Environmental Data and Decision Support for the Gulf of Mexico

Satellite view of the Gulf of Mexico courtesy of the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE.

The Gulf of Mexico Regional Collaborative (GoMRC) was established to provide natural resource managers and policymakers in the United States and Mexico with a growing set of tools to sustainably manage the Gulf’s marine and coastal environment. The integrated data and decision support tools accessible through GoMRC will help end users – from federal coastal restoration scientists down to county land use planners – to identify and test options for natural resources planning and management. The GoMRC system will address a wide range of resource management issues and enable analysis at multiple scales.

With seed funding from NASA, the interdisciplinary GoMRC team developed an open system architecture and an initial set of end user tools for priority coastal management issues facing Gulf of Mexico states. The GoMRC team, with direct collaboration of numerous types of data users in both the U.S. and Mexico, achieved five milestones:

• Conceptual models for submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV), mangroves, and coral reefs systems were developed by the GoMRC team and its collaborators in Mexico and the U.S.
• An SAV restoration prioritization decision support tool was demonstrated in Mobile Bay Alabama and is accessible through the ArcGIS Toolbox or the web-based Conceptual Model Explorer.
• The Noesis semantic web search engine was refined to incorporate ontologies for SAV and mangroves and to search databases dedicated to coastal marine resource issues.
• Map visualization tools, including COAST, Interactive Maps, and Real Time Image Viewer, were adapted to support analysis of coastal wetlands and SAV in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Coastal resource managers and academic researchers in Alabama and  Florida in the U.S. and Veracruz and Campeche in Mexico have been trained in use of GoMRC resources to support local decision-making.

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