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Proposed Initiatives -Mitigating Climate Change Impacts on NOAA managed resources
What is the issue?
Through the Coastal Zone Management and National Marine Sanctuaries Acts, NOAA is mandated to protect and conserve the Nation’s suite of National Estuarine Research Reserves (NERR) and National Marine Sanctuary (NMS) sites. These ecosystems are comprised of diverse habitats that provide a wide variety of goods and services but a major knowledge gap lies in understanding how these and other similar ecosystems will respond to climate change impacts. Failure to proactively plan for and respond to these effects will have severe ecological and economic implications. Coastal decision makers need the best scientific information in order to appropriately manage coastal ecosystems impacted by climate change.
How is CSCOR addressing this issue?
Our initiative proposes to fill these gaps by providing estuarine research reserves and marine sanctuary managers with the scientific knowledge and tools, including ecological models, to prepare for climate change impacts, with more certainty in scale, timing and local detail. This will be accomplished by supporting interdisciplinary, multi-year research projects investigating how coastal and marine ecosystems respond to climate variability and change, targeted specifically to the management needs of estuarine research reserves or marine sanctuaries currently experiencing climate change impacts. These efforts propose to leverage the extensive infrastructure, monitoring, outreach, and management capabilities found at the target locations and to incorporate research results and developed predictive tools into threat assessments and management plans. Coastal managers will then have the information, mechanistic linkages, and models to determine and mitigate projected climate change impacts on these NOAA managed ecosystems.
For more information contact Libby.Jewett@noaa.gov