Biologically/Ecologically-Driven Spill Response

Following an oil spill, there is a theoretical point at which continued response activities do not provide a measurable benefit to the environment or lead to quicker recovery periods. Decision makers must rapidly consider various clean-up methods and their relation to the expected improvement, degradation and eventual restoration of the environment. Resource recovery models that include factors such as geographic scale, habitat type, clean-up method, operational cost, and identify the timing and nature of environmental trade-offs during an oil spill response are desired. The Center is interested in research and products that support environmental decision making during response activities. Areas of research are:

• Evaluate multiple clean-up and assessment methods and their relationship to resource recovery period;
  
  
• Identify the timing and nature of trade-off decision points in the context of response activities, expected level of resource injury, and resource recovery period;
  
  
• Evaluate suitability of existing methods to rapidly estimate toxicity to natural resources under a response framework;
  
  
• Evaluate methods used during a response to ascertain risk to and recovery rates of potentially affected resources.

POC: Troy L. Baker, NOAA OR&R, Assessment & Restoration Division; Troy.Baker@noaa.gov; 225-578-7921.

Habitat Metrics

Oil spills result in an immediate threat to flora and fauna yet evaluating the magnitude and duration of impacts that actually occur can be a difficult undertaking. Balancing the collection of injury and recovery related data with cost considerations necessitates the use of metrics which are intended to serve as a surrogate for multiple studies across a broad spectrum of ecological services. Ideal metrics are easy to measure, cost effective, sensitive to oiling or other hazardous substances, good indicators of ecosystem services or functions, and useful for scaling restoration.

The Center seeks research proposals that will develop or evaluate metrics for quantifying the magnitude and duration of injury resulting from oil spills or other hazardous substances as well as the success of compensatory restoration projects. In developing new metrics or evaluating existing metrics for use in assessment activities the researcher should consider natural variation in "baseline," statistical power, and how the metric will allow injury and recovery to be scaled to restoration. Also, ideal metrics would be suitable measurement endpoints for long-term monitoring. Areas of research are:

• Develop practical metrics for cost-effective assessment of injury to wetlands or other habitats;
  
  
• Evaluate existing long term data sets to extract durable indicators of function that may be sensitive to oil or other hazardous substances;
  
  
• Develop metrics based on fauna within a habitat type typically described by floristic characteristics (e.g., marsh, mangrove, submerged aquatic vegetation, etc.). Faunal metrics could focus on individual species or assemblages and any life stage from egg to adult.

• Improve methods for evaluating recovery and/or the success of restoration. For example, above-ground plant cover may not fully reflect recovery or restoration success. What needs to be measured to better evaluate restoration success or habitat recovery?

POC: Daniel Hahn, NOAA OR&R, Assessment & Restoration Division; Daniel.Hahn@noaa.gov; 727-551-5715.

Submerged Oil

In the past few years, spills of non-floating oil and oils that become submerged as a function of sediment entrainment have presented significant response challenges and have resulted in enormous dollar-per-barrel recovery costs. Currently, the ability to forecast submerged oil movement, estimate water column concentrations of large droplets, and efficiently recover sunken masses in an operationally expedient way is quite limited. Additionally, as this category of oil is difficult to locate, track and retrieve, managers have difficultly maintaining public confidence with regard to response termination. Therefore, the Center is seeking research proposals in the following areas:

• Refinement, calibration, and protocol development of mechanical (e.g., snare, sorbent) methods for monitoring and detecting submerged oil in the water column and/or on the bottom;
  
  
• Specification of conditions that will lead to submerged oil mobilization;
  
  
• Formulas or models that predict the physical characteristics and particle size distribution of submerged oils;
  
  
• Conceptual models for determining the likelihood of a given oil type sinking in a given set of environmental conditions;
  
  
• Analysis of the long-term fate of submerged oil and its consequences to the environment;
  
  
• Environmentally acceptable or retrievable surrogate for sunken oil for calibration of motoring, detection and recovery techniques in the field.

As the US Coast Guard Research and Development Center is currently soliciting proposals on the "Detection of Heavy Oil on the Sea Floor" (BAA Number HSCG32-07-R-R00013; available at www.crrc.unh.edu/heavy_oil.pdf), the Center is not, specifically, looking at detection technologies.

Applicants are encouraged to reference the DRAFT Center report, "Submerged Oil - State of the Practice and Research Needs," April 2007.

POC: Steve Lehmann, NOAA OR&R, Emergency Response Division; Steve.Lehmann@noaa.gov; 617-223-8016.

Human Dimensions

Oil spills evoke images of dead or dying wildlife, smothered intertidal animals and other ecological impacts, but there are also significant direct and indirect human/social impacts from such technological disasters. There are several areas of research that would be useful to better understand this human dimension and mitigate or compensate for these adverse impacts. These include approaches to improve response decision making to prevent or reduce social impacts, and specific research to improve assessment and valuation of social impacts for claims related to natural resource damage assessment and restoration.

• The social issues related to response decision making are broad and include approaches or methods to:
  
  
• prevent or reduce social disruptions;
  
  
• repair or mitigate social impacts;
  
  
• measure perceptions of impacts from spills;
  
  
• evaluate how spills affect human uses of the environment;
  
  
• evaluate trade-offs and synergies between environmental protection and community disruptions;
  
  
• determine factors related to resiliency of communities;
  
  
• delineate the role of environmental ethics and social justice in spill response and restoration, etc.

To the extent possible, proposals should involve application of innovative methods to existing data sets in place of primary data collection. Other related topics will be considered, and additional discussion of research needs can be found in the DRAFT Center report entitled, "Research and Development Needs for Addressing the Human Dimensions of Oil Spills," summarizing the findings of a Center-sponsored workshop.

POC: Doug Helton, NOAA OR&R, Emergency Response Division; Doug.Helton@noaa.gov; 206-526-4563.