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, GoMRC developed the system architecture and an initial set of end user tools for priority coastal management issues in the Gulf:

• A conceptual model of submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) habitat to support restoration planning
• An SAV restoration prioritization decision support tool demonstrated in Mobile Bay Alabama and accessible through the ArcGIS Toolbox or the web-based Conceptual Model Explorer
• An advanced web search engine, Noesis, to support science-driven searches on an initial set of coastal and marine resource issues
• Map visualization tools, Interactive Maps and Real Time Image Viewer, with initial data layers related to coastal wetlands and SAV.

More About GoMRC >>