Evaluation of emission reduction and other societal and environmental outcomes: Structured decision making for the Louisiana climate action plan.

Climate action planning continues to accelerate rapidly across the globe as communities seek to prepare to thrive in an uncertain future. Climate action planning is a particularly contentious and complex topic in the southern United States, however, because of significant economic reliance on industries that contribute substantially to greenhouse gas emissions, and due to a complicated relationship between industry and persistent racial and economic inequities that contribute to distrust between communities, businesses, and state governments. Within the last decade, research efforts have begun to evaluate approaches used to develop city, state, and national-level climate action plans, finding that planning efforts are often as diverse as the localities they represent.

A multiscale natural community and species-level vulnerability assessment of the Gulf Coast, USA.

Vulnerability assessments combine quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity of species or natural communities to current and future threats. When combined with the economic, ecological or evolutionary value of the species, vulnerability assessments quantify the relative risk to regional species and natural communities and can enable informed prioritization of conservation efforts. Vulnerability assessments are common practice in conservation biology, including the potential impacts of future climate scenarios.

Use of structured decision-making to explicitly incorporate environmental process understanding in management of coastal restoration projects: Case study on barrier islands of the northern Gulf of Mexico.

Coastal ecosystem management typically relies on subjective interpretation of scientific understanding, with limited methods for explicitly incorporating process knowledge into decisions that must meet multiple, potentially competing stakeholder objectives. Conversely, the scientific community lacks methods for identifying which advancements in system understanding would have the highest value to decision-makers. A case in point is barrier island restoration, where decision-makers lack tools to objectively use system understanding to determine how to optimally use limited contingency funds when project construction in this dynamic environment does not proceed as expected.

Near-bottom circulation and dispersion of sediment containing cysts in the Gulf of Maine during 2010-2011.

The life cycle of in the Gulf of Maine includes a dormant cyst stage that spends the winter predominantly in the bottom sediment. Wave-current bottom stress caused by storms and tides induces resuspension of cyst-containing sediment during winter and spring. Resuspended sediment could be transported by water flow to different locations in the Gulf and the redistribution of sediment containing cysts could alter the spatial and temporal manifestation of its spring bloom.

Nearshore dynamics of artificial sand and oil agglomerates.

Weathered oil can mix with sediment to form heavier-than-water sand and oil agglomerates (SOAs) that can cause beach re-oiling for years after a spill. Few studies have focused on the physical dynamics of SOAs. In this study, artificial SOAs (aSOAs) were created and deployed in the nearshore, and shear stress-based mobility formulations were assessed to predict SOA response.