The largest zone of oxygen-depleted coastal waters in the United States, indeed the entire western Atlantic Ocean, is in the northern Gulf of Mexico on the Louisiana continental shelf. The inability of trawlers to capture any shrimp or demersal fish in hypoxic waters illustrates the implications to fisheries yield. Without exception, several reports and documents call for further monitoring and research on Gulf of Mexico hypoxia and its linkage with nutrient concentration and transport within the Mississippi River basin. The objectives of our proposed work are to S provide a consistent and sequential series of long-term data that document the temporal and spatial extent of shelf hypoxia, and S continue the collection of the hydrographic, chemical, and biological data related to the development and maintenance of hypoxia over seasonal cycles. S begin documentation of differences in development and maintenance of hypoxia off the Atchafalaya River.
S link the results of our work with ongoing nutrient characterizations within the watershed.
These activities duplicate long-term data sets from which we have garnered our best and basic understanding of hypoxia on the Louisiana shelf. An additional transect off the Atchafalaya delta will provide valuable information concerning differences in concentration and flux of nutrients and system responses between the two riverine sources. Additional studies are satellite imagery and the associated phytoplankton community, determined taxonomically and with pigment determinations. Our group of collaborators have conducted research in an interdisciplinary way that promotes excellent science and that we have communicated in diverse ways to various societal sectors. We have participated in many agency, public, and private discourses to increase the understanding of these developments, including the usual scientific talks, but also an amazing variety of newspaper, radio, television, magazine and public.