FEBRUARY 5, 2016--The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and Ecosystem Science Conference was held February 1-4, 2016, in Tampa, Florida. The conference focused on advancing our understanding of oil spill effects on ecosystems and human dimensions.

OR&R Director Dave Westerholm served on the Executive Committee and helped in the planning of the conference.

As listed below, OR&R scientists played prominent roles throughout the conference, including training, speaking during plenary sessions, presenting posters, staffing the NOAA booth, and networking with hundreds of other professionals from academia, industry and government. Several of OR&R’s contractors and partners in NCCOS and NMFS also provided presentations.

Presentations:

• New Approach to Dissolution Calculations in Oil Behavior Modeling (Bill Lehr)
• Deepening the Bench of Spills for Lessons Learned and Future Action Taking; Taking Advantage of Lessons Learned (and Relearned) from Smaller Incidents (Doug Helton)
• Planning for Societal Impacts from Oil Spills: Lessons Learned From the Past and Suggestions for the Future (Ed Levine)
• Managing and Accessing Integrated Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) Data from The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill (Ben Shorr)
• NRDA 101 (Adam Domanski)
• Incorporating an Ecosystem Service Approach in NRDA (Lisa Dipinto)
• Overview of the DWH NRDA Allocation (Lisa Dipinto)
• Overview of DWH Science (Lisa Dipinto)
• Storm Protection Benefits: A Missing Piece of the NRDA Process? (Meg Imholt)

In addition, Lisa Dipinto also spoke as part of the plenary panel session, Big, Open Data: Enhancing Science and Decision-making from the Gulf of Mexico and Tom Brosnan presented a poster, NRDA: An Engine for Coastal Restoration. And OR&R, along with the Coastal Response Research Center and National Centers for Environmental Information presented progress in the Environmental Disaster Data Management workgroups to facilitate data sharing across entities and systems.

For further information, contact Tom.Brosnan@noaa.gov or Doug.Helton@noaa.gov.

Go back to OR&R Weekly Report.