The Open Ocean Trustee Implementation Group, in partnership with the University of Florida, recently completed a project that informs restoration decision-making and the implementation of future projects to restore Gulf sturgeon—a species injured by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Gulf sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus desotoi) inhabit both coastal and estuarine waters in the northern Gulf of America; they are found in seven river systems located in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—the Pearl, Pascagoula, Apalachicola, Escambia, Yellow, Choctawhatchee, and Suwanee.
They hatch and spend the first two to three years of their lives in these rivers and then become migratory. They spend fall and winter in coastal and estuarine waters and return to the river in which they spawned during spring and summer.
The Informing Gulf Sturgeon Population Status and Trends as a Baseline to Evaluate Restoration project set out to improve our understanding of Gulf sturgeon populations by establishing baselines, in order to better evaluate the success of and target restoration efforts. The project focused on standardizing data collection and data storage and making access to such data easier for researchers and agencies involved in their restoration and management.
The project:
- Improved how a network of Gulf sturgeon experts collect data by developing tablets that were used to record data in the field
- Improved the quality of data going back to the 1990s by modernizing the Gulf sturgeon database and assessing the quality of thousands of existing records for inclusion in the database
- Engaged with the Gulf sturgeon research community to update critical population assessments
Included capture-recapture information in the complete database on almost 22,000 individual Gulf sturgeon and several million capture-recapture records from 1976 to 2022
As the Trustees restore Gulf sturgeon, they have worked closely with academic partners to organize monitoring data to estimate the status of the overall population and individual river populations. Through this collaboration, Gulf sturgeon capture-recapture information dating back to 1976 (including length, weight, and genetic data) were gathered from several academic and government archives and combined with sturgeon data collected during and after the spill (2010-2024). These data were compiled into a single database in order to estimate survival rates, population growth, and predict population viability into the future. The completed database includes information on almost 22,000 individual Gulf sturgeon and several million records from 1976 to 2022. Managers then used these data to analyze population trends and identify priority river populations for potential restoration activities.
More on the project approach, models, and results can be found in the Summary of Project Results Report (PDF, 125 pages). Additionally, the September 2024 Executive Summary Report (PDF, 14 pages) provides a high-level overview of the project outcomes and recommendations for priority Gulf sturgeon river populations and restoration actions.
The project was approved as one of three interconnected efforts consisting of one restoration project and a second monitoring activity for restoration.