Restoration

USGS WARC ecologists are assisting partners in conducting avian surveys on Chandeleur Islands during the pre-restoration monitoring phase to document threatened and endangered species, species richness and diversity, species abundance, and habitat use.

USGS will monitor hydrologic and marsh conditions at the Turtle Bayou mitigation area. This effort will help provide a long-term water level dataset for Turtle Bayou.

USGS researchers are examining germination of Purple Loosestrife to determine if the seed bank can reestablish this invasive species in the Mississippi Delta.

USGS researchers will collect geospatial data that will help decision makers monitor and mitigate the direct and indirect impacts of border barrier construction on threatened and endangered species.

USGS will install and maintain up to six rod surface-elevation table (RSET) rods and paired accretion monitoring stations at the location of the Maurepas Swamp Alternative-2 Mitigation Project.

USGS will provide support to the Large-scale Marsh Creation – Upper Barataria Component Project by monitoring change in the area of land and water, and recovery of vegetation and elevation over time.

USGS researchers and their partners will develop a coupled hydrodynamic and water quality modeling system; calibrate and validate the models; assess and predict outcomes of a canal backfilling restoration project on key water quality attributes; and run the modeling system under a suite of climate change scenarios.

WARC researchers are providing support to Louisiana Monitoring and Adaptive Management activities.

USGS researchers will quantify wetland change and wetland vegetation community type change through the analyses of aerial vegetation survey data and investigate potential relationships between Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and marsh elevation change.

The USGS is participating in the Louisiana-Trustee Implementation Group Monitoring and Adaptive Management work group to assess the injuries caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and to select the appropriate restoration measures to compensate the public for the injury to coastal and marine resources.

The USGS partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its conservation partners to develop 16 Biological Planning Units (BPU) and six Aquatic Extensions and compile population objectives for 166 species that are representative of habitats within each BPU.

WARC researchers partnered with managers and species experts to develop a Bayesian network model and a geospatial habitat characteristics dataset to predict the number of Brown Pelican breeding pairs on islands in the northern Gulf of Mexico.