Monitoring and Detection

The USGS and partners will survey bird and human activity on beaches in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana to determine breeding bird response to stewardship activities aimed at protecting and recovering bird populations.

The USGS and the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program (BTNEP) conducted post-restoration monitoring of Piping Plovers and Red Knots to better understand how birds respond to coastal restoration.

USGS researchers and heir partners are capturing and banding birds that use man-made habitats to gather data on species occurrence, abundance, and energetic condition during autumn migration.

USGS researchers are a developing a modeling framework to assess climate warming impacts on hypoxia-related stress to commercially and recreationally important Gulf species.

Dauphin Island, Alabama, is the only barrier island providing protection to much of Alabama's coastal natural resources. Severely impacted by repeated extreme events, like Hurricane Katrina and Deepwater Horizon oil spill, USGS and partners are conducting a joint study to evaluate the feasibility of certain alternatives to increase resiliency and sustainability of the island.

State and Federal agencies, including USGS, are working together to assess the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and to determine appropriate restoration actions to restore natural resources, ecological services, and recreational services injured or lost due to the incident.

USGS scientists are conducting research to understand how estuary fisheries are affected by the the timing and/or magnitude of freshwater discharge into Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana.

USGS WARC ecologists are assisting partners in conducting avian surveys on Chandeleur Islands during the pre-restoration monitoring phase to document threatened and endangered species, species richness and diversity, species abundance, and habitat use.

USGS will deploy a small, portable radar aboard a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel to measure the abundance, geographic distribution, and flight altitude of birds migrating across the continental shelf of the northern Gulf.

The USGS will establish Rod Surface Elevation Tables at five National Wildlife Refuges on the Texas coast. This work will support climate adaptation and resilience planning by identifying areas susceptible to loss and degradation due to sea-level rise and extreme climatic events along the Texas Gulf Coast.

In response to declining populations, researchers at WARC are collecting data on demographics, movement patterns and habitat use, ecological niche and foraging ecology, and nesting ecology of diamondback terrapins.

The Asian tiger shrimp began appearing in commercial shrimp catches in 2006. They grow larger than native shrimp and are known to be fierce predators - so shrimpers and managers are concerned about the potential effects this species might have.