Goals

Although NOAA and other resource managers have made significant progress in marine mammal assessments, reducing the uncertainty about the cumulative effects from multiple stressors will improve their science-based decision-making process.

For example, common bottlenose dolphins in coastal waters near Houston, TX are exposed to multiple chemical contaminants, as well as stress from other natural (e.g., freshwater inundation from Hurricane Harvey) and anthropogenic (e.g., vessel traffic and construction noise) events.

This workshop will establish a multi-disciplinary working group of technical subject matter experts, regional stakeholders, and resource managers to build a framework that will help decision makers evaluate the relative impacts of:

1) individual stressors

2) their cumulative effects on dolphins at both the individual- and population-level.

We will focus on the Houston area as a prototype application, but consider expanding to other areas and challenges as we build the framework.

We will construct our framework following recommendations from the report of a National Academies panel on Approaches to Understanding the Cumulative Effects of Stressors on Marine Mammals. For example, we will assess how stressors may or may not interact using the decision tree below (source) or whether modifications to the tree need to be made to address NRDA and other decisions by resource managers.

In addition to a multi-day workshop spent designing a project plan using existing data, the group could serve as an ongoing source for marine mammal resource managers in tailoring the model to future rapid or long-term decision-making throughout the Gulf of Mexico and US waters.