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• Guest Editorial: team collaborates on nutrients and hypoxia

Sea Briefs is a report on the results of the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium.

Editor: Melissa Schneider

This newsletter is available in PDF format from:
masgc.org/seabriefs

MASGC supports applied, interdisciplinary marine science research, education and outreach efforts to foster the sustainable development and management of the Mississippi and Alabama coasts and nearshore ecosystems of the Gulf of Mexico

Mississippi-Alabama
Sea Grant Consortium
703 East Beach Drive
Ocean Springs, MS 39564
Phone: 228-818-8838
E-mail: seabriefs@masgc.org
MASGP 09-012-02

Guest Editorial: Team collaborates
on nutrients and hypoxia

The Gulf of Mexico Alliance (the Alliance) of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, intent on significantly increasing regional collaboration to enhance the ecological and economic health of the Gulf of Mexico. The Alliance has identified six priority issues that are region-ally significant and can be effectively addressed through increased collaboration at the local, state and federal levels. The priority issues are water quality, habitat conservation and restoration, ecosystems integration and assessment, nutrients and nutrient impacts, coastal community resilience and environmental education. The integrated approaches of the Alliance to addressing these issues include the planning and implementation of monitoring, modeling, data management and sustainable best management practices.

The State of Mississippi leads the Nutrients Priority Issue Team. Kim Caviness (team lead) and Ann Porter (team regional coordinator) are both employed by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. The Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, under the direction of LaDon Swann, continues to be a valuable partner; and with the recent addition of Stacy Ray (NOAA nutrients and hypoxia engagement specialist) to the Nutrients Team, excellent opportunities for extension, outreach and education have been realized and supported.

The Alliance Nutrients Team strives to ad-dress nutrient and hypoxia issues of the five Gulf States, each facing similar nutrient challenges, and is an important forum to build and evaluate effective management tools to reduce nutrient impacts. Current planning efforts of the team are detailed in the Action Plan II Implementation Guidance Document (Tier II) available online at http://www.gulfofmexicoalliance.org/working/nutrients/nutrients_tier2_020210.pdf

This document describes implementation plans aimed at reducing nutrient impacts over the next five years. Overall actions of the team address: nutrient characterization, nutrient criteria development, hypoxia and nutrient reduction strategies.