National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Gulf of Mexico
Hydrological Restoration
Inventory and Prioritization Project
 Gulf of Mexico Sea Grant Agencies
 

Description

Hydrological restoration of tidally influenced areas offers opportunities to efficiently use resources and maximize benefits for comparatively low investments. By focusing restoration efforts in relatively small footprints, such as removing barriers to tidal flow, hundreds or thousands of acres can be positively impacted. The NOAA Restoration Center and Gulf of Mexico Sea Grant College Programs are focused on this type of restoration through a partnership. There are three components to this effort, and they cover the entire spectrum of restoration from the identification of potential restoration projects to funding restoration project to monitoring the effectiveness of the implemented projects.

Definition of Hydrological Restoration for this Partnership
To remove or modify anthropogenic barriers to restore historic tidal estuarine and freshwater exchange to benefit coastal and marine fisheries habitat.

Scale of Restoration Projects for this Initiative
The primary focus of this effort is on restoration projects that improve 5 acres of habitat or more and cost less than $1 million to complete. Larger (up to $5 million) or smaller projects may be considered and used by other partners who are interested in supporting hydrological restoration projects.

 Objectives

Objective 1: Identify 100 to 150 hydrological restoration sites in the Gulf of Mexico.

  • Part I: Developing the Site Prioritization Criteria

  • Part II: Utilizing Gulf of Mexico Sea Grant Extension Agents to Apply the Criteria

  • Part III: Prioritizing the Restoration Sites

  • Part IV: Assembling the Report and GIS Layers of Potential Restoration Sites

Objective 2: A set of monitoring criteria that is appropriate for assessment of hydrological restoration sites will be developed and incorporated into future phases of this partnership.

Objective 3: Fund on-the-ground tidal hydrology restoration projects.

Regional Sea Grant Programs

Figure 1: Four Gulf of Mexico Sea Grant regions include Texas (A), Louisiana (B), Mississippi and Alabama (C) and Florida (D).