately for the Deep-Sea Benefits project, the seas were too rough to safely work as Hurricane Francine passed to our west. We are all thinking about those who will be impacted by the storm. Fortunately for us, we have been in port in Pensacola to wait out the storm’s passage. All going according to our contingency plan, we’ll be back out in the open Gulf of Mexico on Friday to continue our work.

Caption: The R/V Point Sur shelters at Plaza de Luna Square, Pensacola, to dodge rough seas caused by Hurricane Francine. 

Perhaps this pause in the fast paced, day and night, on-and-off action of instrument and net deployments and acoustics surveys is a good time to take a step back and discuss the Deep-Sea Benefits project with respect to broader restoration activities taking place throughout the Gulf of Mexico. My name is Ian Zink, and I work for the NOAA Fisheries Deepwater Horizon Restoration Program.

NOAA works with our partners to implement projects to restore natural resources injured as a result of the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill that took place in 2010. Some restoration is fairly straight forward—like building marsh habitat to address injuries to coastal wetlands, and injuries to the fishes and invertebrates that rely on these habitats. A good example of this would be the Upper Barataria Marsh Creation project, which was recently completed in Louisiana.

However, some ecological processes in the Gulf of Mexico are less understood, meaning our ability to restore for them is not so straight-forward. The Deepwater Horizon restoration plan recognizes this, and thus places a strong emphasis on Monitoring and Adaptive Management. Monitoring is data-gathering that helps us assess the outcomes of restoration actions and inform future restoration activities.

The Deep-Sea Benefits project is using monitoring to gather information that will increase our understanding of ecological interactions among fish and water column invertebrates, sea turtles, marine mammals, and mesophotic and deep benthic communities. This information can be used to design restoration actions and calculate the benefits from other restoration activities. For example, the information collected by Deep-Sea Benefits will be incorporated into the Active Management and Protection project activities, including informing other agencies responsible for protecting Gulf of Mexico benthic habitat and resources about these protections. It will also help protect mesopelagic fish and invertebrate communities situated in the water column above them, thus contributing to protecting water column productivity—which helps support sea turtles, marine mammals, and mesophotic and deep benthic community productivity. These protections would also lead to conservation of the biodiversity inherent to these locations. The Deep-Sea Benefits project is layered—both figuratively and literally—on top of other restoration actions being taken to help restore for the injuries from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.