The NOAA Deepwater Horizon (DWH) Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) Program is a NOAA-wide effort focused on restoring injuries to natural resources and services from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. 

As the lead science agency for coastal oil spills, NOAA was on the scene from the earliest moment of the DWH oil spill crisis. In the six years following, NOAA assessed the damages, quantified the injury, and determined the types and cost of restoration needed. This work resulted in the 2016 Programmatic Damage Assessment and Restoration Plan and Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PDARP), which details the natural resource injuries from the oil spill and selects a comprehensive, integrated ecosystem approach to best restore those resources at an ecosystem level. 

To support the extensive restoration efforts, NOAA has been working alongside our state, federal, academic, and non-profit partners, and the public to implement the best approaches to restoring the Gulf of Mexico resources and habitats. NOAA is particularly focused on identifying and conducting work to advance science needs to either fill data gaps needed to better target restoration or to advance our ability to monitor and evaluate progress toward recovery of NOAA trust resources, including assessing deep benthic and mesophotic communities on the seafloor, monitoring the health and population characteristics of injured marine mammals, and evaluating population status and trends for Gulf fish species. 

All are encouraged to “tag” their DWH-related work to this collection when they are submitting to the NOAA Institutional Repository to support this knowledge base.