Success Story
DREDGED MATERIAL DISPOSAL SITE designations involve contentious ecological, economic, social, and legal issues. When Maryland began its search for a new disposal site, NOAA Fisheries recommended an innovative approach to minimize contention while focusing efforts to identify high-value source areas. User group tensions decreased and the approach identified several potential disposal sites. This procedure could serve as a model for how agencies, industries, and citizens can collaborate on siting challenges associated with aquaculture facilities, docks, sand extraction sites, and other permitted activities that often affect habitat.
Success Story
POPLAR ISLAND HABITAT RESTORATION was the first large-scale, beneficial-use project involving Chesapeake Bay dredged materials. Clean materials that are dredged from up navigation channels will be used to restore an eroding island and create fish habit learned should prove useful where erosion is a major cause of habitat loss.
Habitat values associated with the Project will also offset lost Bay bottoms affected by maintenance dredging. NOAA Fisheries contributed to project design and baseline monitoring and will continue to provide ecological oversight.
MITIGATION BANKS offer opportunities to protect lands
to offset the unavoidable impacts of development that affect
wetlands and waterways. NOAA Fisheries participated in the White
House Wetlands Working Group to establish mitigation banking
guidance and is now actively applying the guidance around the
Nation:
- NOAA Fisheries co-sponsored training to establish common mitigation banking practices;
- NOAA Fisheries provided fish habitat perspective.
Success Story
SANDY ISLAND MITIGATION BANK offered an early opportunity to implement the
1996 White House guidance. NOAA Fisheries signed an interagency
Memorandum of Agreement with its partners in South Carolina and
Federal agencies representing regulatory, construction, and development
interests. A $14 million, 9,000 acre mitigation bank was established
in 1996 to offset unavoidable environmental impacts of highway
construction projects in South Carolina. The agreement will protect
wetlands and adjacent uplands with outstanding fish and wildlife
value. This agreement will serve as a model elsewhere for mitigation
banking and agency partnerships.
- RESTORE AND CREATE
Habitat restoration and creation complement protection and conservation in our efforts to retain habitat function and value. While protection and conservation are more cost effective, restoration is evolving as a valid technique to reverse habitat loss.
NOAA Fisheries leadership role in restoration and creation projects offers the opportunity to promote this important component of the National Habitat Program.
The ecological, socioeconomic, and cultural challenges of restoration and creation are immense. NOAA Fisheries considers community needs and environmental ethics when setting priorities.
Key
Recommendations:
- Establish habitat restoration and creation as integral strategies in resource and ecosystem management;
- Emphasize restoration in the natural resource damage assessment process;
- Use restoration opportunities to improve and share technical expertise with government and private partners.
HABITAT RESTORATION AND CREATION include a complex mix of agency activities. The Oil Pollution Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, and the National Marine Sanctuaries Act enable the government to compensation through restoration damages for impacts resulting from oil spills, toxic chemical contamination, and physical injuries.
Our
mandate is to restore, replace, or acquire resources equivalent
to those injured. NOAA is a national leader in the legal, economic,
and ecological challenges of restoration.
We are an active partner in about
$1 billion in restoration projects, including:
- Complex efforts to remove PCBs and restore ecological health and economic vitality to New Bedford Harbor (Massachusetts);
- Innovative underwater coral reef reconstruction work after vessel groundings in the Florida Keys;
- Extensive urban harbor restoration efforts following chemical contamination in Puget Sound, with ecosystem impacts to anadromous fish and legal implications for tribal treaty rights;
- New partnerships with oil spill response and clean-up agencies to initiate restoration activities shortly after each event.
Each project involves partners from local, state, regional, and federal agencies, and strong public participation. This extensive experience enables NOAA Fisheries to improve restoration techniques and to expand capabilities at both the local and regional levels.
Success Story
THE M/V ALEC OWEN MAITLAND AND THE M/V ELPIS ran aground in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary in October 1989. Both groundings and salvage efforts caused extensive coral reef injuries.
Through legal settlements, NOAA recovered funds to restore both
grounding sites. Working with our partners in the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers, NOAA stabilized the reef structures at the two
sites, prevented secondary injury from loose coral rubble, and
recreated the three-dimensional habitat necessary to hasten natural
recovery. At the smaller M/V Elpis site, limestone rock and sand
were placed into the damaged area to restore the natural landscape.
More extensive damage at the M/V Maitland site required that
40 concrete units be constructed on land for placement into the
crater. In an unique application of ocean engineering, non-separable
concrete was poured between the units to fuse them and to connect
the new structure to the surrounding reef.
COASTAL WETLANDS PLANNING, PROTECTION, AND RESTORATION ACT OF 1990 (CWPPRA) includes major commitments to protect and restore the Nation's wetlands. Louisiana receives highest priority since the state has about 40% of the coastal wetlands in the lower 48 states and is experiencing about 80% of the nation's coastal wetland loss. A state/federal task force is now implementing a state-wide strategy to slow wetland loss and to create new habitat by:
- Reversing hydrological alterations;
- Promoting sediment deposition to enhance wetland accretion;
- Revitalizing barrier island habitats to protect 40 inland wetlands.
The Louisiana projects are heavily dependent
upon cooperation with local industry, parish governments, land
owners, and partners in state and federal agencies. Projects
include a wide variety of restoration activities. CWPPRA reaffirms
the importance of partnerships, financial leverage, local participation,
and other facets that underlie the National Habitat Plan. 
Success Story
THE MYRTLE GROVE DIVERSION project is one example of local/state/federal cooperation to restore wetland functions. Under the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection an Restoration Act (CWPPRA), a federal/state task force has been awarding funds to implement wetland restoration projects since 1991. NOAA Fisheries coordinates several large-scale projects to protect and restore wetlands such as the Myrtle Grove project along the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish. Large siphon pipes will divert approximately 2,100 cubic feet of water per second, distributing water and sediments over 15,000 acres. When completed, the $15 million project is anticipated to protect, enhance, and create more than 10,250 acres of prime habitat for coastal and marine resources.
The Myrtle Grove project is strongly supported by the state and Plaquemines and Jefferson Parishes.
NOAA Fisheries is the federal sponsor for 10 other CWPPRA restoration projects. Each project is implemented with state cooperation for engineering, construction, monitoring, and operations/maintenance.
Success Story
BIG ISLAND, located at the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, was created with dredged material from the Atchafalaya River navigation channel. Although no spoil has been deposited on the island since the mid-1980s, the location and height of the island prevents the river delta from expanding and creating new wetlands along the western side of the river's main channel.
A 500-foot wide, 10-foot deep channel will be dredged just north of Big Island at a 45-degree angle to the navigation channel of the Atchafalaya River. The project's main channel will graduate into several smaller channels designed to allow sediment and fresh water to once again reach the western side of the Atchafalaya River delta lobes, creating approximately 300 acres of wetlands. More than 1,200 acres of marsh are expected to form naturally over the life of the project.
COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION is an integral component of all
restoration projects. The National Habitat Plan envisions local
and regional participation to ensure that we achieve our goals
of sustainable natural reosurces and economies.
- Financial support and restoration assistance is helping dozens of communities and local groups to undertake small-scale restoration activities;
- Innovative, cost-effective pilot projects meet community needs and achieve effective restoration;
- Partnerships with non-governmental organizations, the public, and industry are often supplemented by local volunteers who help to restore habitat or to monitor effectiveness.
UNDERSTAND
The Plan renews NOAA Fisheries commitment to understand habitat
functions and values an to communicate that knowledge to others.
Habitat research is a high priority that will be pursued within
the NOAA science hierarchy in full cooperation with partners
in academia, other agencies, and the private sector. The best
scientific information must be communicated the public and private
sectors so the agency can pursue its habitat management and research
objectives with the greatest prospects of success
RESEARCH includes a mix of basic investigations to understand natural functions and applied effort to support resource management. Science and management coordination begins with a process designed to identify habitat information needs, to compare needs with research capabilities, to review funding sources and partnership opportunities, and to prepare a plan to meet needs.
NOAA
Fisheries has planned regional and national meetings to implement
the NMFS National Habitat Research Plan. The NOAA Fisheries Southeast
Region has a long history of science/management interaction that
will be adapted to meet our needs elsewhere in the country. Our
efforts will involve frequent interactions with partners in the
private sector and elsewhere in government agencies.
Research is a basic function of NOAA Fisheries
and a vital component of the National Habitat Plan. The Plan
lists recommendations for action, including:
- Implement the National Habitat Research Plan;
- Evaluate research and management programs, inventory needs, and set priorities;
- Share research results, technology, and information with partners and constituents;
- Package research results for managers,
including synthesis documents and journal reports.
Among our highest priorities are research on the ecological value of various habitats, studies of the effects of human activities on habitats, and the effects of diminished habitat value on living marine resource populations.
Success Story
"THE HABITAT RESEARCH PLAN
OF THE NATIONAL MARINE FISHERIES SERVICE" was approved
by NOAA Fisheries in 1995. The Plan encompasses five areas of
research needs:
- Understand the structure and function
of natural ecosystems, their linkages, and their role in supporting
and sustaining the abundance, distribution, and health of living
marine resources;
- Quantify the response of habitats and
living marine resources to natural and anthropogenic alterations;
- Develop and evaluate new techniques to
restore or create productive habitats of living marine resources;
- Develop indicators to simplify determinations
of habitat impacts or recovery;
- Synthesize research and communicate findings
to managers.