Louisiana

The project will develop a Marine Mammal Restoration Portfolio in Louisiana. NOAA and a partner will work collaboratively to elicit restoration goals, objectives, and project concepts that would lead to the development of Strategic Priorities for Marine Mammals in Louisiana. This portfolio will identify key partnerships; engagement needs and opportunities; short and medium-term priorities and their connection to other marine mammal restoration; and Monitoring and Adaptive Management (MAM) activities in the Louisiana and Region-wide Trustee Implementation Groups (LA and RW TIGs).

The Joint Restoration Plan and Environmental Assessment #1: Chandeleur Islands (Joint RP/EA #1) will evaluate design alternatives for the Chandeleur Islands Restoration. This planning effort is tiering off the Region-wide Trustee Implementation Group's (RW TIG) Restoration Plan-Environmental Assessment #1 (RW RP#1) that selected, as a preferred alternative, the Engineering & Design (E&D) for the restoration of the Chandeleur Islands.

This activity will compile and collect data relative to sea turtle nesting and nesting habitat in Louisiana to further inform the approach identified in the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Natural Resource Damage Assessment: Strategic Framework for Sea Turtle Restoration Activities Version 1. The data will be used to enhance sea turtle hatchling productivity, and restore and conserve nesting beach habitat.

The objective of this activity is to use targeted data collection to develop baseline estimates of net ecosystem carbon balance (NECB) for a fresh marsh and salt marsh, which will be used to develop a decision support tool that will assess the impact of various restoration approaches on coastal wetland ecosystem health. Data collection and analysis will focus on quantifying carbon capture of flora and soils, and export of dissolved and particulate carbon from wetlands to adjacent estuarine waters.

This project will enable coastal restoration monitoring data interoperability between the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority's Coastal Information Management System (CIMS) and NOAA’s two applications, the Data Integration Visualization Exploration and Reporting (DIVER) Explorer and the Environmental Response Management Application (ERMA) platform.

This Project will use aerial photographic nest surveys and nest dotting analyses to determine Monitoring and Adaptive Management (MAM) priorities for colonial waterbird restoration in Louisiana: (1) address significant informational needs (e.g. relative abundance, diversity, distribution trends and breeding status) that will facilitate Trustees ability to evaluate restoration effectiveness; (2) address potential uncertainties related to restoration planning and implementation; and (3) provide feedback to inform future colonial waterbird restoration decisions.

This project will harness nature to re-establish processes that originally built and sustained coastal Louisiana. At peak capacity, this project will allow the controlled transport of up to 75,000 cubic feet per second of Mississippi River freshwater, sediment and nutrients into the Barataria estuary. By re-introducing a sediment supply into the Barataria Basin, the project will build and sustain more than 13,000 acres–or 20 square miles–of wetlands and recreate a functional estuary in the basin.

This project is performing engineering and design (E&D) for a construction project that will provide multiple benefits to injured resources by restoring and creating habitat, and preventing island breaching. E&D is in progress for borrow areas; beach, dune, and marsh restoration; mound creation; shoreline protection; nesting substrate; and vegetation planting. A shoal west of the island and offshore sites are under evaluation for potential sand sources. A diversity of habitats are under consideration in the design.