BOEM FY 2016 Environmental Studies Program (ESP)

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The Environmental Studies Program (ESP) of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is offering a cooperative agreement opportunity to develop an index to regionally assess and rank the degree of anthropogenic disturbance for outer shelf and slope soft-sediment biological communities in areas surrounding platforms in the southern California Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). A complete analysis and tool development will help local government agencies, other Federal agencies and the State of California understand the condition of the deeper seafloor habitat and compare these conditions with shallower waters already assessed. In addition this will allow assessments to be made of the status of the seafloor regionally and comparisons can be made for OCS projects that will impact the soft-bottom habitat. This information will be used in all environmentally based planning, from current biological assessments of critical habitat for white abalone to regional-level decommissioning decisions. Developing a quantitative index for disturbance of seafloor areas is a tool that can be applied to other regions on the Pacific OCS, where there is current interest in renewable energy development. Scope of Objectives: The primary goal of this work will be to develop a formal characterization of natural, non-disturbed macrobenthic infauna of the outer continental shelf and upper continental slope regions (>200m) of the Southern California Bight. Specific objectives include: (1) Synthesize deep-water infaunal data and related environmental datasets collected from across the region into one database; (2) Determine if there is more than one distinct infaunal community across the region and identify the natural gradients (e.g., depth, sediment composition, biogeography) that may differentiate unique infaunal communities; and (3) Once a reference condition can be defined, then sites with potential anthropogenic impacts will be compared to discern if repeatable and predictable alterations in biological communities occur.

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