Funding Wizard

The overall goal of this cooperative agreement is to develop and provide capacity to the Tribes so that they have the capabilities to manage and analyze the requisite environmental information supplied to them by offshore wind energy developers. Moreover, this will facilitate more effective collaboration between BOEM and these tribes. The specific objectives that will enable BOEM to accomplish this goal during this study are: To develop pro-active, best practices for the management of data and information concerning cultural and archaeological places important to both the Tribes. These will include the review and analysis of technical data provided by offshore wind energy developers in support of their COPs for projects located offshore of Aquinnah and Mashpee lands. This information will be used to inventory and monitor adverse effects to those ancient, submerged landforms and traditional cultural properties and associated areas of significance that BOEM must consider during future offshore renewable energy development. Incorporate indigenous knowledge and language with remote-sensing and bathymetry data collected from these areas into a model depicting the preservation potential of submerged ancient cultural landforms and associated archaeological resources, as appropriate. To work and collaborate with tribal nations to train them to actively monitor and document offshore cultural and archaeological resources that may be impacted as a result of BOEM’s approved activities.

The purpose of this Cooperative Agreement is to collect data and conduct research in topics that serve the public interest relating to offshore sediment resources, coastal restoration and protection, and coastal resiliency, as well as meet BOEM MMP and Gulf states' goal of a Gulf-wide OCS sediment inventory. Data in support of these goals promotes preservation of biological, cultural, and economic resources by rebuilding coastlines to safeguard the Nation's assets and delineates OCS mineral resources to inform long term planning and ensure protection from activities that might otherwise permanently obstruct access to the resource. To support this need BOEM is interested in awarding a cooperative agreement to the University of Southen Mississipp Sound. The goal of this award is to support the two existing cooperative agreements by focusing on an area offshore Mississippi/Louisiana that falls outsie of the scope of both. This new analysis will help expedite the identification, characterization, and delineation of sand-rich lithosomes for estimating restoration-quality sand reserves on teh Mississippi OCS.

The purpose of this study is to provide funding through a cooperative agreement to continue the 10-year time series of aerial survey data within and surrounding the Massachusetts and Rhode Island offshore wind energy leases. Additional aerial and/or passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) surveys may occur contingent upon future funding. These surveys will contribute to providing the data needed to detect any changes in habitat utilization of large pelagic marine species by comparing the time series of data pre-construction to post construction data that may be collected. Surveys are currently funded through August 2022 after which a new cooperative agreement would be required to continue these important surveys. The surveys provide an essential baseline understanding of the distributions and abundances of North Atlantic Right Whales and other large whales, sea turtles, and birds in the Massachusetts and Rhode Island wind energy leases. This research will help further characterize species’ usage of the MA Offshore Wind Energy Area in order to assist the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the federal government in assessing the location and configuration of future offshore wind energy development. Under the National Environmental Policy Act, BOEM and other federal agencies are required to review environmental assessments of offshore development and construction plans to identify and mitigate potential effects of development on marine species. This time series of consistent survey effort provides the information on the abundance and distribution of marine mammals and turtles in the survey area that are needed for these assessments. This information can also help wind energy developers plan the timing of activities, such as turbine construction, to minimize impacts on protected species.

Incorporating PAMGuard into the Tethys Passive Acoustic Data Metadata System Tethys is a passive acoustic monitoring metadata database system designed to organize and store acoustic metadata ( http://tethys.sdsu.edu). Tethys has been developed over many years through joint BOEM-Navy funding. The data schema (rules that govern how data is organized) were designed to permit representations of acoustic metadata that are comparable across long time frames by providing a consistent format. A set of schemata have been developed for describing instrumentation, effort, detections, and localizations. In addition to the standard reporting fields, the schema permits the addition of user-defined information, thus letting passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) practitioners define their own information such as referencing physical oceanographic and meteorological data to help in the analysis and interpretation of the acoustical observations. The Tethys metadata system has been adopted as the community standard by NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI), now serving as the permanent archive of raw marine acoustical observations. This study, in conjunction with an ongoing, companion project funded by the Navy’s Living Marine Resources (LMR) Program, is the final increment in Tethys’ development, bringing Tethys to maturity to give NCEI a reliable, user-friendly metadata tool that also meets the needs of scientists and natural resource managers wanting to make secondary user of the archived data. PAMGuard, the software package that this study seeks to incorporate into Tethys, is a semiautomated, open-source software for real-time acoustic detection and localization of cetaceans and other marine species from mobile platforms. It can also be used as a stand-alone tool for analysis of previously collected acoustical observations. With the recent efforts at standardizing and optimizing the methods of acoustical measurements from moving platforms, PAMGuard has become a preferred tool in the collection and analysis of marine acoustical data and is the most common software used for BOEM permitted geological and geophysical surveys with PAM requirements in the GOM. Tethys integrated with PAMGuard affords metadata documentation concurrently with data collection rather than at a post-processing stage when important details may be forgotten or misrepresented. In addition, this study includes creating a programmer’s interface for the integrated package that will allow adding future functionality to Tethys without requiring a major overhaul of the core program.

The passage of the 2005 Energy Policy Act has increased interest in renewable energy development on the Pacific Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), and BOEM has already received five unsolicited applications to install floating wind turbines: two offshore Washington, one offshore Oregon, and one each offshore northern and central California. The overarching challenge with the development of new industries or technologies is trying to anticipate their effects on the environment. The purpose of this study is to collate and analyze existing telemetry data gathered from protected cetacean species along the U.S. West Coast and Hawai’i to better understand how these species use their ocean habitat. This type of analysis is crucial in supporting more accurate assessment of potential impacts of oil and gas decommissioning activities and offshore wind energy development, as well as providing insight into potential mitigative strategies.

The Department of the Interior, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) oversees leasing, development, and production of conventional energy and renewable energy on the nations’ outer continental shelf (OCS). The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) at 43 USC 1346 mandates that BOEM conduct environmental studies needed for the assessment and management of environmental impacts on the marine environment which may be affected by existing and future offshore energy development. The purpose of this award is to assist the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project (SCCWRP) scientists assess the ecological condition of the seafloor near oil and gas platforms in Federal (OCS) waters of the Santa Barbara Channel offshore southern California. Through this Cooperative Agreement, scientists will utilize tools developed by SCCWRP to examine the seafloor adjacent to OCS oil and gas platforms. Information collected about seafloor disturbance and conditions will inform and benefit public decisions and development of State programs and policies related to OCS platform operations and decommissioning planning. Beneficiaries include all public stakeholders, local government agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the State of California.

The purpose of this award is to conduct research in topics that serve the public interest relating to offshore sand resources, coastal restoration and protection, and coastal resiliency, as well as meet the MMP and Gulf states’ goal of a Gulf-wide OCS sediment inventory. Data in support of these goals promotes preservation of biological, cultural, and economic resources by rebuilding coastlines to safeguard the Nation’s assets and delineates OCS mineral resources to inform long term planning and ensure protection from activities that might otherwise permanently obstruct access to the resource. UTIG will, in coordination with BOEM and GLO, resolve identified location discrepancies between the MMIS and TexSed databases for cores collected on the Texas OCS. In addition, UTIG will expand on regional analysis of the upper coast of Texas along Sabine and Heald banks and the outer Trinity Valley by providing a detailed interpretation using data collected but not interpreted under two prior BOEM cooperative agreements.

The overall goal of this cooperative agreement is to acquire information that will enable BOEM to assist the States of Washington, Oregon, and California; west coast Tribal Nations; and public stakeholders with contributing information to further refine current models for the preservation potential of submerged ancient cultural landscapes along the US Pacific OCS. The specific objectives that will enable BOEM to accomplish this goal during this study are: to develop a pro-active, best practices approach for consulting with the Quinault Indian Nation and other appropriate Washington Tribes in order to inform the identification of submerged landforms, submerged traditional cultural properties, and associated areas of significance that BOEM may need to consider during future offshore renewable energy development; to incorporate indigenous knowledge with remote-sensing and bathymetry data collected from these areas into a model depicting the preservation potential of submerged ancient cultural landforms and associated archaeological resources, as appropriate, offshore Washington and the US Pacific coast in general.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are in the process of conducting high-resolution aerial imagery surveys under the Atlantic Marine Assessment Program (AMAPPS). The objective of AMAPPS is to provide baseline data on regional and seasonal species abundance and distribution in the nearshore and offshore environments to aid decision-making concerning offshore development, transportation, military exercises, and conservation. The AMAPPS collaboration has entered its third phase. The overarching goal of this third phase is to develop cost-efficient remote sensing- and machine learning-based methods to survey and monitor marine birds and other wildlife to improve the quality of population estimates and distribution mapping while enhancing personnel safety. BOEM is seeking subject matter experts to classify seabirds, marine mammals and other marine wildlife to the lowest taxonomic level in aerial imagery. The primary objective of this segment of AMAPPS is to enlist expertise in marine wildlife species identification through the Cooperative Environmental Studies Units (CESU) program to classify detected wildlife targets in imagery collected by AMAPPS to an appropriate taxonomic level utilizing remote access to an imagery annotation tool developed at USGS-UMESC and implementing the annotation quality control workflow developed by USGS-UMESC, BOEM, and USFWS.

Gravity flows (GF) (or currents) in the Mississippi River Delta Front (MRDF) are known to displace large volumes of sediment mixed with seawater. These high-energy events have damaged infrastructure, causing multiple oil spills including the second largest oil spill in U.S. history. GF additionally have displaced shipwrecks hundreds of meters over short time periods, potentially impacting these wrecks and further endangering nearby oil and gas infrastructure. There is currently a limited understanding of the triggering mechanisms for GF, the dynamic processes at work once they are underway, as well as their frequency, power, and scale. This study will identify high, intermediate, and low-risk areas for future occurrence of GF. Researchers contributing from multiple Federal agencies will identify key locations to deploy monitoring equipment able to detect intermediate to large high-energy sediment transport events. They will also obtain a better understanding of environmental factors and processes that initiate these events in the MRDF and test new and/or existing technologies to detect and monitor GF events. New and existing data sets will be utilized to characterize sediments and physical oceanographic processes at selected locations in the MRDF, including known shipwreck locations; conduct baseline archaeological analysis at these sites; and test if in situ acoustic sensors could monitor potential future shipwreck displacement due to GF activity.