OCS Study 

MMS 2005-063 

UPDATE OF SELECT ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION FOR 

NORTON BASIN, CHUKCHI SEA/HOPE BASIN AND COOK INLET 

PLANNING AREAS FOR THE ALASKA OUTER CONTINENTAL SHELF 

(OCS) REGION.

FINAL REPORT 

Submitted by 

LGL Alaska Research Associates, Inc. 

1101 East 76th Avenue, Suite B 

Anchorage, Alaska 99518 

Prepared For 

28 February 2006 

UPDATE OF SELECT ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION FOR 

NORTON BASIN, CHUKCHI SEA/HOPE BASIN AND COOK INLET 

PLANNING AREAS FOR THE ALASKA OUTER CONTINENTAL SHELF 

(OCS) REGION.

By 

LGL Alaska Research Associates, Inc. 

1101 E. 76th Ave. Suite B 

Anchorage, Alaska 99518

This study was funded by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Minerals Management Service 

(MMS), Alaska Outer Continental Shelf Region, Anchorage, Alaska, under contract No. 

0103CT71930, as part of the MMS Alaska Environmental Studies Program. 

28 February 2006 

This report was prepared under contract between the Minerals Management Service (MMS) and 

LGL Alaska Research Associates, Inc. This report has been technically reviewed by the MMS 

and approved for publication. Approval does not signify that the contents necessarily reflect the 

views and policies of the Service, nor does mention of trade names or commercial products 

constitute endorsement or recommendations for use. It is, however exempt from review and 

compliance with the MMS editorial standards. 

Project Organization 

Fish Marine Birds 

Marine 

Mammals Ecosystems Social systems 

Quality 

Assurance/ 

Quality Contr

B. Haley A. Haskell A. Haskell B. Haley M. Galginaitis C. Sorrie A. Haskell S. Haskell S. Haskell A. Haskell S. McKendrick S. Haskell R. Rodrigues S. McLean S. Haskell V. Priebe M. Nemeth 

 R. Rodrigues R. Rodrigues 

R. Rodrigues M. Williams 

iii
Norton Basin/Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin, and Cook Inlet Planning Area Final Report

iv

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 (42 USC 4321-4347) requires that all 

federal agencies use a systematic, interdisciplinary approach to ensure the integrated use of the 

natural and social sciences in all planning and decision making that may have an effect on the 

human environment. In support of these efforts, an extensive search of available literature 

including material published in the open literature, gray literature reports, and material published 

on World Wide Web sites was conducted for the Norton Sound, Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin, and 

Cook Inlet planning areas on behalf of the Minerals Management Service. The search 

emphasized new literature and other available scientific information on fish, marine mammals, 

marine birds, ecosystems, and human social systems that would be important to the analysis of 

the impacts of oil and gas exploration and development in the planning areas. References were 

incorporated into a ProCite® database that can be searched by keywords, authors, and titles of the 

reports. Each entry in the database contains full citations that will allow users of the database to 

obtain the report and in most cases provides an abstract or brief synopsis of the article that will 

allow users to determine if the report or article contains information relevant to their needs. All 

entries have been reviewed by subject matter experts and have been checked through several 

QA/QC procedures to reduce errors in the entries. 
Norton Basin/Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin, and Cook Inlet Planning Area Final Report

 v

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Executive Summary....................................................................................................................... iv 

Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 1 

Approach......................................................................................................................................... 1 

Quality Assurance and Quality Control.......................................................................................... 4 

Appendix A. Individuals and their affliations contactedd for input in 

compiling the bibliography............................................................................................................. 5 
Norton Basin/Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin, and Cook Inlet Planning Area Final Report

vi

Title: Update of Select Environmental Information for Norton Basin, Chukchi Sea/Hope 

 Basin and Cook Inlet Planning Areas for the Alaska Outer Continental 

 Shelf (OCS) Region. 

Principal Investigator: Dale W. Funk
Norton Basin/Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin, and Cook Inlet Planning Area Final Report

 1

INTRODUCTION 

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 (42 USC 4321-4347) requires that 

all federal agencies use a systematic, interdisciplinary approach to ensure the integrated use of 

the natural and social sciences in all planning and decision making that may have an effect on the 

human environment. In the Final Proposed Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing 

Program 2002-2007, released in July 2002, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) proposed 

lease sales in the Norton Basin, Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin, and Cook Inlet planning areas. 

A draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was recently released for oil lease sales in the 

Cook Inlet Planning Area (OCS EIS/EA MMS 2002-065, Draft Environmental Impact 

Statement, December 2002), but it has been a number of years since the MMS released a detailed 

lease sale EIS document that described potential development scenarios in the other planning 

areas, although an EIS for the OCS oil and gas leasing program, 2002-2007, described general 

development scenarios for these areas. In the Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin planning areas the most 

recent EIS for the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) issued was OCS EIS/EA MMS 90-0095, 

Chukchi Sea Lease Sale 126 Final Environmental Impact Statement, January 1991. In the Norton 

Sound Planning Area the most recent EIS for the OCS issued was OCS EIS/EA MMS 90-0009, 

Norton Sound OCS Mining Program Final Environmental Impact Statement, March 1991. 

The writing of a comprehensive EIS, that uses the best available science to analyze potential 

impacts and provide industry and wildlife managers with appropriate information to determine 

how and if development in an area should proceed, requires extensive review of the literature on 

the natural resources of the area in question. An annotated bibliography that updates select 

environmental information for the Norton Sound, Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin, and Cook Inlet 

planning areas has been accumulated to address the needs of the MMS in preparing future 

planning documents including EIS’s and Environmental Assessments (EA’s) for these lease sale 

areas. The bibliography was established in a ProCite® database, a common bibliographic 

software package. ProCite® allows flexibility in the searching and use of the bibliographic 

information as well as the production of citation lists during document preparation. 

Bibliographies for each of the lease sale areas are contained in separate files on the 

accompanying CD. 

APPROACH 

For the Norton Sound Planning Area we identified new published literature and other 

available information on protected species. For the Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin Planning Area we 

identified similar sources for information on fish, marine mammals, marine birds, ecosystems, 

and human social systems of the region. We focused our literature searches to identify new 

information that may be important in evaluating the impacts of oil and gas exploration and 

development in the planning areas. The review covers all new information since the most recent 

EISs for these areas from 1991-2003. The search is complete through 2003 and includes 

information from January through December 2004, although a lag time in the appearance of 

some journals makes the 2004 entries more sporadic and the database may not contain all of the 

articles that will ultimately appear with publication dates in this range. Similarly, some gray 

literature reports published during 2004 may not have been accessible via our searches and the 
Norton Basin/Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin, and Cook Inlet Planning Area Final Report

2

database should not be considered complete for the 2004 time frame. A series of final searches 

was made during late December 2004 and early January 2005 to make the bibliography as 

complete as possible for 2004. The literature on human social systems was assembled by 

Applied Sociocultural Research (ASR) of Anchorage. 

For the Cook Inlet Planning Area we identified new published literature and other available 

information on fisheries that might be affected by oil and gas development in the Cook Inlet 

OCS. The review covers new information from 1998 through September 2004. 

The bibliographies are restricted to the boundaries of the planning areas and nearby locations. 

For instance the Chukchi Sea database includes references for the Bering Strait but generally 

does not include references for studies conducted in the Beaufort Sea. In some cases references 

were included if our subject area specialists felt they were important to an assessment of impacts 

to the organisms using a particular planning area. However, the database should not be 

considered a complete compilation of material for migratory species that only use a particular 

planning area during part of the year. 

The literature surveys were conducted using an established bibliographic search service 

provided by the ISI Web of Knowledge for our basic search of the primary literature. This 

service provides access to search engines that scan the published scientific literature through the 

Web of Science. The service allows specification of search characteristics that can achieve a 

thorough compilation of titles and abstracts of journal papers and conference proceedings 

published in a wide array of scientific disciplines. The service allows connection to and search 

of various databases including Current Contents connect, Biosis previews, Science Citations 

Index Expanded, and Social Sciences Citation Index. A list of publication titles was established 

and reviewed for appropriateness for inclusion in the ProCite® database. We searched the 

databases using a series of key words that included Norton Sound, Chukchi Sea, Hope Basin, 

Bering Strait, Cook Inlet, and general search terms including, fish, marine mammals, marine 

birds, ecosystems, and human cultural systems in association with the geographic search terms. 

Key words were used singly or in combination depending on the number of citations returned by 

the search. We also used both scientific and common species names in association with 

geographic search terms for important species in the area. 

Additional literature searches were conducted using search engines at the Alaska Resource 

Library and Information Services (ARLIS) and the University of Alaska, Anchorage Consortium 

Library. New titles found during these searches were added to the database. Available abstracts 

of articles were scanned and incorporated into the ProCite® database. In some cases, subject 

matter experts reviewed books and articles without abstracts and provided annotations that 

described pertinent information about the article or book for the bibliographic entry. Again, 

these searches were limited to the boundaries of the particular planning area and the database 

does not contain a complete reference set for individual organisms but rather for studies of the 

organisms that were conducted in and around the planning areas. 

A number of state and federal agencies conduct regular surveys of various biological 

resources in the planning areas, or in associated areas. These monitoring programs produce 

annual reports of the results of these surveys. For these programs a single entry has been 

included in the database that indicates the title of the report and the period over which reports 

have been produced. The annotations to these entries also include information regarding the 

likelihood of these studies continuing and indicate if additional reports will be available on an 

annual basis. In some cases these reports may be authored by different people in different years. 
Norton Basin/Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin, and Cook Inlet Planning Area Final Report

 3

For example the marine mammal stock assessments have been authored by different people over 

a period of many years. This precludes searching these publications by author but they should be 

retrievable by searching for the title of the publication or by key words. 

Internet-based searches for websites of government, non-governmental (NGO) and private 

organizations that may be sponsoring or conducting research in the planning areas were also 

conducted. These included entities such as the National Science Foundation, Environmental 

Protection Agency, the National Park Service, Office of Naval Research, the North Pacific 

Fisheries Management Council, the International Whaling Commission, Alaska Oceans 

Network, The PEW Oceans Commission, Coastal America, the Ocean Conservancy, the Nature 

Conservancy, Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, Ducks Unlimited, the Audubon Society, 

Society of Marine Mammology, The Ecological Society of America, American Geophysical 

Union, Acoustical Society of America and others. This search was used to establish lists of 

appropriate contacts to obtain reports and to establish bibliographic entries for material published 

only on the World Wide Web and not available in printed report form. The amount of 

information and the number of web pages currently available on the World Wide Web is 

enormous and it was impossible to provide a complete and comprehensive listing for all of the 

available web pages. Similarly, within individual sites numerous pages with various types of 

information may be available. It was not possible to provide descriptions or web addresses for 

each individual page. Web page descriptions are thus very general and should be used as tools to 

finding some pertinent information and additional links to sites. However, they should not be 

considered to be complete accounts of all material available at a web address. 

Lastly we contacted appropriate sources at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

(USFWS), National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), Alaska Department of Fish and Game 

(ADFG), academic institutions and other entities conducting or sponsoring research in the 

planning areas. These contacts were asked about ongoing studies that would be likely to produce 

additional research reports in the next year to several years that may be important to analysis of 

MMS activities in the planning areas. 

We learned that ongoing studies are occurring in each planning area. Some information is 

accessible now through the world-wide-web that will eventually be available in report form. For 

instance, a long-term mooring study—Bering Strait: Pacific gateway to the Arctic—that began in 

1990 maintains a web page that provides information about the project and its findings. That 

address has been included in the bibliography. 

Other current projects being conducted in the Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin region include the 

Regime Forcing and Ecosystem Response project being conducted by researchers at Dalhousie 

University and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Researchers for this project have collected 

samples of seabirds and forage species in Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin to assess diets and 

physiological condition of murres and kittiwakes and the nutritional quality of their prey. This 

project has been included in the database and published reports and articles will be forthcoming. 

Similarly a project titled Trophic pathways on the Chukchi-Beaufort Shelf that is assessing food 

web relationships of seabirds and marine mammals in the Bering Strait region and the 

Chukchi/Beaufort Sea area near Barrow anticipates future publications. 
Norton Basin/Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin, and Cook Inlet Planning Area Final Report

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Ongoing studies are also occurring in the Norton Basin area. Some information is accessible 

now through the world-wide-web that will eventually be available in report form. For instance, 

the Bering Strait mooring study and the regime forcing study mentioned above for the Chukchi 

Sea are also relevant for the Norton Sound area and are included in the Norton Sound 

bibliography. Another series of ongoing studies focuses on salmon in the Norton Sound area. 

Federal funding has been made available to study the possible causes of a precipitous decline in 

Norton Sound salmon abundance. Norton Sound Salmon Research and Restoration projects 

began in 2002 and funding will be available for 5 years. Projects range from escapement 

enumeration and sampling to an investigation of juvenile salmon in estuarine zones. Annual 

reports are available on line at http://www.cf.adfg.state.ak.us/region3 /proposals/nsrr/nsrr.php. 

We have also included this web site as an entry in the ProCite® database. 

Inquiries were also made as to the availability of GIS data regarding fish distribution in Cook 

Inlet that could be used by the MMS while modeling the effects of spills. Contacts included 

sources described above and investigators involved in recently (since 1997) reported fish 

distribution studies. Results were limited, considering the relative novelty of GIS and the 

narrow time period reviewed. Also, the focus on salmon has not been on their distribution 

throughout the inlet, but on the adults’ return – near and inshore. One existing dataset we 

discovered that was not available through the worldwide web is an extensive database 

documenting the locations of herring schools and herring spawn in the Kamishak Bay area. It is 

entered in the webpage format as a computer program. 

In addition to the research programs mentioned above, a number of other individuals are 

conducting studies within the various planning areas. A complete list of individuals contacted 

and their affiliations are included in Appendix A. 

QUALITY ASSURANCE AND QUALITY CONTROL 

LGL scientists with appropriate subject matter expertise reviewed all database entries to 

insure that abstracts and annotations to the entries were appropriate. ASR reviewed the 

sociocultural citations. Key words were assigned to each entry to allow database searches for 

specific species, species groups, and subject areas, such as subsistence. Additionally, all entries 

were checked for spelling and typographical errors that may have occurred during entry of fields 

in the database. All entries were also checked for completeness and consistency with regard to 

information and fields used and the database as a whole was checked for duplicate entries. 
Appendix A. 

Individuals and their affiliations contacted for the Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin 

planning area. 
Norton Basin/Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin, and Cook Inlet Planning Area Final Report

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Appendix A. Individuals and their affiliations contacted for the Chukchi Sea/Hope Basin planning area. 

NAME AFFILIATION 

Knut Aagaard University of Washington 

Betty Anderson Alaska Biological Research, Inc. 

Gene Augustine United States Air Force 

William Barber University of Alaska, Anchorage (retired) 

Fred DeCicco Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Sport Fish Division 

Sue Detwiler United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

Jesse A. Dizard Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Subsistence Division 

Ken Dunton University of Texas, Marine Science Institute, Port Aransas, Texas 

Paul Flint Alaska Science Center 

Joel Garlich-Miller United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

Robert Gill United States Geological Survey 

Verena Gill United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

Dr. Jackie Grebmeier University of Tennessee 

Dr. Jack Helle National Marine Fisheries Service, Auke Bay Lab 

William Hines National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 

Dave Irons United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

Gordon Kruse University of Alaska, Juneau 

Bill Larned United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

Julia Moor Lenz Alaska Natural Heritage Program 

Loh-Lee Low NOAA, Alaska Fisheries Science Center 

David B. Leech University of Alaska, Institute of Marine Science 

Philip Martin United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

Brian McCaffery United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

Jim Menard Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Commercial Fisheries 

Ed Murphy University of Alaska, Fairbanks 

Russ Oates United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

Craig Perham United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

Mary Pete Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Subsistence Division 

Margaret Petersen United States Geological Survey 

Bob Pickart Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute 

Dan Rosenberg Alaska Department of Fish and Game 

Scott Schliebe United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

Marianne See Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Subsistence Division 

Gay Sheffield Alaska Department of Fish and Game 

James J. Simon Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Subsistence Division 

Art Sowls United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

Alan Springer University of Alaska, Fairbanks 

Marc Webber United States Fish and Wildlife Service 

Tom Weingartner University of Alaska, Institute of Marine Science 

Polly Wheeler United States Fish and Wildlife Service, Office of Subsistence Management 

Terry Whitledge University of Alaska, Institute of Marine Science 

Rebecca Woodgate University of Washington 

Bruce Woods United States Fish and Wildlife Service