Monitoring and Detection

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.

USGS researchers are collecting information about lower trophic levels in Barataria Estuary to develop a long-term monitoring plan.

Fifty-four biologists from nine organizations, including USGS, participated in a two-day Fish Slam event on December 13 - 14, 2023 in Southwest Florida.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is leading a Monitoring and Adaptive Management (MAM) activity with USGS collaborators to establish reference ranges and restoration targets, assess data gaps for focal nekton species and/or guilds associated with Louisiana’s estuarine and coastal habitats, implement the fixed-area sampling strategy to quantify fishes and invertebrates...

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.

USGS will deploy a small, portable radar aboard a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel to measure the abundance, geographic distribution, and flight altitude of birds migrating across the continental shelf of the northern Gulf.

In response to declining populations, researchers at WARC are collecting data on demographics, movement patterns and habitat use, ecological niche and foraging ecology, and nesting ecology of diamondback terrapins.

Researchers are investigating beach compaction, the incubation environment for turtle nests, and shorebird nest abundance at beaches throughout the southeastern United States to better understand the impacts of beach compaction to nesting turtles and foraging seabirds.

A new study aims to collect information on sturgeon temporal and spatial distribution to inform offshore wind energy and sand leasing operations.