RAPID: Enhancement of Fishnet2 for Disaster Impact Assessment

Tulane University, New Orleans LA

Investigators

Abstract

In response to the Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Tulane University is awarded a RAPID grant to expand and enhance the Fishnet2 network of fish collection databases (http://www.fishnet2.net). They will expand and enhance the network to facilitate rapid searches and extraction of archived data on Gulf of Mexico fishes. The oil spill has the potential to have far-reaching, long-term impacts on species, communities and food webs in both offshore and near-shore areas of the Gulf of Mexico. It occurred at a time when many oceanic species are spawning in areas of the Gulf of Mexico affected by the spill, including critically endangered species such as the bluefin tuna, which spawns in the gulf from April to June. The bluefin tuna is just one of the thousands of marine fishes and other organisms whose larvae are currently being exposed to oil-derived toxins in the Gulf of Mexico. The ability of scientists to assess the impacts of the spill on the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem depends critically on the availability of baseline data on the composition and structure of biotic communities in the region under natural conditions. Natural history museums contain a wealth of data on marine resources spanning decades to hundreds of years. In most instances, the sampling was conducted by national marine natural resource agencies, which regularly census various components of the marine biota and routinely engage members of the scientific community in this endeavor. As a result of the scientific engagement, specimens from the cruises have made their way to various museums to be identified, studied and archived. The enhanced portal will serve as a research resource for assessing impacts of the current oil spill and other such environmental disasters in the future. It will also serve as a model for enhancing data networks for other groups of organisms. The specific enhancements planned for this project include a new mapping interface, the ability to conduct online spatial queries and searches based on gear-type and user-defined depth zone. The new map interface will be based on OpenLayers and will support Open Street Maps, Google and Bing. The Fishnet2 portal already supports downloading results as .KML files for visualization of point occurrences using Google Earth and/or ArcGIS. With the proposed enhancements, a user could draw polygons on the search interface map or upload a .KML file describing a search area (e.g., the projected spill impact area) and use this as a spatial filter for extracting data from Fishnet2.