October 30, 2023 — New research initiatives with $16.8 million in RESTORE funding from the federal government will conduct collaborative ecosystem science research for use by natural resource managers in the Gulf of Mexico.
NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center is involved in two new projects.
A team of researchers will study red tide and reef fish modeling. The team will update and improve an ecosystem model of the West Florida Shelf to account for red tide mortality when assessing Gulf of Mexico reef fish. The project will develop new approaches to map red tides using satellites, and map oxygen concentrations in relation to red tides. These products will be incorporated into a fisheries ecosystem model to estimate red tide mortality on valuable commercial and recreational species.
Those estimates will be used in stock assessments and recommendations on the amount of reef fish that can be caught each year in 2024–2028.
A second project will focus on building next-generation fishery forecasting capacity. The project team will address limitations and uncertainties in the stock assessment process by developing novel model diagnostics and interim assessment methods.
“We will incorporate these new methods into active stock assessments. This will provide more efficient and reliable stock projections used to derive overfishing limits and acceptable biological catch estimates,” according to a statement from the science center.
In all, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is awarding $16.8 million to 32 organizations working across 10 projects to conduct collaborative ecosystem science research.