WASHINGTON — Assessing the success of the nation’s largest ecological restoration investment effort will require continued improvements in data collection and synthesis and coordination across the Gulf of Mexico region, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The April 2010 Deepwater Horizon platform explosion and oil spill seriously damaged Gulf of Mexico ecosystems from Texas to Florida. The resulting civil and criminal claims, fines, and penalties included over $16 billion to be used for economic and environmental restoration activities. The unprecedented number and diversity of these activities provide a rich body of evidence that can inform future planning, monitoring, and assessment, according to An Approach for Assessing U.S. Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration: A Gulf Research Program Environmental Monitoring Report.

“A lot has been learned about monitoring and assessment from the experience of restoration efforts over the last decade,” said Holly Greening, former executive director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program and chair of the committee that produced the report. “Today, there is a golden opportunity to use those lessons in support of a coordinated restoration strategy in the Gulf of Mexico that is greater than the sum of its parts and meets the challenges ahead. It’s important to move quickly so that we can begin using the best data to inform restoration activities.”

Moving beyond project-level assessment presents novel challenges, particularly in the context of a restoration effort that encompasses a large number of activities across such a broad geographic area. Individual projects can interact with each other in ways that are mutually reinforcing or, alternatively, in conflict. The effects of environmental background trends on restoration efforts, such as those associated with climate change, further complicate these assessments. Understanding the effectiveness of restoration at a Gulf-wide level, therefore, will require supplementing traditional project evaluation methodologies with new approaches, says the report.

For example, using diverse sources of information to develop “multiple lines of evidence” provides a promising avenue for evaluating restoration efforts at a regional scale. Furthermore, standardizing approaches to data collection, analysis, and reporting to support effective synthesis will better enable adaptive management approaches, which are needed to effectively implement restoration strategies against the backdrop of long-term environmental trends such as sea level rise, increasing hurricane intensity, and rising water temperatures.

Because Gulf of Mexico ecosystems cross political boundaries, coordination across these jurisdictional lines is challenging, the report says. The report provides a series of recommended actions for the organizations tasked with managing the key Gulf restoration and recovery funding streams. These actions emphasize increased collaboration to promote and facilitate consistent data collection, analysis, synthesis, and reporting.

“The future health of the Gulf’s ecosystems critically depends upon not just collecting the right data but ensuring that they are able to be used effectively,” said Lauren Alexander Augustine, executive director of the National Academies’ Gulf Research Program. “This is a valuable contribution to ongoing efforts within the restoration community to monitor, measure, and plan for long-term success.”

The Gulf Research Program is an independent, science-based program founded in 2013 as part of legal settlements with the companies involved in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. It seeks to enhance offshore energy system safety and protect human health and the environment by catalyzing advances in science, practice, and capacity to generate long-term benefits for the Gulf of Mexico region and the nation. The program has $500 million for use over 30 years to fund grants, fellowships, and other activities in the areas of research and development, education and training, and monitoring and synthesis.

The study was funded internally by the Gulf Research Program and undertaken by the Committee on Long-Term Environmental Trends in the Gulf of Mexico. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.

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