Projects
Many projects conducted by the Ecosystem and Climate Operations (ECO) team are in collaboration with other offices in NOAA or with other agencies that require the ECO team's technical expertise. Frequent NOAA partners include the Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS) and the Office of Coast Survey (OCS). Each project is unique and may have different drivers, but most ECO efforst can fit within four general categories: Restoration, Long-Term Monitoring, Procedure Development, and Collaborative Surveys. See below to learn about ECO's role in each category and for information on specific projects.
Restoration Projects
NGS' expertise is often required during intensive restoration efforts in delicate coastal ecosystems. When partners replenish eroded land or replant vegetation, they need accurate elevations relative to sea level to ensure their efforts are successful. To support restoration projects, ECO will set up a local network and survey the project area. Through this work, ECO can establish precise elevations and transfer them to the marsh surface. Accurate elevation information can help determine the timing, duration, and frequency of inundation, which creates conditions favoring different vegetation communities in the high and low marsh zones and ultimately determines the success of the restoration.
Long-term Monitoring Projects
NGS' expertise is required to establish precise elevations on the millimeter or centimeter scale at long-term monitoring sites in coastal areas. Loss of coastal elevation is driving the loss of coastal wetlands, and many factors may contribute to change in coastal elevation including sea level rise or local geological subsidence. Since these factors can cause change at a rate of millimeters per year, the ECO team will help partners set up a local geodetic network and begin systematic repeat surveys. This work will ultimately help monitor elevation change, whether it be gain or loss, and then resource managers can better plan how to adapt to these changes.
- Chesapeake Bay Environmental Center (CBEC)
- Piscataway
- Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC)
- National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS)
- Chesapeake Bay Sentinel Site Cooperative
Procedure Development Projects
ECO completes projects to test equipment and procedures sharing guidelines or recommendations with the public. ECO staff has expertise conducting many types of field surveys and is actively researching applications of new technologies such as Surface Elevation Tables (SETs), terrestrial LiDAR, and Real Time Kinematic GPS. Although procedures to help use these tools for various applications already exist, NGS is the leader in high accuracy geodetic techniques and, as such, can properly adapt these techniques to coastal and marsh environments.
Collaborative Surveys
NGS, and ECO, works very closely with other NOAA offices; especially CO-OPS and Coast Survey. To better serve local coastal communities, these three office have identified geographic areas in which they could coordinate and leverage their investments. The following projects were conducted collaboratively, and they provided the local data users with more information than any office would be able to provide individually. These projects often engage additional external partners including other federal agencies and local stakeholders.
Scanner set up over a newly planted cell on Poplar Island.
Preparing to level the rebuilt shoreline at Piscataway.
Driving the rod mark into the marsh at Waquoit Bay NERR.
Global Navigation Satellite System float set out to take positions in Mobile Bay.
