RESTORE Sponsored Research Project: Building Resilience for Oysters, Blue Crabs, and Spotted Seatrout to Environmental Trends and Variability in the Gulf of Mexico

This project explores how oyster, blue crab, and spotted seatrout populations respond to human and environmental changes with the goal of improving the management of these economically and culturally important species.

The abundance of oysters, blue crabs, and spotted seatrout is rapidly declining in the Gulf of Mexico. These species have provided valuable food, raw material, recreation, and cultural resources to humans since the Gulf was settled. Today, the ecosystem services provided by these species are threatened, or near collapse in Gulf estuaries. This is partially due to human activities and environmental trends such as fisheries harvest and changes in water and habitat quality. Many of the underlying mechanisms that relate long-term trends and short-term variability in the environment to changing populations of oyster, blue crab and spotted seatrout are unquantified or unknown.

This project will identify temperature, salinity (freshwater), oxygen (hypoxia), and pH (acidity) thresholds for oyster, blue crab, and spotted seatrout populations based on current and future habitat conditions, including climate variability and human-induced stressors. Thresholds will be quantified in mesocosm experiments, from field observations, and with numerical models. By linking multiple data sets of species recruitment, growth, and survival rates with natural and human induced environmental conditions across time, the project team will identify the large scale drivers and stressors of these populations in Mobile Bay, Alabama. Next numerical models will be created based off these data that can forecast population, ecosystem services, and socio-economic changes based on scenarios of future conditions. Public preferences about changes to the ecosystem will be gauged through a survey and incorporated into the models to calculate the costs and benefits of potential management actions.

This project is led by the University of South Alabama, Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

This project is funded by the NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) RESTORE Science Program under award NA19NOS4510194 to the University of South Alabama.

Expected Outcome: This project will provide Mobile Bay decision-makers a process for evaluating various scenarios, management actions, and outcomes based on single and multiple thresholds for oyster, blue crab, and spotted seatrout populations. It will help identify what individual or combined stressors affect these economically and culturally important species plus evaluate how management actions may improve the resilience of these populations to environmental change.

Lehrter, John; Fletcher, Allison; Parrish, Alex; Liu, Zhilong; LaBon, Nicholas (2023). Temperature, Salinity, pH, Oxygen, Inorganic and Organic Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Carbon, Suspended Sediments and Chlorophyll-a data for the Mobile Bay and Mississippi Sound from 2020-05-28 to present (NCEI Accession 0277234). [indicate subset used]. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.25921/jacg-ts70

Download from website

None

None

For details, see Distribution Information.

For details of data quality control methods, see Lineage Sources. All users should independently analyze the datasets according to their own needs and standards to determine data usability.

NCCOS IT Policy

[Request this information from Lehter Team]