 Well, welcome everyone. I'm Kevin Stokesbury. I'm the chair of COSA and it's great to welcome our colleagues and friends at Bone and I'm looking forward to a great day of discussion. Do you want to just zip around the room quickly with introductions? Is that the best way to go to jump right in? All right, please. Sorry. Can you press the button on the microphone to speak so everyone online can hear Hello. My name is Marina Shaji. I'm an economist at Bureau's Pacific Region and Environmental Sciences. Jessica Malendine, marine biologist with the Marine Minerals Program in the Gulf of Mexico. Victoria Brady, biologist with the Marine Minerals Program at headquarters. James Flynn, atmospheric scientist at the University of Houston. Karen Ashton, Biological Oceanographer, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Katrin Eichen with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Bendic ecologist. Jack Barth, Oregon State University. I'm a coastal oceanographer. Hello, Megan Carr. I'm with the Bomes Office of Strategic Resources, Background Geology, Environmental Sciences, and Geophysics. Hi, I'm John Jensen. I'm from the University of West Florida. I'm an applied historian and marine archaeologist. Deb Lixon, I'm with the National Academy's Board on Earth Sciences and Resources. Jeff Weichel, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Good morning. Jessica Bravo, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Deputy Chief Environmental Officer. I'm Jonathan Tucker. I'm with the National Academy of Science and I'm a program officer at the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources. I'm Kevin Stokesbury. I'm the dean of the School of Marine Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and I'm a fisheries oceanographer. Les Kaufman, Boston University Marine Program. I'm a Bendic ecologist and I studied coupled human natural systems. Jackie Dragon, Senior Oceans Campaigner with Greenpeace. And I'm Lori Suma. I'm retired from ExxonMobil currently adjunct at Rice and UT and I'm a geologist. Good morning. Dina Hansen with Bomes Marine Minerals Program at headquarters. Hi, Jeremy Firestone, University of Delaware School of Marine Science and Policy. I'm a social scientist and recovering lawyer and my apologies but I'm only going to be here for today. I have to go back for a family issue. Good morning Anna Rice. I'm a physical scientist at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Marine Minerals Program Gulf of Mexico region. Hi, I'm Dan Costa, Director and Student Marine Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz and a professor there. I study upper trophic level critters like marine mammals and seabirds. Ruth Perry, I'm the head of regulatory affairs for renewable power at Shell and I'm a PhD oceanographer specializing in physical oceanography. Bill Brown, Chief Environmental Officer of BOMB. So while it's just lawyer. Good morning, everybody. I'm Rodney Clark. I'm Chief of BOMB's Division of Environmental Sciences which also oversees BOMB's Environmental Studies Program which we'll be talking a lot about at our summer COSA meetings. Good morning, everybody. Jeff Reidenauer. I'm the Chief of the Marine Minerals Division in BOMB, part of the Office of Strategic Resources at Headquarters. Good morning, everyone. Shannon Cofield. I am a geological oceanographer with the Marine or BOMB's Marine Minerals Division. Paul Norr, critical minerals specialist. I'm a somewhat interdisciplinary geologist. Wonderful, and Zoe, we have Zoe in the back here who's keeping us all honest online and online. Kevin, go ahead. Hi, everyone. I'm Kevin St. Martin. I'm faculty in geography at Rutgers University. So I think Kevin's the only other COSA member online. Anyone else from BOMB online that can introduce themselves? Oh, there's about 50 people. Wow. Well, maybe we should maybe we should just read the participant list. Well, with that, what I'll do then, I'll hand it over to Bill to make the BOMB introductions and he can solve that problem of the people online and how do you want to introduce them all? Okay. No, I'm fine either way, but with a few housekeeping things, because it's a big meeting. So we can do it a couple of ways. I mean, raise your hand if you'd like or tip your card up if you have a question or a comment. Make sure you use the microphones online. You could use the raise hand apps. I'm from New Bedford. And so a lot of the meetings there are Robert's rules of order, because Robert attended a fisheries meeting and then wrote those rules that he lived in. So, but I don't think we need to go down that road here. Any other, let's see, for other housekeeping, of course, the two bathrooms, we just have found those at the break. And yeah, we're looking forward to a great, great discussion. So we've had an hour closed meeting. So the COSA, the new members, we have several new members in the COSA group. And they've just kind of introduced themselves a little bit. So we can move in and start the meeting, if that's all right with everyone. Sounds good. So on the agenda, it has a welcome bill. It has your welcome. And then Megan and Jeff, do you guys want to have a couple of opening comments to jump in? I know we have a, I know I have a bone 101 thing for some of the new members. Let me, I'm happy to extemporary and honestly just say, I think it's great to see everybody. And some people I know that have been on the COSA for a long time. And others that are newly on that I've known for quite a while, I think since I've been here. And I mean, let me just say for the new members, the, I think the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine is a really important institution for us and actually for the US government in general. And actually, I'd love to see it engaged more, more broadly across the government. But, but, you know, Boehm is sort of heavily looking to the academies and for a lot of different kinds of things. Actually, I've got one slide where Jessica put together that sort of shows a number of the projects. And so, you know, your task is, it's really important to us. It's to, you know, that we didn't pick you. You're picked by an institution that, you know, cares about its integrity and independence and intellectual strength too. And so, you know, we really value the time you're giving us free of charge. And that's very special. And we're focusing on marine minerals here, which is just a really fascinating, important area. And Megan Carr is the leader of the group. But there are many leaders within it. And, you know, it's just a lot going on. And, you know, some of it's been going on for a long time and some, you know, like sand. But the whole critical mineral issue is just really, just, you know, a hugely significant coming up now. And they're very focused on it. So, so it should be really interesting discussion. That's my welcome. Fantastic. Megan. Thanks. And just want to say thank you for having all of us here. It's something that's really important. You know, we talk about our bone mission all the time and, and how at the root of all of our decision is good science. And so that's where I see a lot of value in the people that are across this room, not able to join us here today. And everyone that's on the screen as well as how can we come together and make sure that the science that we're doing, particularly because it is paid for by tax dollars, is the best that it can be in orchestrated and building those partnerships, and particularly in our very late coming fiscal year 24 appropriations from Congress. Thanks for the late notice. Every year it gets later and later. It makes it more difficult or a challenge to execute those funds. And so like really having as much work up front, having these conversations, designing good projects, having things shovel ready for whenever it's time to execute is really important. And these conversations really bring that into focus as best as possible. And it contributes towards that. So I want to thank you for everyone preemptively for the next couple of days mentioned with the budget. Our program, the Marine Mentals Program has grown very significantly over the last several years. We're becoming more and more involved in, you'll see on the different slide presentations throughout this two days, how that has evolved, but really focusing on how we can support the offshore wind program within our bureau and the development of their construction and operation plans, those reviews, making sure that we're brought into those processes to look at where those different cable and other transmission corridors are being proposed and that it doesn't compromise other resources and other ocean uses as much as possible. So that's a real big development over the last several years as that industry has started to take off pretty significantly. In addition to the charge, and I was just saying early today, critical minerals, huge, it's becoming a bigger and bigger space for us. So our partnerships with NOAA, with USGS and others at the State Department, Department of Defense, just Department of Energy, this group right here, everyone that's able to come into the conversation, very, very welcomed and something that we want to see continue. So just with that, I don't want to steal the thunder that everyone's put together the presentations today, but just issuing that thanks. Jeff. Sure. Thanks. Yeah. Hi again, everybody. I just want to say that this is a great venue. I was wondering what it was going to look like this first time I've been here. A lot different than the DC venue. If I had my druthers, this would be where I'd like to have a meeting. But yeah, I just want to thanks for the opportunity to really kind of dig deep into the Marine Minerals program during the next couple of days. I really value the diversity of the COSA with respect to the Marine Minerals program. We've been participating in the COSA meetings ever since the beginning. And like Megan said, we've been growing over the last few years in terms of staff, budget and responsibilities. So it's nice to have different perspectives from everybody to weigh in on where we're going and what kind of science we're doing, if we're doing good science. And so I really appreciate the opportunity and y'all's time. So thanks. Great. Thank you. And in our meeting and in our introduction with the new members, we went through the tasks of COSA and really the main one is to facilitate, try and provide expertise or provide the network to connect up to other scientists. And so over the next couple of days, I really encourage everyone to meet each other, to talk, and to form those connections. Because a lot of where we don't write a formal report, instead what we do is we provide advice, we provide, try and review and connections, and then also interactions where someone might say, well, I need this particular bit of expertise and reach out to one particular member in COSA. So the membership connection and the connection between the BOM staff and scientists and the COSA members is very important. And please don't build on that and use that. So great. Well, with that, is there any other housekeeping we need to do or shall we jump in? Good. All right. Well, then, Bill, we'll turn it over to you for your 101. Somebody actually put the slides up. Yeah. And so this will be a brief overview. I shouldn't take too long. And we've tried to put it together so that it would be helpful, particularly to the COSA members that may really not have much of a feel for what the Bureau actually does. And I apologize to those of you, like Ruth that have followed us for a long time. And so if it's redundant, I won't dwell on the details. Next slide. So there we have a mission to manage the development of the outer continental shelf energy and minerals and geological resources that are sort of referenced for carbon sequestration in an environmentally and economically responsible way. We now calculate the acreage as 3.2 billion. And Megan's office does that. They do the mapping for the Bureau. And that 3.2 includes the territories that were added by Congress. And there's a picture of where they are and also see the darker kind of red stuff. That's the area that the state department recently declared as the extended outer continental shelf. So it's the area that's beyond 200 nautical miles. Not every nation in the world agrees with us on that point. You may have noticed. Next slide. This is the department. The president should be at the top. The interior secretary reports to the president. And so, you know, we have a deputy director, deputy director. And then we have these six boxes underneath three regional directors, a renewable energy chief who's essentially managing an Atlantic region, although we can't declare that yet. And Megan's the chief of the Office of Strategic Resources there, for example. Next slide. I'm not going to read all these things, but we have, let me just set it up there for a minute. And basic, important tasks that are out of our strategic framework. And we do have, it's online now. I recommend you take a look at it just a few months ago. We posted an updated strategic framework. We're not calling it a strategic plan pretending that we've really got the operational details down to that level. Next slide. So I'm sure you've been reading about and you've been hearing about all of what we're doing on renewable energy, which really translates to wind at the moment fundamentally. And next slide. And I, this is just to give you a sense of the scale. I believe, you know, we've tried to make this up to date. It's hard to keep this slide completely up to date. And I believe actually, for example, I read this morning, we had approved our eighth with Dwingland Wind, our eighth record of decision, although one of the projects has dropped out, but huge amount of activity, too small to actually read the details unless your eyes are better than mine. But basically, the east coast is on the north side is ahead of the rest, a lot of projects. The west coast is moving along. We, and we're working on potential future lease sales for the mid-Atlantic and what will be a second sale for the Gulf of Mexico, a sale for Oregon, a sale for the Gulf of Maine, all in this year in the works. Next slide. And so we, you know, and historically the Bureau, going back to the MMS States was really, really known for its management of oil and gas offshore and particularly almost entirely the Gulf of Mexico. We do have a new national program that's been issued, and Megan's office is responsible for that, among many other things. And as you can see, the period is 2024 to 2029. And their next slide, there are just three lease sales contemplated. We don't necessarily have to do that, but we said that's what we intend to do. And they're in those years 2025, 2027, 2029. And as you can see, they're restricted to the western and central Gulf of Mexico. Next slide. Oh, and let me say one thing just to notice on the slides, part of the background of that is the Inflation Reduction Act allows offshore wind lease sales only if in the previous 12 months there's been an oil and gas lease sale covering at least 60 million acres, one or more covering at least that amount. So that was a legislative initiative decided to give those who want to have offshore wind lease sales also do something for oil and gas. It's built into the statute. Next slide. The Marine Minerals Program, just take a look. You've got all the experts here and they've got a lot to bring on. So I'm not going to read the slide to you, but this is their slide and it basically lays out kind of fundamentals for why this matters. Next slide. And we do have this new requirement that was in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act bill. When I first heard that, I kept carrying bill and I was at hard time. People were calling me to respond or whatever, but they're kind of adapted to that now. And actually the statute directs the Secretary to issue regulations for leasing for carbon sequestration within a year after November 15, 2021. So we have passed that date. And that doesn't mean that the whole Bureau isn't working like really hard on it. And I suppose maybe at least my excuse would be that from the beginning the Bureau decided to approach this not just as a framework regulation, but as a program. And so there's been a whole lot of work heavily in the Gulf and making an office that during the Gulf. And my office has been to try to develop a program that the regulations actually are based on and drawn into. And so we have a very large package that's out there and I cannot give you a deadline, but we're working hard on it. And of course, as you know, a lot of companies that are generating CO2 are really banking on sequestration being significant. And so there's a lot at stake in trying to make sure that works right. Bill, I'll just interrupt real quick on this note. The latest, greatest timing that we've been authorized to say is this fall is whenever the proposed rulemaking will be out for public comment. We seem to be on track for that. So I can say that with some level of certainty. So we are a little bit past the deadline, but with every question that we answer, we get another 10 to 20. So it's very robust in its makeup, very bulky, so to speak. But I do think that this as a whole, how the program is developing would be a very good topic for a COSA meeting, say some point early 2025. As we're working through the comments that we get from the public comment period, and we're designing what we're going to do particularly for the environmental monitoring piece is going to be really critical that we're doing that the right way so that these projects don't end up having unintended consequences right from the beginning. So I just wanted to add that. Yeah, that's good. Now we can live up to what we said we're going to do in terms of timing. Next slide. We have completed some rule makings, the split rule, which for the first time actually assigns Bessie regulatory responsibility for inspection enforcement of the offshore wind activities. And until that rule was issued, Bohm was actually the agency in charge of it all, really without the capability to do enforcement, for example, at this point. So Bessie's there. And I mean, I'm sure you get a feel for it though. They've really been stepping up, but it's a huge shift for them from not really being responsible to being now responsible for inspection enforcement. And then we did gain the territorial jurisdiction and I think to me at least it's clear it's all the US territories, although there's a mandate to move forward with wind, lease, sale, feasibility, and then the exercise of that requirement for the five US territories that have civilian governments and populations, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and then Northern Marihana. And so we're focusing on them. We have a proposed rule that ready to go final to quote modernize. The streamline was actually the earlier word, but we've focused on modernizing offshore wind. And I mean, most of that really is just trying to make some of the terms that are used in the current rules a little bit more efficient. There's a risk management rule, which I will not try to explain. Somebody else here wants to, they can. There's a protection of marine archeological resources rule that's also ready to go final. And actually its fundamental thing was to clarify that BOM has the authority to require a survey of an area before it gets drilled. And it was, that had been a practice for a long time, but our lawyers brought it into question. It's not an offshore wind issue. It's limited to oil and gas. And this rule would clarify that. It's the fundamental thing. And then as Megan said, there's a proposal in development where I guess I'll say too, I guess we're looking to later in this year for a proposal. I'll also add, and it's in our regulatory agenda, a fitness to operate is another rulemaking that we're moving forward with. So this is primarily for oil and gas type of operators and less ease. But then there's potential for it to be expanded to all other type of ocean uses that we authorize as well. But we're initially starting with oil and gas. Next slide. And so here's the environmental program. And of course, now that's what we're looking to the COSA to help advise us on. But it relates to everything I just described. But I will make the point though, it's not just the studies program, although that's critically important. It's the whole environmental program that we want your help on. And so it's the assessment side as well. And our assessment side has a lot of, we employ a lot of scientists who are not in the science division. And if I refer to the science division as the division that sciences and headquarters that properly upsets people because there are a lot of scientists who are in that division as important as a division is. So I mean, there's a basic thing of what we do. Next slide. Long term goals. The fundamental thing is to be first in class, second to none, call it what you want. Maybe second to none shows less hubris. And some people like to use best in class, but that sounds like the dog show. So we went with first in class. And so we're serious about that. And as some of you know that the COSA members, we did pay for an Academy consensus committee and report that did a really good job I think in 18 attributes. And we have a very talented staff that are working on ways to move that forward. And actually, I believe the COSA is oversight of how we're doing on that. And I don't mean you're overseers in a regulatory way of what we do, but you're paying attention, scolding us if necessary, helping us through is important, I think. And then under that, you know, we've listed the broad category of protecting ecosystems in the context of climate change. And I think there's one other slide that particularly to show related to that, but that's a huge area, right? So that's, I mean, that's kind of the fundamental, a fundamental historical mission. But we have listed separately tribes and environmental justice. And I mean, it's certainly a priority of this administration that has been a priority of mine before and during the Trump administration as well, and it was much less highlighted. And in some ways, you know, there are, there are stated and important policies of the White House and the Interior Department that are pretty specific that with federally recognized tribes, we should consult early and often on anything they're interested in. We should try to make sure that we make them aware of that. If they're interested, we should do our best to seek consensus and in a real way. And if we fail to reach consensus, we don't have to, you know, it's not mandated that we have an agreement, then we have a duty to be as clear as we can. You know, that if we're not doing something that we are not doing it and explain why and maybe hope to work things out more but to be clear. And then beyond the consultation requirement, there's an underlying more fundamental trust responsibility of the United States government that dates back to our Constitution and treaties with tribes that are date back actually before the Constitution. The first written treaty was 1778, the Fort Pitt Treaty. And then there were early Supreme Court decisions of Justice Marshall, the second Chief Justice of the United States that really helped define the sovereign status of tribes. It is a dependent sovereign seat. It recognizes the overarching authority of the Constitution. And a lot of what people don't, I think, always immediately understand if they haven't gotten into it is that there's a lot of that background relates to the tribes. They're right and they're interested in working directly with the federal government not going through state governments. And it's really, so we're doing the best we can. We're hot, we've hired a wonderful tribal liaison officer who's a Pomo Indian and she's a lawyer. She was the Chief Judge of the Yakama and she's really focused on our trust responsibility. And she's been trying to actually help some of the companies figure out what to how to work with tribes better. And then on environmental justice, we're at this, as you may have noticed, this is also a priority of the Biden administration and certainly the Interior Department and and we're doing a lot on it. And Jessica Bravo who's here is actually, I think, the person who knows all the bits and pieces of that the best. But we've focused on New York Bight and forums for environmental justice and a contract that we just have results from for best practices and so forth. And we're in the stage now of trying to expand that so that it's, you know, it's not just the New York Bight project and and not really just my own office, you know, that's doing most of the work and to spread it across across bone. Next slide. There's environmental leadership. The so there's the headquarters side of the equation is on the left there. But we have a we have a diversified environmental program diversified staff so that if you'd look at the box on the right there, you know, for the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific, Alaska renewable energy marine minerals, each of those program areas has environmental staff that do and they're organized in different ways. But they when you put it together, they there are some that are focused on studies more and and others largely that are probably the larger share of focus focus more on taking science and doing assessment work. So that's our basic current structure. Next slide. So we've got all these things going with the National Academy. We have two standing committees. There's COSA. There's also an offshore wind and fisheries committee, which really was driven by the offshore wind releases and projects. We have consensus studies that we're supporting. One, we were I think probably the first financial sponsor. I'm not sure if we were, but I think we might have been of increasing diversity in the ocean studies community. And that's now been launched. It's supposed to last two years that we've done. We've had, for example, funded a study on hydrodynamic impacts of wind on Nantuck controls, an important study. And then we have the attributes of the first and class program. That was a letter report for those of you. So it's a, you know, a simpler thing and cheaper too. We've done at least one formal peer review. What we're doing here for what it's worth, and this is maybe to note to the new COSA members, this is not peer review, this meeting, the kinds that are discussions with COSA. A very important feedback for us and open to the public, but it's not peer review. We never contemplate, we never contemplated it should be. And I make a point of this, because some of the COSA members in the past have expressed concern that it might be perceived as that. And it's not, if you want peer review from the national academies, you have to pony up around 150,000, and they put together a big project just on that. And it's very detailed and very good. And we did want, we've done one on air quality modeling in the Gulf of Mexico. And we actually have our default approach is that if something is highly influential, like a study, you know, a rare study that those are the ones that we would typically use the academies for, but today it's just been this one. And then we have a workshop. We've thought to several workshops, you know, which don't have a consensus report. There's a workshop report from them, and there's one they're listed. So there's a lot. There's a whole portfolio of functions that are funded under an IDIQ and umbrella contract that we have. So the individual projects are task orders. Next slide. The studies program mission there is pretty fundamental. Rodney's the head of it. Next slide. I serves everybody. I mean, that's, I should have actually let Rodney do this part, but I'm going to do it all for the lead Megan actually do the other part. But Rodney's very good at always making the point that it's, this is not like a little headquarters, you know, a little pointy headed thing. It's serving everybody. And actually the funding develops that way. It goes through a quite elaborate process. It was authorized by section 20 of the Outer Continental Self-Lands Act. Over a billion dollars and a quarter to date, although, you know, we need, we do need money to keep increasing that. And of course, I'm not seeking that, but it is a tight budget time right now. It has typically been about 30 million in annual funding. And the results are all available publicly. And we looked, we've looked to the COSA from the beginning to help us try to make the process as good as we can make it. And that's still an open invitation request. No process is perfect. Next slide. And then we have what we call assessment. It's kind of a mild way of presenting the regulatory program. But its purpose is not just to assess impacts, but it's to develop what people call mitigation measures and essentially regulatory measures. So there's the information and there's what you do with it that actually affects outcomes. And at the national level, Jill Lewandowski is the head of, she was on that other slide, but she's the head of the National Assessment Program, and also the head of the Center for Marine Acoustics. Next slide, which I think comes up. Yeah. I actually like Jill's, when we launched, we launched initially the idea of having centers of expertise. And the obvious one was, was acoustics that we might do other things. No one was sure in the beginning, actually, if it would really work. You know, I have a center, some people said, you know, had good staff. The center really has, I think, brought focus to the, I think it's doing what we had hoped. I credit Jill a lot to this, but she's now got a group of seven people, including herself, which is a lot of people that we focused on acoustics. And they're very talented. They include modelers, they can, there's, you know, they're like as good as there is anybody good that's out there, including in the commercial sector. So there, as you can imagine, they've been, they're critical in the offshore wind process. Because when you pound turbines, monopoles, and it makes a fair amount of noise. And so there's a regulatory system that they've helped develop. And, and, and, you know, they, and they, their objective is to be a trusted voice. They're not on this, they're on the side of the environment, but they're not on the side of industry or the ED NGOs, they're doing a government job to be a trusted voice. And Jill also always has said several times, if you're not driving the bus, you'll find yourself under it. So that's another reason for having a CMA. Next slide. Their functions, they're kind of generic. So I won't dwell on them. Take a quick look. Next slide. Just one thing to note, again, I'm not going to go into this, but there is a tremendous focus on the North Atlantic right whale, which is in dire straits, largely because of vessels and, and a certain fishing activity. But there's certainly a lot of concern about the impact of wind farms to some of it, I think, unfounded that the whales that have washed up lately really are related to that. But we, we recognize that's that is a species of animal that we need to pay very special attention to. And so we've developed and published a strategy. Jill's been the leader on that for, for bone and no is our partner. Next slide. Just to just take a look. I mean, this is just, this is like, this is real life in the bone environmental program. You're surrounded by all these statutes. And, and it's for every aspect. I mean, Jeff riding hours, finds himself surrounded by these laws. And we could list more. Those are just the most significant ones. Next slide. And this is just to show you, we really are trying to have a number of partners. So we're putting all the logos out as our example of that. For example, the environmental studies program is sort of prides itself on leveraging its funding very heavily through these other partnerships. Next slide. Tribal. I've talked, I've talked longer than I intended to on tribes. So maybe I'll just take a quick look and we'll go on. It really does matters to us. And we're trying to do the everything we can to live up to our trust responsibilities, which historically the federal government really is not done. So we're trying to do better. Next slide. Next slide. I showed you this already. We talked on it too. So one thing I've been pushing this, I'm at the closing stage now. I think we're down to one or two, maybe three slides at most. But I mean, it's apparent to me that artificial intelligence is kind of revolutionized so much of what goes on in the world. But it certainly will affect what, what BOM does in a big way. And we should, and we should try to understand it and take advantage of it. And so this slide actually is, these are points from a YouTube video that Andre Carpathi, who's currently got his own company, but he was with Open AI. And before that, he was the head of Tesla's AI program. But he had a very influential YouTube video that various people picked up on. And I shared this and some other slides with our strategic or senior leadership team just to try to prompt everybody. And they were there, I think, to get more in AI. But these are some fundamental points he made, which I, you know, they're not my points. I can't guarantee that all of this is, it's not vetted by the United States government, but it's worth noting because I think it's reasonable. And so these, these foundation models, basically large language models that can do more than handle text can either do these things or we'll be able to do them in the next few years. That's his term, let's say, certainly before 2030, read and generate text, no more than a human can about a subject, browse the internet, use existing software infrastructure and, you know, and mentioning keyboard, mouse, calculator, but, but the point is that anything you can think of yourself doing on a computer, it can or will be able to do. Seeing generate images here, see can speak and generate music. Then on the right are the more things that aren't quite there yet. Like one of them is to the large language models respond immediately. They don't contemplate that, you know, they don't do what everyone's room does, but they're, but they're apparently is considerable work going to let them have that figure out how to have them use that development capability. You know, we, they are trained by people, they're not really generally being able to train themselves. You know, there's why can't they, you know, move, you know, have the AI do its own training of itself. That's in the works. They're already being customized. There are hundreds, thousands, I presume, apps now that for specialized training on top of a large language model, like this one called co-counsel for that a lot of law firms are beginning to use right now. And it's, and it's better than Michael Cohen did, you know, when you give the fake legal citations, but and like one big law firm, I read, you know, major law firms just, you know, uploaded, you know, all of its pleadings, all of its papers, highly confidential and, but has figured out how to train that on top of an AI model, maintain the confidentiality, but much speeding up the writing of documents. And then the other thing is to really effectively communicate with other large language models. And that's, you know, that's where he gets a little scary, because if they start talking and they're smarter than humans, they're as nearly smart. Next slide. So, yeah, and I just wanted to, I showed this to our senior leadership group, I didn't, I think they enjoyed it, didn't they, Megan? I don't know what I was saying. There was mixed reviews. Yeah, Megan wanted, she thought we really should have, she told me this morning, we should have somebody come out of the costume, but I, I might have done that, but Jessica told me I was limited to three slides on this issue. So, but there is a, there was a meme, the show got that came out about a year now, it's probably, there's probably a new meme now that represents AI and the one on the right you may see has a smiley face. And this is from, it's from a science fiction writer who I actually never read, but, you know, had the choke off. And it's some of this, some of the things came up from there was apparently an Elon Musk's 2015 birthday party, thrown by his ex-wife. He had a very long discussion with Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, and, and, Larry Page apparently believes that the, once, once, once the singularity is reached, once we have something we think is at least as smart as a human, I don't know how you really fully determine that, that these AIs might be very likable. And, and his other view was if they're better than us, maybe they should take over. But Elon Musk, at the time, at least apparently, according to New York Times, expressed opposition. And he thought, he thought they were dangerous to people. And Larry Page called him a species. So he was like, he was like into the human species, as opposed to a broader look on things. And, and, you know, it's unclear, weddle. It's already out of date, it's GPT-3. And now we're, now we got four and we're moving on five. So that's there is the background. It's worth reading the stuff and trying to stay on top of it a little bit. Next slide. And then for BOM. So I mean, this is really important, perform analyses and write reports. And we do have this project, the SOX project status of the outer continental shelf with an ecosystem-based management model associated with it. And, and what the staff working on it and I want to do is to, you know, use SOX to, to assemble a well-vetted database or environmental studies and other things and link it to the ecosystem-based model that Jake Levinson and, and, and Les have been working on. And ideally, I put that on top of a large language model and, and the Interior Department does have an Azure cloud contract with Microsoft that is, has operational GPT-4, I understand. Although they're just in the kind of the early stages of trying to figure out how to use it apparently. And I'm just asking the staff to work with them. But, and, but you can see, given what I just went through that Mr. Carpathi, Dr. Carpathi has presented that we, I mean, we may be able to do a lot of the things we do and do it better, you know, with what's coming. And I, everyone here that's worked on AI knows that those systems hallucinate. I mean, I, I hope everyone here has tried some of them and maybe Google yourself and found that it says you went to school somewhere you didn't or something. And, but, and there's no easy way out from that. We have to have, right now we need super quality control, but, but the future lies here heavily, I think. And if we do it right, it'll save us money. So even if we get situations like we have now where the Congress is not a very dependable funding partner for these kinds of things. You know, we may be able to do things less expensively and do them better if we work at it. And I'll jump in there as well for on the AI front. So something that bone on a more local level not looking futuristically at it. Over the last five to eight years, I'd say really focusing on technology advancements and looking at how we can structure our databases, identifying the appropriate metadata and other types of attributes to the studies mentioned, the 1.25 billion with the big giant B has been spent. That's just the environmental studies aspect. We also have all of the data that's been collected under geologic permits under leases as well. So a lot of seismic data and other type of geophysical and geologic data that's been collected by industry and others since the 1940s. So I don't even know what that would total we haven't spent the time to figure that out, but it's definitely worth more than 1.25 billion. And so viewing the data in the information that comes from that in the work products that everyone's been working on through the years as business assets and making sure that we are putting together the architecture technologically speaking that connects all that in the background. So we have everything available. We know what we have. We make it accessible and then we can advance a lot of our analysis, the more mundane, tedious task to AI type of purposes. That's really going to advance what we're doing and really free up the time of our scientists to do what we want with it and to provide those services for the public as well. It's because that's something that we've been advancing as well as just making available to the public. That's a part of our mission as well. And so all of this works together, but just one kind of ground it for a little bit, but that's something that we're actively working on right now. Yeah. And at that point, Megan made it really important that, you know, we don't have to solve all the world's problems immediately. There's a lot of value in actually looking at using this for some simple things that take a lot of time. We're using it already for not a generative AI, but for FOIA, for example, to identify patterns and in emails just to make the job of FOIA officers simpler, already doing that. So I think that's it. Next slide. There you go. Thank you. Well, Bill, that was emotional. You know, that's a lot of stuff. We've got plenty of time for discussion on all the different points. And I mean, a very comprehensive review of BOM and I wasn't actually anticipating the AI discussion at the end, but I know those of my colleagues in academia were, you know, AI is at the forefront with how you use it to teach. And it's really used on seven or eight different levels, not just writing, but also coding and how quickly that's going. And it falls into the realm of scientific writing and authorship. And, you know, some professors like my brother, for example, only gives exams with this because, you know, so it's a challenge that we're all struggling with in different avenues, how to use it and also how to keep it from taking away creativity. Certainly, I don't know if you guys are fans of Nick Cave, but he wrote a great letter that Stephen Fry reads on YouTube, which, hey, check it out if you're interested in it, but certainly on creativity and AI and songwriting. So, go throw it open to discussion. Kevin, I just want to mention that we're also using other forms of AI beside large language models, various kinds of machine learning that have massively increased our creativity by using them as observational tools and big data, revealing processes we didn't even know were there. So, this is, we've got a little bit of time. And so, the ability for the COSA members and the BOME to have some discussion on those points and maybe points of clarification. So, Dan, you hands up. Yeah, that was a great introduction. And while you were talking, there's a couple of things that came to mind. It's one being an academic who can retreat to the ivory tower. I really appreciate the fact that you guys are on the front lines. And my point is, is that you have lots of aspirational endpoints, which what does the science tell us? And the problem is a lot of the science doesn't tell us, well, it certainly doesn't tell us what to do. And ideally, the science will tell us what the outcomes are if we take different paths. What I'm getting to is a lot of the science is really not, we're not to the point for many of the questions you have to answer. The science is not adequate. So, I can retreat to the ivory tower because I don't have to make those decisions. You guys can't. And so, it's really the interface in terms of how do we take the level of information we have to make the best decisions that we can, which is what you guys have to do. And so, bring that up as I appreciate the difficulty and the importance of that interface. But, and then the other thing I like to say is you talked about the history and obviously, the history goes beyond VOM. And I mentioned in the closed session early in my career, I was part of the Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Assessment Program. UC Santa Cruz was part of, I can never remember if it was BLM or MMS in which came first. So many of our, and I also said earlier, there was no such thing as a baseline, an incredible amount of our first understanding of the Outer Continental Shelf Environment, whether it was California, whether it was the East Coast, whether it was Alaska, came from ancestors of VOM. I think back at California Current, the early work that we didn't have much knowledge of the distribution of marine mammals and funding set up the baseline from which we now all look back on from the 1970s, a lot of the physical oceanography to understand these environments was funded by these programs. So it's just an acknowledge that I think it is pretty spectacular for the size of the organization that you are. You've probably had a disproportionate impact on the on the basic understanding of these offshore environments. I'll throw the floor open. Any other questions or comments? Ask the time for discussion. Please. This is just a really quick question. I think you mentioned it, but it's interesting when you have the organization charts up there and you've got the Alaska one and the Gulf one, but you don't have the New England or the East. Where does that go? I remember you mentioned it, but I realized that we haven't had a lot going on in the past and that's probably why it doesn't exist. I think Megan's interested in answering that. So there used to be an Atlantic region back in the MMS days and then whenever Boma and Bessie split off, that organization or reorganization didn't include one. So now we've been actively ever since then trying to establish it again, feel that we're definitely evaluating that and seeing what makes sense given the type of activity. It's very heavily on the offshore wind piece. It's very heavy on the marine mineral space. So more than likely won't be seeing a lot of oil and gas like we do see that as the dominant activity level in the Gulf of Mexico and so how to structure things that were all coordinated together and even across the other regions as well that are doing similar types of work to support those activities. So that's something we are doing. It is in the 25 budget, so that's public, so I can't say that. I had to think for a second on what's public and what's not. The administration has proposed the creation of the Atlantic region and it would be effective October 1st if it goes forward. Or once Congress approves the budget, which could be this time next year, but either way we are moving forward with that. So any suggestions, things that people would like to see us concentrate a little bit more as that is forming, welcome the feedback. Probably know the answer to this, but 30 million, this comes up a lot, not significant and we're going to have a deep dive on an expanding marine minerals into further parts of the outer continental shelf, more distant territories, things where there's not a lot of lack of a better word baseline information, which you know in that type of oceanography is exponential cost increase. So from a strategic point of view, how has Bohm tried to think about that and then essentially work with Congress and others to put the framework into action, primarily increasing budgets because it's just, because this always tends to be a conversation of tradeoffs, right? And just trying to figure out the complexity here and all of the great work and yes, you can leverage so much, but I would imagine some of the conversation over the next day and a half is going to be particularly challenging because there's not a lot of entities, government agencies that are working in these more remote areas with maybe the exception of ocean exploration, but that's mapping, right? So I'm just kind of thinking ahead and what has Bohm tried to influence or think about in terms of scaling the ESP to match the amount of work that's required by the agency. And that might not be an easy answer, but just kind of some context. Well, let me start and then Rodney has some thoughts together and Megan has something she wants to add on this too, we'll see. But I think you do know the answer probably, and I'm not sure how to articulate it. I think it's safe to say that it is recognized within Bohm that to do the job right for development in general actually and certainly including examination of what we might do for critical minerals, warrants, more money. And actually 30 million is kind of, you know, that's an historical amount, but I'm not optimistic that we'll have that amount next year, for example, with the way things are. We don't know where Congress will go. So we want and need enhanced funding and we do make our case. I do, Rodney does. And Bohm typically will for at least incremental increased funding, but we're constrained by overall budget requirements and we respond to it OMB in the Department of Interior's budget office sort of required to balance and there's no easy way just to and we do shift our priorities. We're now spending most of our studies funding on offshore wind, for example, and that was not the case five years ago. Our Alaska funding is actually much reduced because of, you know, the shift in interest for oil and gas up there. So but it's still all within this pot of a limited amount we have we have considered and advanced and I don't really know exactly how far things have gone but the potential for example of research percentage associated with oil and gas revenue so the Land and Water Conservation Act kind of thing. But that really hasn't hasn't gone anywhere. Rodney who will note that we do we really try hard to find ways to raise money with partners especially federal partners for the big projects that they're subject to similar constraints to and we are in the midst of developing for environmental monitoring of sound in particular but I hope it'll become broader than sound like eDNA and other things we mix in an option it's not yet definitively approved but an option that would, you know, on one hand say if you don't exercise this option company you need to do monitoring on your on your lease long term however long that exactly is. But another option is to actually provide a certain amount of money that you know based on criteria that has been discussed with the companies to to bone to the studies program which in turn though would have a probably a non-profit entity that can take funds from federal state local governments to implement a monitoring system that that would that will be I mean it's just much more attractive when you think about it to do it that way because you can the companies fulfill their obligation by doing that but the system is being managed by those that are looking at the overall impacts of all these all of these projects so we're in the middle of that and that'll help a little bit so I guess what I'm saying is there is sort of a private sector contribution so we're still allowed to do that it's every year it's in the appropriations field it could drop out but I don't know it's troubling and actually with with with you know the partisan arrangement in Congress doesn't help with certainty of long term great I'll chime in a little bit more and then pass it over to Rodney and Jeff but to to the question since we're talking about the marine minerals program over the next couple of days I do think that the program as a whole has done a really good job on setting priorities in the critical mineral space for our national sand inventory you know two very separate documents that have been developed with the SMEs within the program and others across the different bone regions or environmental basically a whole of bone approach to say these are our priorities these are the objectives within each of those priorities that we're hoping to achieve over the next five to ten years and then from that becomes kind of a little bit of a brain trust in some brainstorming sessions within staff to develop proposals for research and other types of efforts designing what it is that we would need as far as technology all of those types of things that then can feed into budget initiatives and we put those forward every year Rodney's group's been Rodney himself has been instrumental in making sure that there's a certain part of the environmental studies budget that is carved out specifically for marine minerals purposes in addition to the partnerships that we've been able to develop with NOAA USGS and everywhere else so that we can leverage the expertise but we are constrained by our budget just like everyone else but we're continually putting our hand out we're starting to develop relationships and some strategies with external partners that can speak on our behalf when they're meeting with their congressional representatives to really advocate for bone as a whole and then the marine minerals program so we do have some limitations in that that we're trying to be creative to work around but it's it's definitely a process but being able to look forward as much as we can and strategize as much as we can and so we can incrementally make progress towards those goals has been really really important and that's where the I mentioned for this conversation over the next couple of days and beyond is really critical to that point but Rodney and Jeff you want to add yeah well one thing I guess well I think you've all Bill Megan mentioned basically everything I was going to say but to summarize it's really I think three ways to really make this 30 million more one is to enhance public private partnerships and yes that was developer with the wind developers but with marine minerals companies with with other developers with private sector companies with the technology sector so I think that's one really important thing so to enhance public private partnerships is one to really embrace innovation and emerging technologies and then to keep writing our budget initiatives like we do every year building in the innovation as far as the first one I mentioned public private partnerships we've done a really good job over many years you know working with universities and you know other federal agencies that 30 million in any given year we turn it into 60 double it remember we don't have ships satellites or anything like that if we're doing any type of animal telemetry from satellites we know we're using NASA or we you know if we're going out doing kind of different types of surveys we're using no ships you know that's those things are not free so that's you know kind of you know you know work that we're actually taking our 30 million um and enhancing that if we can bring those same principles to the private sector I think and work like Bill was saying with the contribution authority for passive acoustic monitoring it's one way but also just to cost share use our environmental studies program to cost share on work so we have at least area or ecosystem say you know in the Gulf of Maine or wherever any place if we want to spend five million of our studies program doing you know ecosystem baseline studies and then we can work with developers or other interested parties up there to cost share that along with universities along with the state so I guess what I'm trying to say is you know enhancing partnerships I think is really really critical to building you know what we have and leveraging that 30 million right now like I said we can maybe double it I want to triple it because I think we can't it's an all hands on deck approach but the second thing is innovation too and emerging technology it's like we're talking about for AI a couple of years ago I wanted to hire a chief innovation officer in our program which I'm still working on I also wanted to establish a new center for innovative ocean monitoring which I'm still thinking about but things didn't exactly work out the way I wanted but we do have an FTE that we will be hiring a new chief innovation specialist or officer that's going to be coming into bone that will help all of our scientists really understand how best to employ you know innovation and technology to whatever studies they're doing so this this person that's coming in I really see that as a beginning step to really enhance and work with tech companies and other people and then bring that knowledge and information back to our scientists when designing studies so that's the second thing and then I guess the third thing again is is you know continue to beat the drama and budget initiatives because we do that every year and we're gonna have to continue to do that and you know I've been here 25 years I've got a couple funded so I mean it's not zero so maybe we'll get that you know that going as well so so I'm gonna just order for people to speak I saw Lori's hand first and then Jeremy, Jack and then Les. So thank you for all of that overview and I have it's just a really basic review given the context of our conversations the next couple of days on marine minerals where exactly are we defining the edge of the outer continental shelf and how does that bleed over into the deep sea and deep sea mining that is now such a hot issue even in congress maybe from it's uh well the United States is not a party to the law of the sea convention but we do regard the the provisions related to our continental shelf says customary international law that we're required in the state department feel strongly about this to follow and and you know the the the continental shelf of a nation in that provision in that article extends at least to 200 nautical miles that everyone's got out now but there are several tests and you may know all this but that maybe not everybody does but that provide for nations to assert a continental shelf that goes out more than 200 nautical miles and you know release basically the tools are designed to try to match the actual shelf place there and it's limited to 350 miles and the United States so the United States it's on that map I put up I went through a really multi-year is it whole decade and and one of the best lawyers at state who actually used to report to my wife one was went over to know and was doing the work and they just came out with their extended continental shelf decisions basically of the United States and and so the the map you remember the parts of the map yeah that and so that's well over 200 nautical miles and in a number of cases now that you know some day some patients I think including China and Russia have already objected to that the Arctic is a big flash point and although of course the United States is not a party of the law the Sikh convention and some on the more conservative side say well you know that means we can just do it we don't have to worry about going through the process that you know is available for kind of endorsement of extended continental shelf and and but basically and and but one of the issues on the other side is you know why would companies and be interested in investing in areas that are where the United States is not a party asserts this but others disagree are we creating vulnerabilities and there was a 60 minutes thing that kind of related to that a little bit about a week ago I know many of you saw it so for at least 200 nautical miles there's not any debate except from the Chinese like the nine dash map if you're over that way I'll pass the baton over to Paul Norr who's our critical mineral specialist and would be helping to facilitate whenever we reach the point for deep sea mining okay wasn't expecting that thanks Megan yeah so looking at the ECS areas in particular which really aren't ECS anymore they're OCS now just from a terminology perspective that stopped in December when the executive order was issued or that at far was published it's now the OCS there's only really as I understand it currently two areas where there's really critical mineral potential that would be relevant to bone one is the Chuchki Peninsula there's cobalt rich crusts other metals scandium things like that up in the Arctic and then off the Blake Plateau there's there's an extension that pushes down into the abyssal plane so there may be nodules down there but we don't know we need to look most of the other extended areas that were added I don't think we'll have much potential for critical minerals deep sea mining for example it's worth pointing out that the Dishmarah the deep sea hard minerals resources act gives NOAA authority to issue leases in extra tech in international waters basically to the hollow areas in the Clarion-Clipperton zone that haven't been put under contract by ISA are actually legacy leases that NOAA issued to Lockheed Martin back in the 1980s and those still exist anyway I probably Jeff yeah Paul thanks I was going to mention Dishmarah also but my understanding is that a few of the members of the ISA are actually questioning those leases at this point in time since they're you know pretty valuable yeah I also mentioned the international seabed authority as part of the law to see it was established so the US does participate as a delegation to that ISA along with USGS and NOAA and BOEM so we do follow the development of the exploitation regulations they have exploration regulations in place but not exploitation regulations and my understanding is that they're supposed to finalize those in 25 they've been pushed off a few years but yeah we closely monitor that and participate as part of that delegation actually I want to even add to that that one of our BOEM reps who's been part of the delegation in Jamaica to the this seabed authority told me that BOEM was having a lot of influence because of just because the systems that we've used you know for leasing and so forth we were I'm more familiar with how one might approach so we so even though we are observers we're having you know some real effect if I another just a point I've got a message from some of the people online that if you could introduce yourself when you when you speak because they're having a little hard time figuring out who's talking in the in the in the room and also Juliet Lee posted the announcement of US extended continental shelf at her limit so so that that link is up okay Jeremy stepped out Jack do you want to yeah Jack excuse me Jack Barth Oregon State University I just want to follow up with that partnership comment I think you touched on it Rodney there's there's the federal partners you know we're all pretty big fans of knob how about an analog of the cooperative institutes that NOAA does with academic institutions does BOEM have an entity like that or has looked at that well yeah we we do obviously a lot of cooperative agreements with the universities we do have certain agreements with LSU and University of Alaska Fairbanks that do the coastal marine institute where we have a cost share with them so we actually do cost share in that way and we go through the cooperative ecosystem study units which is ramped by the park service and if we go through that entity and work with the member institutions we get a lower overhead so more of our money can be spent by science you know for towards science and less admin cost so we have these certain avenues that we're going down we're not of course you know exactly like NOAA has with their institutions and everything but we we do have that authority is there something else you're thinking about that I might I've just seen that as a to leverage 30 million just like you were talking about so making that easier to putting in place the procedures to make that go quickly to leverage the academic sector right I mean a lot of our work is done with the academic sector but like I said it's you know through our existing cooperative agreements authority or like it's the CESU the CMI we go through sometimes with the USGS they have their science centers for example so aimed that they're affiliated with the academic institutions which we also utilize those as well but any other additional ideas I am willing to to open up and try to explore certainly so thank you and Jack so taking what Roddy just said the I mean if what you're thinking of are like the wildlife co-ops that fish and wildlife had for a long time or I guess NOAA that I'm less familiar with there were just those a lot more money so it's you know so there's an opportunity to have like a big portfolio of continuing offices and but with the amount of money we have what Rodney described is pretty much of all we think we can do yeah I was just reflecting on the the mission has gotten so much bigger right you know a person like me could have ignored it 30 years ago and said it's just oil and gas but it's everywhere now it's in the water column it's 350 nautical miles offshore I mean it's just a larger group of people that are interested and want to help I'm sure thanks I'm on the same topic of the 30 million I I'm not sure that people appreciate the scope of the opportunity here the the development of the partnership model parallels what's happened with NASA but when people think of NASA they think of the whole universe what we're really talking about in broad strokes is not really just bone jurisdiction but two-thirds of the surface of the planet about which we know almost nothing and it's possible that our need for the resources that we know are there could expand our vision of what we're doing and and view this as a huge opportunity for exploration for basic exploration and see and try to urge Congress to fund it with that in mind that's really the scale of the problem and the level of excitement that should surround it I have a bit of an antidote on that one too because a friend of mine and scientist you guys probably some of you know Bob up in Alaska we were talking he was doing a before after control impact uh study up there and I said well how's it going he said it's really hard to do before impact before after control impact study when every time you make a toe you discover a new species exactly yeah exactly haven't I had one question sure to follow up not on the budget per se but uh with the expanding territories piece of this how is how is bone organized to deal with that is it the minerals program is a national program because I know you have the regional pieces of it and I'm just thinking in terms of has there been anything in uh discuss government to government particularly with state department and defense given some of the sensitivities and also other sources of funding around these areas that that bone may not have capacity for because this seems like a little bit of a unique structure compared to offshore wind um oil and gas in terms of you know who's out there and who's collected information and and then there's a lot of other initiatives that bring in money to a lot of these territories and where is the territory to bone relationship when we're starting to talk about management of resources and so those online Megan Carr um the jurisdiction that was expanded into the territories does include critical mineral um and also sand and gravel um and so we've been working heavily with USGS to look at their perspective maps and have them and you'll see that in some of the slides later on today and tomorrow but where we think there are things you know where in theory there could be with the geologic processes and the ocean process that we know exist um and going out and coordinating with NOAA so wherever NOAA is we try and get extra ship time to get some baseline environmental data baseline resource assessment data but we are limited by their plans and we just kind of are latching on to them but yeah I think as that program grows meaning you know we're getting more and more information we can then be a little bit more focused and have a louder voice and I think as the conversation around critical mineral supply chain deepens a little bit more particularly as you know we are in the beginning of the supply chain by getting the raw resources in the domestic waters or you know terrestrial as well but I think that's going to get a little bit more accelerated in that but right now we are you know just with the limitation um kind of the first thing that we're looking at is going out with the request for information now the timing of that we're not quite sure but that would be more than likely for all of the territories um to try and understand what is out there and that's where we would have that more heavy coordination with the other departments across the government as well as with industry and in anyone else just to see what it is um because the vast majority of the data that is out there and the research that is out there is not in English so that's a limitation and so how are we going to have access to that and really make sure that the translation is correct and then use it in our applied ways so that's that's a challenge that we have to oversee as well and so where is state department in some of this because I know one they have big ocean budgets that they're typically slow to use and two the point you just made in terms of the territories language things like that seems that they could be a huge enabler here I don't think we have a good answer to that question so we're we're developing that relationship to get an answer and I think it's also I think safe to say this is an issue that there's a lot of attention and it is you know things will happen going forward I I mean from my own sense there there are different voices in the state department just as there are elsewhere and you know it'll it's kind of evolves around you know the balance between development and their research concern over biology and it's a little bit that a distinct difference between OES at state and the energy side of state department I think we actually would be would benefit a lot from by will from more conversations you know within the government and hey Bill I'll I'll just said that we're part of a couple of intergovernmental committees with regard to critical minerals we're part of the nstc critical mineral subcommittee which practically almost all the departments participate in and we're also part of an interagency policy committee specific on seabed mineral resources so there are those conversations that have been been ongoing but but frankly they're in early discussions and we haven't gotten to the point where you know we're totally in sync with everybody in terms of you know organization money etc etc but those conversations are being held I just remind everyone again to please and introduce themselves I just got another Jeff right now sorry that's all yeah I was no brown no worries so Paul nor just the point with the territories state department doesn't really have any involvement in that they're part of the united states it's the department of interiors office of insular affairs that coordinates relations with the territories and under the inflation reduction act when they were added to the OCS they're given the same status of states so it's basically the conversation with the territory for us is the same as having a conversation with the state government it's worth adding to that as noting what Paul said we we do have pretty regular discussions with the insular affairs office actually our our environmental experts helped them develop categorical conclusions for a number of projects which weren't limited to the U.S. territories they were for the ones that we have a relationship for the freely associated state relationships like Palau and Marshall Islands so they're very they're small they they insular affairs has last time I checked 30 staff you know they put out a lot of money I think it's in the neighborhood of 300 million don't hold me to that a year but it's largely through these big conduits more general support so we are having those discussions but it's it's you know it's not clear exactly how that will translate into something for what we're talking about the state department I mean what Paul says totally right it's there this is part of the United States but there is this whole issue of critical minerals and how important they are to the nation that which the state department is very involved in and so I I do think and it's it's what Jeff said that you know we have all these structures and Roddy's involved in them too he's there's so many committees he's honest you can't really remember but this particular issue is is going somewhere right yes I would say so Jeremy you had a question yes and I'm sorry I had to jump out there and hopefully I didn't miss too much but sort of following on this point of greater cooperation with Department of State it's been my observation that that there could be much closer cooperation between the Bohm Environmental Studies program the Department of Energy wind energy technology office NOAA Sea Grant but particularly DOE WEDDOW because they've got lots of money and can help not just on the wind side but and then if we go outside of WEDDOW into other parts of Department of Energy they've got lots of money that could be very helpful in in investigations related to critical minerals as well because that goes into the to the EVs it goes into the wind turbines it goes into all of those things and it goes all into the energy transition so I would really think that that's certainly one way to leverage additional funds I would also note and it's not something that we like is university researchers and there was one recent exception from from DOE but both NOAA and DOE have some sort of some cost sharing involved and and that's certainly a model that Bohm could could look at as a way to expand its rather limited funds so Dan? Dan Costa? Yeah Dan Costa you see Santa Cruz. Jack made a comment about institutes and I just looked up I don't I imagine a BOM people know about it because I all of the institutes I looked at Bohm as part of it and this is the Cooperative Ecosystems Studies Unit and it's a it's a pretty excellent way to move federal dollars to researchers especially in academics but it's not limited to academics but it's also a pretty substantial network that I was helped in to help create the the Californian one then the the other comment I wanted to make we're talking about your 30 million dollar budget and I going back to my ancient history the OXEP program which funded just Alaska in late 70s early 1980s money was 22 million dollars in 1980s dollars and you're looking at 30 million in today's dollars. I can Dan thank you we have noted that and we are an active member of the CESU we're you know really interested in using it wherever we can yeah okay well I don't see any other questions I do have one myself but it's more just a question of clarity uh Bill in your presentation you said um or there was a comment I think I think it was you uh fitness to operate and I didn't understand or was that sorry Megan that was you I don't understand or I guess I'm not familiar with fitness to operate you mean companies fit the operator yes and so sorry Megan Carr for those online um part of the one of the first things that President Biden had the department do is a comprehensive review of the oil and gas program that was in conjunction with BLM and and Bessie our sister agency and one of the things that came from that report was recommending that we move forward with the fitness to operate standard and so that's something that um Beaum and Bessie have been working on together since then and more aggressively over the last six months on what are the types of things that we need to look at for you know are they good on their financial obligations are they you know particularly whenever we have our financial assurance rulemaking finalized later this year um there's going to be a considerable amount of bonding that's going to be now requested of these companies and so are they good on that obligation have they been having any environmental violations have they been any other types of criteria that we're coming up with what are the thresholds for that you know so that's all being worked out um so whenever we have a proposed rulemaking everyone will have comments to share I'm sure on on what those criteria should be the thresholds are they being proposed appropriately but really um how are we going to also share the information and the data between the agencies so that we can work together a lot better and be more coordinated for making decisions and so it's not just bone making decisions and isolation it's not just Bessie making decisions and isolation um that there's good coordination with industry as well and making sure that we're not um going to be creating think an environment that's unintentable for them to continue operating as well and so that's um in the works that's about the highest level summary that I can provide I think does that make sense it does great yeah I know it makes sense and also I mean the where we've been on these because working with the wind firms where we've had these companies pulling out of their agreements and stuff does that tie into that kind of that that kind of thing I don't think companies choosing to not I guess if they choose not to move forward with the project that would not go into a fitness to operate but let's say um there are certain things that they do outside of a plan or whether that's for exploration or development that's been approved you know that would result in a in an ink or notice of non-compliance and so how many of those a company acquires you know things things along those lines or the severity of that non-compliance could play in thank you any uh it's almost uh break time any other uh comments or we could break a couple minutes early any it's well I'll just say it's going to be a fascinating meeting and I think we're going to after the break we're going to dive into it uh a little more but uh gosh you couldn't get more exciting than the kind of you know marine dynamics we're talking about and the impact so thank you everyone and uh have a good good break and we'll uh we'll start right back up at uh 11 o'clock okay thank you for those online we'll be back at 11 okay okay everyone welcome back hope everyone had a few minutes to gather the thoughts after the first presentation we're going to jump in now with uh introduction to to Bohm's marine mineral program and and although he's not on the agenda Jeff is going to lead off with a with a kind of a 10-minute overview so everyone set all right Jeff please hey thanks Kevin and uh thanks for listening to me for at least a you know a few minutes uh we just wanted to give a broad overview of the uh of the program uh we have a story map that we're going to navigate through for this part of the presentation uh so fingers crossed it works uh so anyway let me get started Ariel can you advance the uh story map yeah stop right there okay uh just wanted to briefly talk about our mission uh marine minerals program is the environmental steward of marine minerals on the OCS and um we review requests for exploration of minerals on the outer continental shelf and we also review and issue leases for marine minerals on the outer continental shelf and so throughout today and tomorrow we're going to be describing and providing examples of the ways we utilize and rely on science uh to inform our decision making uh to fulfill this mission taking into account the variety of marine mineral types that there are on the outer continental shelf and then the different environments that the marine marine minerals occur on on the outer continental shelf so we're a really small program within a relatively small bureau we have about 21 staff right now so uh take a look at that or remind yourself about the 3.2 billion acres of OCS so we have a lot of territory that we that we cover um so our success in accomplishing our mission depends upon maintaining and building upon the strong relationships and partnerships that we've developed over the years with the public private and academic sectors that we've worked with next uh thanks so let's start at the beginning what is a marine mineral a few several types that we we're going to be talking about uh traditional sand and gravel for coastal restoration projects and the bulk of today we're going to be talking and focusing our discussion on sand and sediment for coastal restoration and speech nourishment i know everybody's really kind of jazzed up about critical minerals and there was a lot of talk about that we're going to be talking about that tomorrow so so maybe pivot and start thinking more about sand and sediment resources uh then we also are going to be talking about critical minerals as part of that marine mineral suite and then there's another another form of marine mineral that we've dealt with in the past aggregates and commodity minerals outside of correct critical minerals for example back in the late 1990s a company in new jersey requested a potential lease sale for aggregate material offshore so there's that that we're going to be dealing with and then also for example gold up in alaska there's been interest potential interest in gold development as a commodity mineral so that's another category marine mineral that we deal with next area so this slide probably looks familiar it's uh covers the outer continental shelf includes the extended continental shelf and includes the territories um so as as bill mentioned 3.2 billion acres so that's a quarter essentially extending uh increasing our uh responsibility uh by a quarter of uh of acreage so the program uh has a lot of things that we do with uh with 21 people we do resource evaluation and environmental research uh g and g exploration we do environmental assessments for proposed exploration activities and leasing activities we uh we handle a lot of data uh with regards to our national offshore sand inventory and that'll be increasing as we deal with critical minerals so we have a what's called the marine minerals information system that we've developed over the years and we've mentioned at previous coastal meetings that's a central repository of all our all of our data and then a huge part of our of our work is stakeholder engagement with regard to our negotiated agreements and as part of our environmental studies process next so we do have um uh regulations in place guiding all all parts of our our program on the left shows the uh legal framework that we work under and our authority comes from the outer continental shelves lands act and then we have um regulations in place for prospecting for marine minerals uh both commercial and non-commercial and then we have regulations in place dealing with leasing of minerals and operations these are competitive uh processes the 581s it's a competitive process very like oil and gas for companies would bid on developing minerals and then we have uh regulations in place for negotiated non-competitive agreements these are agreements that we have and that we work with project proponents and stakeholders to provide sand and sediment for beach nourishment and coastal restoration so the bulk of our activity up to this point and the leasing that we've done is under the 583s of negotiated processes I think we've issued nearly 70 agreements over the last few decades um but with the um critical minerals and other commodity minerals will certainly be exercising the 581s I just want to point out that with uh with with our current regulatory structure there's almost a disincentive for industries to request leases with let me back up there is a disincentive for companies to request a prospecting permit for from us to do for example critical mineral prospecting because that does doesn't having a prospecting permit doesn't give them exclusive rights to a lease so that's a little disincentive why a company would want to pour millions of dollars into uh prospecting and then not have exclusive rights to develop those minerals next thanks everyone okay so we've talked a bit about uh budget uh this morning and the marine minerals program has enjoyed an increased budget over the last several years in FY this fiscal year uh we we have realized a four percent reduction in our budget so we currently have uh or appropriate of 13.8 million dollars that's a decrease of a nearly 600 thousand dollars from uh from last year and when you take into account that reduction plus inflation uh certainly uh 13 and a half million dollars doesn't go a long way and in terms of how we spend our money about a third of it goes to personnel about less than 50 percent goes to uh resource evaluation work for for sand and sediment built basically building our national offshore sand inventory and then uh 15 percent goes to critical mineral work so do the math i mean we're essentially spending two million dollars to do critical mineral work over 3.2 billion acres uh and we only have two uh dedicated staff working on critical minerals so we're we're extremely resource limited in terms of what we can do uh so we do have to be creative on how we're uh utilizing that funding funding working with USGS and NOAA to to collect information to inform uh the offshore critical mineral component of our program next so how are we organized as a program uh we have uh FTE ceiling of 25 uh currently we have 21 staff on board the division within the office of strategic resources has uh FTE ceiling of 16 we currently have 15 staff or we're in the process of interviewing for the 16th person we have one branch in the division marine minerals resource management branch and that's led by Jeff Weichel and then the marine the marine mineral component in the Gulf of Mexico has a FTE ceiling of nine and they currently have six on staff and we're composed comprised of oceanographers geologists program analysts and biologists so once again small program uh with a relatively small bureau but this is relative this is how we're organized at the moment but like we've talked about this morning there's a proposed Atlantic region that would certainly have a marine mineral component to it and and we would have to reassign and reallocate resources to that that region uh next so since we are relatively small program with a relatively small number of people we certainly uh similar to the budget we we reach out to to other groups within uh the the bureau to tap into their expertise and we we work closely with the real resource evaluation groups both in headquarters and the regions we work within the office of strategic resources with our leasing and policy division and particularly recently we've been developing standard operating procedures for critical mineral leasing with them we work really closely with Rodney because he has a lot of money so we try to get more money from him right Rodney and and then we we do work with a renewable energy program mostly in terms of multi-use conflicts for example export cables that would make landfall we want to make sure that they're not cutting through important sand resources and then basically taking out a large portion of resources that could be used for beach nourishment next so we're going to show a little video here and then I'll hand it over to Jessica right Jessica uh before we start I just want to make the caveat that we tried to get Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling uh but they deferred uh and uh so I'll just say that the individuals in this video uh aren't going to quit their day jobs and become actors so I'll just leave it at that so you can start the video thanks risks from stronger and more frequent storms are increasing and sea levels are rising along our nation's coast threatening coastal communities and the economies they serve one major storm can cost billions displace entire coastal populations and severely damage or destroy habitat against this backdrop critical infrastructure and valued ecosystems face chronic coastal erosion after a major storm residents visitors and businesses are eager to see a speedy response including restoration of beaches to pre-storm conditions we also know that our nation's coasts will continue to face the risks of rising sea levels severe erosion and habitat change for many years to come what will our coasts look like in 10 20 or 50 years what can we do now to build more resilient coastal communities for the future first there are multiple federal agencies working together to deal with this issue and the marine minerals program within the bureau of ocean energy management or Bohm is an essential part of that team Bohm is unique it's the only federal agency with the authority to lease offshore sand from federal waters for coastal restoration projects strong partnerships are key to the success of the marine minerals program Bohm partners with communities and other state and federal agencies to identify and lease sand in federal waters for restoration projects to reduce risks from future storms and maintain beach and dune features to support wildlife recreation tourism and national security second to properly manage these valued and finite resources on a national scale we must know where the sand is how much exists and if it's a good match for the beaches or wetlands where it would be placed we need to know who else is interested in that same area of the ocean such as oil and gas pipeline companies commercial fishermen and subsea cable companies so the resource remains available to meet future demand to help answer these questions we in the marine minerals program are working with stakeholders to develop a national offshore sand inventory building an inventory involves identifying the location of existing sand resources relative to the need figuring out where we need more data and working together to fill the data gaps despite 30 years of research we are barely keeping up with the growing number and size of projects part of the solution is the geodatabase we have developed it maps organizes and manages all this sand resource and environmental data for coastal managers engineers and other stakeholders to use in planning we call it the marine minerals information system this allows us to take stock of what is available and where the resource is getting low third Bohm stewardship mission also includes managing environmental impacts at Bohm we invest in world class research to help us make informed decisions our environmental research tells us how animals and their habitats may be affected by construction activities our sea turtle tracking studies tell us what their behavior patterns are and when and where they are located within a project area in another study we are working to explore how fish use sand shoals we study the best ways to explore and dredge sand resources in order to maximize long-term availability while minimizing or avoiding risk to animals and habitat Bohm's marine minerals program plays a key role in reducing coastal risks by researching identifying and managing offshore sand for the nation promoting coastal restoration and helping coastal communities be prepared and resilient for decades to come great I think that was going to be the most embarrassing part of the whole day for me it looked pretty good though right it was good um so um my name is Jessica malondine I am in the marine minerals program based in the Gulf of Mexico um before I go too far into this I do want to acknowledge that the um the person in the sky that we keep speaking to is Ariel K who also is a data analyst for the marine minerals program and has graciously agreed to to run the storyboard and she was a major part of developing it so it's not the name of the storyboard it's not the AI that we secretly have hidden hidden away so thank you Ariel for running this so to kind of transition from the video that we were just showing I wanted to kind of explain what the flow of this presentation was going to be kind of what the goal is um obviously coastal resilience is is the primary focus here particularly in regards to the sand and gravel component of our program um which is the part of the program that this 101 is going to cover critical minerals the 101 led by paul um and others tomorrow will be tomorrow so as part of that we're going to talk about some of our key areas the resource evaluation components environmental stewardship and how all of that plays into making informed decisions particularly with things such as multi-use kind of navigating multi-use across multiple programs and industries um so with that let's go ahead and move forward so to kind of give a little bit of an engagement component we've incorporated a couple trivia questions so that we win at the games later tonight um so you can kind of say the answer out of out loud if you want or you want to take a guess i'll let you pause consider it this is a multi-choice answer anyone any of these not specific all right ariel go ahead and show if you guess the all four of them are part of this program you would be correct um and we'll talk a little bit more in depth about these in a moment um go ahead next one all right so next question what other federal agency do we often work with when talking about sand and gravel and my minerals folks please keep your thoughts to yourself oh it could be all of them yeah all right ariel what do we have so the us army corps engineers as a federal entity constructs probably the bulk of of our projects we do work with the other two in some capacity but the other two are not out there currently building beaches and restoration projects uh go ahead and we'll transition into the presentation so you will get questions at the beginning of every category so just prepare yourself for that format as we go through um so um jeff and the 101 before that kind of showed our broader bohem area jurisdictional areas but i wanted to kind of frame this conversation a little bit differently because we are limited by what we can do when it comes to sand and gravel so the map that you're looking at right now is actually um our range of accessible resources for sand and gravel um and that's largely due to dredging limitations we are the dredge fleet that we have in the us is restricted um a good deal usually less than 150 feet i think last i checked the current dredge depth the max dredge depth is is 130 so we are pretty limited even though we have a larger jurisdictional scope we are limited to some extent on based on technology and like we had talked about with coastal resilience and stewardship in mind we're looking at infrastructure protection ecosystem restoration habitat creation and resource sustainability is kind of the drivers for a lot of the leasing projects that we support um i will note that most of our borrow areas that we lease so our leased areas that we provide access to are about three to nine nautical miles off the coast a little bit closer in the atlantic a little bit further in the gulf of mexico just based on the way the the topography is we can go ahead and move forward to give you a little bit of sense of where we're at right now as far as active projects you'll notice this map only covers the atlantic and the gulf so we do not have any active projects in the west currently but as far as projects that we do have ongoing there are about seven that are active right now seven that are in the works and about to come on board any day as well as a number that are completed or expired and expired essentially means that a lease was granted but for one reason or another did not move to construction so our leases are limited in time so usually it's a couple years maybe up to five depending on the scale of the project so one time use only agreement and after the expiration or the construction of the project that lease then is completed let's go ahead and move on aerial so this is a very busy slide i'm going to hang here a second so don't stress if you're trying to read all of it at once so the the big piece here that i want to know is that bohem is in all of these resiliency projects we are a partnering agency we do not construct these projects ourselves and we are rarely never the lead so we rely on a lot of partner agencies and localities to kind of guide us through the project process and so what you're looking at on the right is kind of a typical project workflow where you move from identifying that's a product there's a problem a beach is gone or eroding and then moving through identification of potential resources environmental evaluations and considerations which is where esp in particular for the program really plugs into the leasing process for us and then you kind of move through other steps that we have less involvement with but are are still kind of engaged in as a team member the engineering and design any real estate acquisition that would be more of a core of engineers component if they're involved the most interesting part for me is that even though there's a lot of steps that lead up to a lease that we execute and that would be typically where you would consider us to be plugged in legitimately right into a project there's a whole lot of steps that happened before that that bohem's really involved with but it's not until the very end of the kind of project life cycle that bohem actually issues a lease provides access to those sediment resources and then the construct the construction starts we do have some stipulations and requirements that we incorporate into our leasing agreements a lot of them environmentally driven summer data driven but ultimately we kind of work hand in hand with the the lead agency to construct it jeff did mention that the leasing authority comes from oslo specifically section 8k and i just want to note there's a couple specific requirements here one is the purpose with which the project is being built so shore protection beach or wetland restoration is is the the guiding principle there right so if you're not doing that then you don't really qualify for a non-competitive negotiated agreement or a lease from us but there's a couple others too needs to be undertaken by a federal state or local entity or funded in whole or in part by a federal entity so those are kind of the guidelines that essentially determine whether or not you can or cannot receive a lease from us and as as you noted in the trivia our negotiated agreements can be with federal partners like the core of engineers but we also work with counties townships and states as well let's go ahead and transition you did hear the marine minerals information system mentioned on the video that is our kind of information and data system and victoria is going to talk a little bit more in depth about that here in a little bit but one of the perks of having data in one location is that it can be synthesized by not a person just like itself um so this is our actually our public dashboard that shows all of our marine minerals information all of you in this room can access it at any point to see where we are with construction how much we've built where we've built who we've had leases with what the trends are um this is a really great platform to kind of keep track of what's going on it's my understanding jeff correct me if i'm wrong that this is used for a good bit by congressional entities and others to to look yeah yeah um so great resource public resource that's available let's go ahead and transition so we are seeing an increase seeing demand for OCS materials and there's probably a handful of reasons probably some that aren't even on this slide but we do have increased storm activity across the board with increased activity means resources diminishing in other areas the states in particular running out of viable sediment resources it also adds to the sediment budget by taking sand from outside of a system and moving it in that certainly helps build that reserve of material wave climates in other environmental or physical oceanography components are less impacted the further away you move from land based areas and then certainly the improvement to sustainability particularly with geologic and geomorphic function and this the video that you're seeing is a project that was constructed in the Gulf of Mexico not that long ago go ahead and transition again um so there are a lot of different types of dredge equipment that exist out in the world but in talking about specifically OCS based um types there's really only two that are used with any frequency the first and the more common one is a hopper dredge um which is self-propelled and as you see in the video it kind of acts like a vacuum so the it'll sit on the bottom and then it'll move usually in a linear direction before it makes a turn across a borrow area the transport distance for these are typically three to thirty miles and the material typically goes into the hull or the hopper of this ship hence its name and then it steams to a discharge or pump out location where it then gets transferred to the beach um this is our more common one just because it's a ocean going certified vessel usually so we switch to the next one the other one that's less common we use it we seem to use it a little bit more in the Gulf than the Atlantic does but the other type is a cutter head it is not self-propelled it's uses a tug system and a cabling system that essentially windshield wipers the intake across the seafloor this one's a little bit different in that the intake point actually gets buried into the sediments and then starts the slurry to vacuum it up um and this one does not have a hopper or hull component to it it's typically a pipeline system so it'll create that slurry and then get pumped to sure pumped to shore we have had some instances where it's been pumped into a scow and then tugboats transport scows but that's not um not that common and these typically aren't ocean going vessels so the conditions have to be pretty super um to use these offshore um and deciding which type of vessel is used is entirely dependent on the contractor that's hired by the lead agency that's constructing the project um and what their needs in bandwidth are so go ahead and transition so just to give you a couple examples um this so this is wallops island in virginia um just as a point of reference as aerial slides kind of back and forth there's a water tower that's about halfway up so if you go back the other way aerial yep you can kind of see the towers about halfway up um as kind of like a a point of reference for the increase in shoreline that one was used to protect the nasa facility there it was infrastructure protection component um of this project um and if you'll go to the next one aerial the other example is in the gulf which is caminata headlands um it was one of our biggest projects and the first one in the gulf of that scale um and this one was really focused a little bit more on habitats and um that wetland area behind it i will note though that port fushon is hidden in this image it is hiding back behind it is the largest port in the area um but there's a big swath of wetland uh between the barrier island and port fushon so it was critical not only from an environmental um resiliency perspective but also for the protection or continued protection of the port and its channels we'll go ahead and transition here so at this point i'm going to turn it over to my colleague victoria to talk you through some resource evaluation and environmental components excellent thank you jessica and thank you everybody for being here today um like jessica said my name is victoria brady and i am a biologist with the marine minerals program at headquarters and so we're going to start off here again with a trivia question uh this one is which state has used the largest volume of sand from the ocs the outer continental shelf any guesses it's narrowed down gulf of mexico-atlantic florida great guess louisiana i think i heard that ariel go ahead the answer is louisiana and then um an interesting follow-up question which state has the most leases and this is specific to the marine minerals program i think i heard someone say it earlier florida yes and so the point we wanted to make here was just um it's kind of interesting just because the state has the most leases doesn't necessarily mean it's used the most sand all right we'll go ahead move forward okay so first i'm going to talk to us about um resource evaluation so the national offshore sand inventory you've heard that mentioned today that is the first resource consulted for our offshore sediment management information and we've referred to this sometimes as nasi so if you hear nasi that is the national offshore sand inventory because it's a little bit of a tongue twister to say the full name and i like this wheel here the determined need acquire data analyze results and share findings so i'm gonna on the next few slides i'll be walking through each of these steps in a little more detail we're not going to go fully in depth just for a time sake but hopefully i'll answer a few questions that you may have on this and the map here on the right just shows a few of our nasi focus areas and that's what the pink shows and then the yellow are counties that are identified as priority areas so we'll go ahead and move to our first little um part on the wheel which is determined need so um as jessica mentioned we know there is an increasing demand but where is the sand that's kind of the question that we we need to ask and there have been several studies to look into this and identify uh where there's a need for sand and where we um have resources available or um or where there are data gaps and so that's what the map here on the right shows it's a little similar to the one i showed you before but goes into more detail so you can imagine the red would be areas where you may have a high need limited resources or um limited i guess data gaps for those resources and then green would be areas where maybe we um know there's resources or there's a lower need and then this graph here on the bottom um the x-axis is showing year so time going forward the y-axis on the left is the number of leases number of leases signed and then the uh right y-axis is showing the quantity of sand and what you can see is that there's those true two trend lines and we see um a continual increase over the years and uh jessica touched on kind of some of the reasons for that um and it's really important that we um understand where we have a need for these um sand resources um and so i'll move back move on to the acquired data so we've determined a need in an area the next step would be to acquire data um and so we do this via geophysical surveys and geological surveys this is a little cartoon just showing some of the equipment um that we use and more importantly what we learned from that and so when we're acquiring data um we're trying to fill these data gaps and learn for a particular area um in our geophysical surveys we're looking at surface sediment bottom elevation uh cultural resources and you can think of this as kind of the um just the sea floor understanding what is present and then um another aspect of that is sub-bottom so looking a little bit below the surface but an important note for marine minerals is we're just looking very shallow we're not going deep it's not like oil and gas um really just understanding what is um at the bottom surface and then uh we also do geological surveys so this is looking at what is actually present so this would be our fiber cores bent the grabs to actually uh understand what that sediment looks like okay and then we can move on to the next slide and so um here we're looking at analyzing results and sharing findings so jessica shared the dashboard for the marine minerals information system and um this is a great resource for us so it is an interactive online tool with GIS mapping capabilities and it is publicly accessible so like Jessica said anyone can go on and it includes over 30 years of data from various government agencies uh academia other private entities and it also does link directly to our environmental studies and it has a lot of information I think for this slide looking at that third column that has mmys going up the side it includes um bathymetry environmental data those bottom characteristics and then planning which Jessica will go into the multi-use aspects um in one of the next sections but um it's a really great resource to have all of this data in one spot okay can move to the next so I have two quick examples um this one is in Texas and the main takeaway here is that this is an area where there is a lack of data and increasing storm frequency has triggered the need for resources so this is an area where bowham was able to partnership with partner with the state and the army corps to collect information for planning and this also goes back to those partnerships being a key role in bowham planning and then the next example is very interesting and different because it is an area where we know that there's a high need but we also know that there are limited resources so there's been a lot of research in this area um there's a lot of projects that are anticipated and many different stakeholders with you can imagine different timelines needs resources um all of the resources that we've identified may not be viable options for these projects and so this is an example where that regional planning is really critical and I like the graphic on the right because you can see at the top you have four people identifying a resource and they're all fighting over this one bucket of sand and that's perhaps not the right way to do things whereas the image below that you have four people very happy with their own buckets of sand and that's what we're working working towards that proactive sediment management for sustainable coastal resilience all right we can move on okay so we're moving on to the environmental stewardship section and we have a true or false trivia question here the bow marine minerals program uses science to facilitate use of resources assess impacts resolve conflicts and informed decisions any guesses true I heard of I heard a few truths it's not a trick question so yes that one is true um and so that's what I've identified here in these first few um bullets so we identify and facilitate the use of resources ensure understanding of how our decisions impact the environment and then resolve conflicts between the two if they arise and the goal is to understand possible impacts from our projects and then apply appropriate mitigation measures and I really like this circle here just because it shows kind of the ongoing never-ending cycle of environmental science informing environmental assessment going back to inform our science while also sharing this information with the public gathering that information any public input that there may be and using the information from these assessments to inform our decision documents so all of this and then all of this goes to environmental stewardship in the middle so it's all linked and you'll see that in the next few slides as well so I think this was touched on just a little bit earlier but there is a rigorous study selection process especially in our small but mighty marine minerals program we identify topics of study and then we work together to refine those and identify what priorities are and this is through a peer review process internally and then with the studies program as well and there are various procurement options so interagency agreements cooperative agreements competitive contracts and the key thing with all of these is that partnerships are critical so without the U.S. Geological Survey partnerships with academia professors students and then of course private entities as well we would have a really hard time completing our research so that's a key aspect of our program and then we use that science to inform our decisions and environmental compliance which I know we've mentioned a lot brings me to the next slide and so just to briefly touch on this again I know Bill talked about this earlier but specific to our foam actions marine marine minerals program actions the these are just a few of the environmental regulations that were required to comply with but these are some of the ones that are triggered more frequently so the National Environmental Policy Act NEPA is kind of the big one we call that the umbrella law and then all of these other ones we have to comply with as well so Endangered Species Act Executive Order for Environmental Justice Magnuson Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act which is important especially for essential fish habitat and then all of these other ones as well and to show how this relates to our studies I think it was in the video earlier but essentially we can propose a study if we know an endangered species maybe in our project area we could propose a study to learn more about their movement and if we learn that they're not present in the winter time we can create mitigation so that we don't don't conduct work during that timeframe so the goal is to inform decisions comply with our requirements under these laws and make science-based decisions okay move on to the next and these are some of the research disciplines and if you notice on the last slide these kind of these relate to a lot of the laws that you saw in the last slide so social science and economics, air quality, there's several on habitat and species, protected species, fates and effect, physical sciences and cultural resources so these are all just some of the possible study areas and then of course our studies are available for public access on the bone website. Next slide all right and then one last example here just to give an idea of some of the studies that we do so this is ecological function and recovery of sand shoals following repeat dredge events this particular study is off of Cape Canaveral and a partnership with several entities on the bottom and the goal here is to understand the potential impacts and recovery of a shoal following dredging of these shoal systems and so these are really important for our program as you can imagine because it can give us an idea of what what a shoal area may be either prior to dredging or in a control site and then monitor how a shoal area recovers after dredging so several of these are multi-year ongoing studies and they can help us understand what is happening in these dredging areas all right and with that I will pass it back over to Jessica. All right I think we're in the home stretch only a few more slides um so yep we got it that it's being recorded sorry I have a message here that popped up um so this one is a little bit of an unfair question because we're not giving you all of the information but it's a pretty mind-blowing stat so economic impact let's talk dollars here um of leaving a thousand meter pipeline on ship shoal which just for reference is about three meters thick so a thousand meter pipeline three meters worth of sand buried by the pipeline any idea what a dollar amount say to this state would be wild guesses are wonderful nothing no guesses how about our MMP people anybody actually know this in the MMP group oh all right let's go with half a billion how do we think Paul did here so rough estimate we're talking about 37.8 million dollars now um that is from the state of Louisiana so that's very specific to the state but Anna and Dina are actually going to be talking later this afternoon I believe specifically about that calculation and how you get that because I 100% did not give you enough information to get that number yourself but yeah so um pipeline regulations for oil and gas is that they're supposed to be buried at least three meters um so that would be uh the three meters is that or three feet excuse me I'm misspeaking now um but the thickness of the shoal that's kind of the one of the deeper portions of of ship shoal so obviously certainly thickness of the shoal varying would change the value on that but um I if you're really curious about that uh on a grill Anna and Dina about it later so I'm gonna I'm gonna punt that one to them all right next one uh last trivia question for this session or for this section what types of activities do we currently coordinate with to deconflict resource areas so we're switching into multi-use coordination all of them is there one that we don't do all of them any other thoughts question mark yeah good yeah so let's go ahead and show the answer you're right sir we do not do green hydrogen yep um so we do currently coordinate with the other four green hydrogen um not at this point but I wouldn't be surprised to see that on the horizon so let's go ahead and transition um so in case everyone has not gotten the message yet um partnerships are really critical to this program um and that holds true for multi-use planning as well um we need it to leverage investments we need it to locate sand resources we need it to manage conflicts execute research um and exchange information which I'm going to focus on just a little bit for this section um our partnerships do vary greatly you know the federal state county we've talked about tribes certainly universities absolutely um we also have a lot of national organizations that we work with as well as some regional planning bodies like the Gulf of Mexico Alliance for example I'm golf centric so I'm going to reference them um but we need them to help us identify where these priorities are right since poem isn't building these projects we need to rely on others to to communicate what they're seeing on their horizon where we anticipate additional needs um what they need that we might be able to support or help with um and ultimately all of that leads to characterizing these resources reducing and mitigating conflicts um and then managing those resources for long-term sustainability let's go ahead and scroll on um mmis I'm just going to come back to this one because what we talked about mmis was accessible to the public it is amazing how much mmis is used and collaborated with with others so this is just a sampling of the various ways the data from mmis is utilized um access shared collaborated with um it's led to some really amazing um coordination efforts for surveys and data collection which has been wonderful um and it's also been a really great tool for us internally and evaluating particularly like cable routing for renewables or oil and gas pipelines that may be coming in or going out um having all that information in one place and having this network of data with others has been absolutely critical and it wasn't that long ago that we like didn't have this so for us this is still really new and really exciting um you know it just went public I think in 2019 so for us this is this is a big deal um let's go ahead and transition forward so the example that you see just to kind of take it all in this is New England New Jersey I believe looking at some possible OCS lease areas and transmission cable routes you can probably just barely see it but there's some yellow and some orange that indicate sediment resources so certainly you're going to be looking at cables going through these areas how do you navigate deconflicting that and making sure that industry still moves forward but resources are guarded as much as possible that takes a lot of conversations so we do coordinate across industries as well as the other entities I'd mentioned particularly oil and gas renewables certainly the Atlantic has been taking the lead for the last handful of years on coordinating our minerals needs with the renewables side of both our agency and external carbon sequestration is coming on board certainly in the Gulf that's a factor that we're looking at we also have though the commercial elements fishing aquaculture that we all try to work with and live in harmony with but to do that at the phrase that I always tend to use is you can't manage what you don't know you have so at the end of the day if you don't know you have those resources it makes it very difficult to manage which is why Nassi that Victoria talked about is so important for our program like we need to identify those areas provide a structured data management system and accessibility to that information and then getting that information or identified needs from our partners and stakeholders we all work together pulling in the same direction so I'm going to use the Gulf of Mexico as an example of just how busy it can be can get this certainly is not all activities happening in the Gulf but you'll get the gist I think pretty quick so for us we do have to manage proactively so we really do need to be at the planning stage of activities to help ensure that there is availability or that the impact to those other activities are limited or restrained in some way that still allows access to these sediment resources that we're managing for the Gulf of Mexico in particular every OCS identified borrow area so every construction project that we have has pipelines that are bounding the limits of that borrow area meaning it can expand the very specific area a slight nuance to dredging is the more turns a dredge makes the more costly it gets because they can't actually be operating while they're making those turns so the smaller you restrict an area the more oddly you shape it the more expensive it gets so for the Gulf at least there's no borrow area that's not restricted or limited in some capacity by industry equipment and there's about 1200 pipelines identified in sediment areas so those gray areas on the map are areas where we have identified potential sediment resources that may be viable for use for coastal restoration projects some of them still need to be verified a little bit more but you get the gist like we've flagged those as an area that we're watching and trying to coordinate around and you've also got wind energy coming on board particularly off the coast of Texas and then oil and gas industry activity which has been in the Gulf for a very long time at this point so just to get a sense of scale on how busy it can get let's go ahead and move forward so to kind of transition and close out we've talked a lot about partnerships we've talked about resource evaluation in the form of resource stewardship environmental stewardship and all of that leading to this ultimate goal of coastal resilience and and making sure that bones at the table supporting these resilience efforts through facilitated access to these sediment resources and all of that leads ultimately to informed decision making by us and by our partners right we don't work in asilo so all of it leads to the best decisions we can possibly make with the information that we have at the time and so with that I'll go ahead and close out I'm not going to repeat these these are the ones that bill showed earlier formatted in a slightly different way since he borrowed that slide but I'll pause here we can take a few questions and then we do have time we have some case study activities for y'all so maybe we can take a handful of questions sure go ahead okay I mean the overall program is great but having worked in sand for a while given that we don't really know at a fine scale what's living on any little spot in the in the atlas given that sand communities are highly dynamic and yet they have this weirdness of sometimes taking a long time to recover there must be a lot of uncertainty so I mean there is a lot of uncertainty how do you guys handle that because the generally you really have a deep understanding of the dynamics but specifically we don't know what the biology is on any one spot and we don't know what it's going to be in 10 years or would have been yeah spot on assessment of that I agree we do the best we can obviously to understand kind of the broader perspective of what's happening what may be there I think Don Dina and Anna correct me if I'm wrong y'all are going to touch maybe a little bit on some of this this afternoon from the environmental side of things yeah yeah I mean I think at this point we try and look at the trends that we're seeing elsewhere and then make connections that way in the event that we're not able to actually collect data um real time in the moment um we have a few areas that we know are going to be unique more unique than you would probably anticipate and are proactive in trying to go out and make sure we collect particularly pre-dredge data um when we can in advance but it's just with the scale that we're working at and the different areas it would be hard to do that for every single location we do um with a lot of the partnerships that we have particularly with the lead agencies they also have a lot of the same responsibilities that we do particularly in regards to environmental compliance um so we we do have the ability to work with them to a large extent in advance of these projects to identify where there might be gaps where we need to backfill and gather data and information and in some cases they've already done a lot of that in in some of their pre-planning coordination efforts the core is a good example of that I don't know if anyone else wichle or anyone wants to say anything else about that or that's good good okay and at that point can you see a little bit more about your relationship with the the core uh on the OCS in regard to sand and who sort of takes the lead and um I mean they obviously are are taking the sand and they have their own permitting requirements under sort of some some combination of the rivers and harbors and the outer kind of now shelf lands and actually extension so how does that how does that all work and um particularly in in the context of looking at some of these difficult environmental effects questions yeah great question you know every district is going to have a slightly different relationship with us but um for the most part we do work essentially as a team on these projects so the core if the core is the lead say it's a civil works project um they will take point on all of the environmental components the only piece that they can't do because it falls under bones jurisdiction is the the access to the to the borrow area that they want to use so when that happens we typically sign on as a joint action agency and then move forward with them so that it's essentially one federal action even though there's two agencies or more that are involved and have jurisdictional responsibilities the regulatory side of of the core relationship is a little bit different but similar in that say if it's the state i'm going to use louisian as an example say the state's building a project they have to go to the core of engineers to get a permit for the project um typically at that point we will have been working with the state for years in advance of the core ever kind of even being tapped right to put all the information together collect all the um science data put the plans together um so at that point we then coordinate with the regulatory side of the core to say look like we have all these all of these same requirements and expectations let's again work jointly on this so that it's issued we still have our own kind of decision documents and we have our own lease that's issued that doesn't get ingested into their process but everything that leads up to that can be done jointly public notices and announcements um so i don't know if that fully answers your question but it is a pretty integrated we've worked a lot on that relationship with the core understanding that there's a lot of synergies and overlap with responsibilities with them so have developed a pretty decent system for generating kind of a unified federal um action when it comes to these projects that have OCS borough areas so uh i see a jack skid his his card up but just before we jump in there a point of clarification on your map can you can't mine in that area you've designated for wind farm so right can you is that a conflict or are you able to to do both in in that area is someone that's handling that right now would like to take that maybe i'll take a first swipe at it i think if uh uh you could as long as it doesn't interfere with the wind farm activity is that potentially a correct answer so we do have to provide easements and rightaways for the offshore wind activities in the infrastructure and that's why it's critical that we understand where the resources are prior to those construction and operation plans coming across our desk for evaluation um kind of doing it after the fact isn't helpful because then the infrastructure is already there and we're limited um you know that 37 whatever 0.8 million at a time would be a consequence so it's potentially larger depending on how big the cable is i would i would think so because there's requirements there with how deep it's buried and the crisscross of the electronic cables and the the structure yeah it must be complicated jack go ahead yeah jack barth organ state just quick clarification then my real question so uh can you borrow from state waters or are we talking offshore of that so state waters falls outside of our scope so if if they have a state borrow area they there's there's not really any unless they just want our support and advice and an input as experts in that topic they don't need a lease or anything from us we do have some projects that have both a state borrow component as well as a federal one which creates an interesting um coordination dynamic but um if it's if it's state resources we're not typically involved with those thanks can you talk about how the money works i didn't hear anything about who pays the lease who gets the money yeah great question so the way that um osla is written if it's for the purposes kind of outlined in 8k the coastal resiliency components essentially are funded in whole or in part built by um federal state local entities um then there's actually no charge to them to get the ocs materials obviously whatever the costs are associated with the work they need to put into to providing everything they need to get a lease from us right is incorporated into project costs but as far as like paying for a cubic yard of material from the ocs if they meet the requirements then it's not um necessary and i think jeff mentioned we do have a commercial component of the regs where we could charge depending on like if it's used for a different purpose than what's outlined for this non-competitive um piece but we actually haven't had any commercial leases for aggregates or sand and gravel at this point i was singing back to the budget question about the 33 percent of the personnel costs that you paid can you get any money for that no that uh that personnel cost comes out of our out of our internal budget there was i'm sorry that jeff right now or i keep forgetting to say who i am yeah jeff right now with both so there was a a few years back interest in cost recovery since we we don't charge for the sand so uh one of the administrations wanted us to look into some cost recovery potential and uh that was a component maybe looking at how much it how much time we spend processing and uh you know doing the actual leasing activity but then never came to fruition would it be okay for us to um transition to leave time for some um oh yeah yeah there's a question online although i don't believe is a committee member so we're just i want to make sure the committee members have a chance to ask all the questions first i also think i'm i don't have the cal the agenda in front of me right now but is there open time this after i can't remember if it's today or tomorrow that there's open time so if we can't get to everybody's questions um in the interest of being able to do this study we can always circle back to these questions at the open session great um and yet ruth you have your yeah thank you for that it was a great overview um some of the activities that bone is responsible for offshore wind oil and gas i know you incorporate quite a bit of the oil and gas mapping information habitat characterization how are you set up to do that for offshore wind given that there's pretty high resolution um mapping happening benthic resource etc um that gives pretty strong coverage for the east coast um just how do you what's the ability of the team to incorporate a lot of that information and do so earlier and then is there a feedback mechanism if there's areas identified particularly in new jersey is a great example to where that may come back and impact bones approvals of or planning for offshore wind um in terms of the right of ways and easements just curious how that system works um and then maybe my last question is how are you working with states that are looking at regional transmission corridor planning and things like that in terms of balancing sand sediment resource availability so i can try to cover a piece of that um i think to answer part of the question i think one important aspect of our program is we are coordinating with wind but as far as the area where the projects are occurring the wind i believe anyone correct me if i'm wrong is further offshore so as far as like that overlap that it's more so the cables that are more of an impact for us that we're coordinating um and that will be part of our case study will be um one of the groups we'll be discussing that and then i believe that might be discussed later as well um but then there was another part of the question victoria victoria i'll jump in this is jeff weichel from bone hi ruth it's been a long time nice to see you um so there are enormous um geological and geophysical datasets particularly on the atlantic sea board that are of wide interest across government not just to bone in its mission areas but also usgs and geological framework studies uh noa and some other federal agencies for their nomek sea floor characterization initiative and department of energy as well so there are ongoing conversations about how to make that data available for its multiple purposes that exists now but could exist and i'll say it's a little bit complicated because of confidentiality provisions um that are associated with the renewable energy regulations in offshore some states some states have been proactive and the states themselves funded uh that data i think uh maryland and delaware come to mind and those data assets have been put out into the public domain and for example our colleagues at woods hole at usgs have analyzed that data to create integrated seamless inner shelf habitat maps that are great and have multiple uses for for people downstream um some of the operators off of new jersey in comparison those have been capital investments by those operators and there are governing requirements of the regulations that basically make that data confidential up to a point at which operation starts and then they become publicly available there are entities in federal and state government that are talking about how we may work with industry and those confidentiality provisions to make that data available for environmental purposes but we haven't threaded the needle on on that topic yet but it's one that we're very very very very interested in and so to some extent bone when we do our reviews of looking at potential space use conflicts between what really are the export cables and and inner shelf sand resources or sediment resources it's we we do kind of like a public data review and then we do a a private private data review so we work very closely with the operators to to figure out how how we do that how we do that best but but ultimately there have been case examples where we had information or they had information that resulted in a rerouting of a proposed export cable because it made sense but there have also been instances where there we have sacrificed sand resources because the investment there was no alternative or the investment for data acquisition was was significant I mean there's many many millions of dollars going into these G&G surveys at the footprint is enormous you know so you're talking some of these are half the state half the size of the state of Delaware in comparison like a borrow area that ultimately gets leased is maybe a tenth of a lease block so there's a significant scale difference and the complexity of just the sheer volume the size of these data sets you know any given offshore wind survey we're talking 18 terabytes T terabytes and just how do you manage that internally is a big challenge that we're trying to address particularly with the department of inter department we're part of interior and others across government are moving to the cloud environment and so going from on-premise systems in servers to the cloud with very limited data centers that are managing all of this there's two now for the whole department of interior the egress in and out from workstations is there's a cost for every single time you do that so we're just starting to wrap our brains around what that actually means for us which is going to further constrain our budgets to be able to do operations so it's it's something that we're definitely keeping our eye on and I guess just to kind of wrap that one up as far as the coordination we haven't brought up one of our other partners which is important the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement we do work really closely with them as well especially for our oil and gas stuff happening in the Gulf of Mexico so in areas where there's activities proposed whether that be install or removal that are in any of those identified sediment resource areas that we have flagged they'll work with us to get our input so that we can evaluate data resources information and Jeff kind of alluded to it but similar to the renewables side operators now are are willing in some cases to collect data to provide to us to support the decision-making process you know we we try and work with them as closely as possible to make sure that you know we're making good recommendations back to Bessie who ultimately has to decide how to how to move forward with with whatever actions being requested but we do work really closely with Bessie as well line oh sorry we do have a question online from Ken I'm Bessie I hope I pronounced that right go go ahead Ken thank you and apologies if I'm not following my exact protocol as I'm not a committee member I am Council for the North American Submarine Cable Association NASCA and we have had very productive discussions with BOEM in the past across all of its programs with protection of submarine fiber optic cable networks but I did not see among coordination with industries lists so far mention of submarine fiber optic networks those are all the pink lines on that map that was shown and so as an industry we would very much like to continue that collaborative interaction that we have had with BOEM we would also like to see the cable layer added back to MMIS it appears to have been removed and so it's not actually possible in MMIS to plot submarine fiber optic networks right now submarine cables of course are typically routed in areas where there is as the industry would see it boring flat sandy seabed which is often where borrow areas are located and so the recovery from a borrow area is an issue both with in that phase but also with the replenishment it's not just with with recovery of sand but also with vessels and anchors and the like with beach replenishment projects and in particular so thanks for considering that thank you all right thank you Ken um do you want to proceed with your uh I'm not sure what do what do you have an interactive one second real quick so I think so we don't have too much time we have about 15 minutes so I think what we may do is the activity that we have is three different case study scenarios so some of them have to do with these cables some of them may have to do with endangered species so we're going to break into three groups but I think since we're close to lunchtime perhaps we kind of close out here break into our groups for 10 to 15 minutes and then leave from there if that's logistically okay with everybody or do we we can come back here yeah the only thing I'm worried about with it a little bit is that people online won't be able to oh yes sorry so online we do have a PowerPoint slide so there will be a case study um for them to participate independently and then we'll ask there's instructions on the PowerPoint so um that will be displayed while we break into groups so this part would be kind of um independent from the online aspect but there will be an opportunity for anyone online um to put comments into the chat and then the hope is that we can capture all of those comments um for internal consideration so all right well yeah sure hey we wanted to get everybody uh moving a little bit and kind of break from the classic sorry classic sitting around looking at PowerPoint presentations so um just yeah it'll just be a little activity before we break for lunch and um Paul and Shannon are going to be two of our leaders I will be the third so I think Shannon do you have one yours is number one right okay so Paul is number one Shannon is number two I am number three so I think we're going to count off one two three um getting really fun here and then there's I believe there's a sitting area out front and then maybe we can have two groups stay in here um so I'll I'll say group three will be out in that sitting area and we'll repeat this after I count everybody off what are the instructions yes so you're going to there are two printouts that your leaders will have and they'll read the scenario and then the goal is everybody um discuss within your group kind of some considerations so um it it has sort of instructions on there like in this scenario discuss what you would do if you were the responsible party in this situation and so there's no right or wrong answers there maybe they're potentially in real life would be a wrong answer but for the purpose of this example we really just want you to start brainstorming if you have expertise in this area please contribute um that aspect of it it's also just an opportunity to um meet your fellow Boehm and Kosa members um and so yeah are there any questions you'll have your leader in your group so there's it's low stakes okay all right we'll all start counting people off then yeah so for those of you online we just put up the optional case study activity this is also your opportunity to run away if you wish not to do this and then we can just follow the schedule and we should be back at two o'clock yeah two o'clock yeah yeah so um but if you have if you guys want to talk online you're more than welcome to but we didn't want you to feel obligated and we know there's a lot of you online so um we would love any ideas or thoughts or concepts for this virtual case that we've provided for you to drop them in the chat because we will collect those and we're going to do a brief out when there's time available maybe later in the week um to talk about some of the points that were brought up for this case study but if you want to run away now is the time to do it all right thanks hope everyone had a great lunch and uh yeah um to start us off jeff is going to make a few few remarks please thank you jessica yeah jeff uh jeff right now with bum yeah so the next session uh we're going to be talking about data needs so environmental studies and sand resource characterization are closely linked for many of our decisions environmental studies provide information on physical processes and ecology sand quality volume location and demand are critical to our understanding of the value of the sand in the sediment to beach nourishment projects and environmental and resource value among other factors guide our stewardship decisions including multi-use planning and much of the information supporting these decisions come from strong partnerships that's a common theme throughout uh all these talks that we're giving uh so i'm going to turn it over to uh ana rice and then uh tag teaming it with dina hanson so okay good afternoon everybody as jeff said my name is ana rice i'm a physical scientist i have an oceanography background and i work in the marine minimals program in gulf of mexico region it's a pleasure to be here so yes uh thank you jeff for those remarks um i will start off the presentation with some background and context about decision-making so we'll go over some kind of how do we come up with our study ideas how to apply these studies then dina will focus on the status quo of the environmental studies with a focus on ecological value um and then we will uh take a quick break she will do some discussion um and then after the break i will come back and finish it off i will be focusing on resource stewardship in the context of multi-use planning one more thing after these introductory slides we're going to take a probably a five minute break just to see if we can get any questions answered and then i will um and then dina will we'll take over so uh in the mmp 101 um a lot of information was shared there so really all the content that we're sharing here um was already introduced and we're just going to be taking a deeper dive into some of the concepts all right so this slide in a way summarizes the content of this combined presentation so you'll see the three bullets there and then we have a question thank you sorry next slide we have a question there that we want to keep up um just for this slide here we will come back to this at the end of my discussion section at the very end of the presentation but we wanted you to see it here because it kind of combines what we're going to be talking about um today so a few things that i want to uh define before we get started um you've probably heard us talk about sand and sediment gravel um it's all interchangeable here right because we manage all of it um the second thing that i want to mention is the decisions which is the overarching topic of this specific presentation are made internally and externally um and they be they may be negotiated or not and they vary depending on the type of project um and then value so value of a sand resource can be characterized in many many ways for the purpose of this presentation we're going to be focusing on resource value which is often driven by the quality volume on demand of the of sand and then we're also going to be diving into the ecological value that's going to be what Dina is going to be focusing on um and then um in tomorrow's coastal resilience presentation we're going to be uh focus more on stakeholder perspectives and social values all right so with regards to that first bullet the resource value uh in ecology uh value are both important both at the project scale and for multi-use planning decisions rely on both ecological factors and economic drivers um and the research that we conduct is to support decisions based on gaps uh and recommendations okay and then i'll read off the question just so you can keep in the back of your mind how do we combine ecological and resource stewardship to better conserve sand and sediment during multi-use planning so you can see it kind of combines what we what Dina and I are going to be talking about today all right so let's begin with some background our context uh that we feel is necessary to kind of lay the grand work of this presentation so first is what kind of decisions does MMP make so we can the decisions can be broken up into three broad categories so leasing you know this is through our dredge projects these are negotiations between boom and our project proponent as Jessica mentioned earlier the core is usually the the agency that constructs our projects so we do a lot of negotiating with them we have a lot of environmental compliance during our leasing so mitigation measures are also a big one these requirements are provided by other agencies and then executed by bomb and then we have the conflicting decisions that we need to make so this is negotiation within bomb and industry so oil and gas wind energy and so forth um and other agencies okay next slide all right so the goal of our studies uh is always to help inform the type of decisions that I just discussed so it's important to know uh how we come up with these study ideas we have three broad categories again the first is assessments and by assessments we don't just mean environmental compliance assessments but all types of assessments so internally um MMP SMEs may identify gap string assessments like NEPA or biological assessments EFH assessments um internally uh through forecasting so if we expect a new area to be dredged we may choose to invest in pre-dredged research so the prime potential study which some of you may be familiar with is a perfect example of that um and also from external research management agencies so during consult consultations uh resource management agencies may provide mitigation measures uh and may identify gaps which then MMP can use as research ideas and then the last and then stakeholder and partner engagement again a common theme throughout this presentation we get a lot of our study ideas from our external partners and then the last category is from other studies so sometimes literature reviews that recommend priority or areas of research and sometimes you know our studies can be divided into two phases so the first phase of a field study review may lead to a development of a new methodology all right our assessments rely on study results sorry next slide um so uh there was recently uh ESP funded a review on how studies inform assessments and decisions this is also known as a feedback loop study uh Kauffman et al 2023 so it was recently published and the main conclusion here was that the ratio of BOM assessments that cite at least one BOM product uh product over time this is for all of BOM was on average 75 percent um now for MMP that ratio is a little bit higher 79 percent and here we show some examples of assessments so usually we try to integrate results into project specific NEPA that's kind of like the general sense also we created a NIMS approved EFH assessment template that incorporates new more accurate uh fish distribution models so this uh led to better conference and outcomes with essential fish habitat consultations next slide all right our studies are also applied externally through our partners and these are just some examples of of of of how our partners apply our studies so operators uh sometimes MMP SMEs have used guidance provided by operators in real time to decrease risk containment of sea turtles as an example um through our external decision makers so the mid-atlantic data portal houses MMIS and show layers and you can see that uh map of the show layers uh on the right there uh the South Atlantic fishery management council uh policy sites some BOM funded research um also going back to the feed loop study the recommendation was to improve stakeholder awareness and accessibility of study or assessment and this is all across the board um now MMP we feel like we do this very well of course but there's always some room for improvement all right again common theme partnership and stakeholder relationships our stakeholders and our partners not only use our study results but they help generate ideas and execute research for both environmental and research storeship so the various sources of information are critical to our decision making um here is just a a small group of uh of partners that we uh you know conduct work with or have a relationship with in the marine minerals program um so these groups help us execute our research leverage our investments locate uh sand research manage conflicts and exchange information next slide right so that was it for kind of the background to our presentation so I'd like to pause here uh for five minutes before turning it over to Dina see if anybody has any questions or comments this is uh this is Lori summa I'm not sure if this is a question for you or for Dina but at some point hopefully this afternoon we can talk about um I think it's I think you could describe it as the time value of the resource so you have a lot of um short term demands on the resource that require you to go out and dredge to fix something and then there's sort of the more strategic issues of maintaining coastal resilience which sometimes might not be um might not actually need dredging and I think it would be interesting to talk about how you all balance those two long term and short term needs thanks thank you that's a very good question and I think you could probably save that for the discussion unless Dina you have something to hi this is Dina Hansen I think this is a very good question it might be addressed slightly in the coastal resilience session tomorrow um because that does dive deeper into planning um planning kind of farther ahead but as was pointed out during the intro or the MMP 101 um our lease uh leases are usually only five years so we are um there is a reactive phase as well which you know finding that balance is something that I think we can know and talk about um either later today when we have more time or definitely tomorrow during the coastal resilience session but thank you for bringing that up uh again this may be for later but um it actually might be possible economically to survey uh potential sand resource areas for their um maturity for the community maturity to avoid the ones that are very mature Kevin is actually our expert on how to do that um but has that been considered and and then sort of avoiding like you said avoiding the more mature yeah but we redo the survey regularly so that because every winter it changes the whole picture so there the sort of survey frequency um varies project to project some sort some projects don't have any um biological monitoring associated with it um so we do try to find that balance between um you know active data collection for a survey versus interpreting what we know for other areas nearby um but we don't always have the same data set for every project um so we may not even know the maturity of a given site um before dredging and that that could potentially go into decision making um but as we'll talk about kind of at the very end of this when we bring together habitat value and almost the economic side of it those two things are sometimes in the same corner and sometimes they're actually conflicting with each other as you know um so I think we'll probably come back to that point another question so I'm going to turn it over to Dina and she's going to talk about sand resource habitat value value okay my name is Dina Hansen I mentioned before I work for marine minerals um division in headquarters and I um do a lot of environmental work and particularly with sort of the fisheries ecology so today we're here to the next slide today we're going to um kind of focus in on one of our research themes so in the MMP 101 you saw several different disciplines that our environmental studies will often pursue each one of those could be an entire COSA session so um I want to just highlight one of our themes and so today I'm going to focus on kind of the benthic and fish ecology and um but being around so many geologists I have come to um you know accept wholeheartedly that that the biology is completely determined by the not completely is determined by the physical and geological setting and so by having our interdisciplinary team it kind of helps um us it helps us biologists realize that coupling and it helps the geologists also understand more of the environmental concerns with each of our um dredging projects and decisions this uh this sort of question of habitat value was brought to marine minerals program over years of consultations with no fisheries and other resource management agencies there was always this question about kind of habitat value whether it's qualitative or quantitative there was this push to define it and so over the last 10 to 15 years um marine minerals program has invested in trying to determine what does you know how do we determine value how do we measure it and then how do we track it you know before after dredge projects and then um you know what part of the concern was that they're made that dredging might constitute an irreversible change to the habitat value but sometimes this was in a vacuum not considering the environmental setting the duration or timing of a project of a dredge um dredge activity and so we wanted to also try to add that environmental context so that we could understand not just the pre dredge setting but also the responses the resilience and the potential for recovery so there we did have a couple cornerstone literature reviews um happened about 10 years ago uh and those kind of helped uh not only did they summarize what we know our current state of knowledge on this sort of um kind of benthic fish uh physical setup setting coupling but it also provided a very comprehensive list of priorities and gaps so that sort of set us up to then invest in those kind of piece by piece and as we've done that over the last sort of 10 years um we're starting to get those results in and now what we what we want to do kind of at this kind of juncture 10 years in is to synthesize look at what we know look at what we still don't know and kind of solicit your feedback on um the kind of these questions we're going to bring these back up at the end of my session to think about um when is it a good point to pivot when do we continue to evolve when do we keep asked kind of studying the same question um do we ever get saturated at a certain point where we need to um kind of change lanes and again I know we've said it multiple times now but I just want to echo that the partnerships with academia including our CSU networks um our federal partners our NGOs and um the private industry are all integral in both the idea generation and execution of our environmental studies next slide and so kind of getting back to this um kind of foundational theme of the physical and biological setting being coupled one of our approaches to to looking at this habitat value question was to characterize the ecology and so when I hear my geologists say resource evaluation to a biologist I hear habitat characterization and so when we think about that physical kind of basic setting that lays the groundwork for the um organisms that will be you know will hopefully colonize there um so in in characterizing this ecology we've had a couple different kind of approaches to this so we've done our best to quantify um actually the coupling we've created species distribution models both on large and small scales looking at multiple trophic levels and life stages multiple species if we can and um you know there is so much natural variation in systems that we do try to look at um inter and inter and intra-annual variability while we execute these studies and when we think about the um kind of relative value question that kind of brings to mind comparisons you know we have to be able to if we're talking um you know valuing a system we want to know what what are we comparing it to so that might be um you know on a shoal sort of a higher relief area versus a lower relief trough area or compare to different um you know same features but different areas around and then a dredged or undredged portion of a sandy bottom um and then of course if we can ideally we would be able to measure changes in communities before during and after dredging um there are surprising there's a surprising number of challenges with this because the timing of a dredged project is not always certain it is often tied to funding and that often changes or is delayed um or if there's an emergency project we don't always have time to get out there and do a full suite of um monitoring studies before before an emergency lease is issued and so when we um after looking at all these different methods some of the i'm going to go over to some of the general results that we've started to get into so the next slide will show us our general habitat associations that we're looking at so kind of going from the benthic on up as as probably a lot of the biologists know that the benthic community is influenced by the physical setting and so that's the sediment composition um natural perturbations and um you know the bottom can be physically dominated biologically dominated or both um and as uh Les alluded to earlier it's there are different sort of maturity levels some may be suspended in sort of an early successional stage just because there are a lot of natural um storms and disturbances in that area and that might be just normal for a certain system and that's something that is helpful for us to know um so just looking at some of our broad studies um we did note that off of Virginia there wasn't particular um habitat utilization for um a lot of fishes but abundance did increase on sandy bottom and then in the south atlantic off of um the the central coast of florida east central coast we saw that there were lower catches on high relief ridges uh ridges and more fish along the trough areas but that there was a day tonight difference as well so there's some of these dl patterns that we um need to pay attention to um but a lot of the studies have kind of uh the results have pointed to the fact that oceanographic features and environmental factors like temperature seasonality distance from shore stratification these are often more influential on fish uh presence and distribution compared to the presence of a geomorphological feature or a shoal or um or even the type of sediment on the bottom for what for for especially for fish and then um looking at more of the individual shoal value on the next side um we we have tried to kind of uh compare a shoal with sort of its surrounding neighborhood um and so down on florida we saw that the fish composition while there were some subtle differences among four different shoals they were more similar than different and so there was a um even with a dredged shoal there was a kind of commonality in the composition um and then when we looked up off of Cape Cod Bay at the distribution of sandlands larvae um it was really important to not just look at the smaller area of influence because they have such a large distribution that the fish that originated on in Cape Cod Bay um were potentially settling all the way off of Long Island New York and so even if you're looking at your impacts uh in one footprint you might they might be not even detectable except for very far is that Jen um so so that's just one um kind of point of of uh you know making sure that that that we're not missing that blind spot um and then uh finally so looking also we uh did some species distribution models not just in the um we did the South Atlantic Northern Gulf of Mexico and you can see we created these heat maps um like this of the white shrimp in the fall where you can see kind of higher probability of occurrence so using an internal bohem tool we're actually able to look at least areas and specific shoal features and compare um kind of the likelihood of shrimp occurrence and so this is also kind of another way that we can hone in on a relative habitat value where you can see that Sabine bank um supports more you know is estimated to support more shrimp than held bank off of the coast of Texas and then you can see both of those are a kind of relatively higher probability compared to the entire Gulf of Mexico um so we're trying to find ways of looking at that relative habitat value um both on a large and small um scale so we also have been looking at individual fish species on shoals in the next slide um we modeled the we use the northeast fishery science center bottom data set which is a very rich very long running data set and we modeled fish distribution relative to shoal features and while we still saw this theme where the oceanographic factors were more influential on fish fish distribution there um for some species there was a small but significant effect to whether a shoal was there or not there and so for this spring we saw that winter flounder and little skate were more likely to be found on a shoal and then in the fall there were three pelagic species actually that were more likely to be found associated with a shoal so it's and that was also kind of illuminating because um you know rough scat and um striped intro v for whatever reason they're more likely to be on a shoal and so that's that's not a demersal fish it's not benthic oriented but it's that's something that we need to kind of keep an eye out for as well we did notice off of the Cape Canaveral coast that there were two shark species that preferred deeper water but besides that the the shallow water meaning the kind of peak of a shoal and the sea floor slope did not correlate with any fish distribution so those sort of other aspects that might define a shoal did not have any kind of significant correlation and then in addition to looking at specific species we've also looked at life stages so off of Gulf of Mexico one of our biggest most valuable sand resources is ship shoal we've talked about a couple times already it was found that blue crab were actually there having a protracted spawning period over the winter and now this is also very notable because this is an estuarine dependent species that's traveling all the way out to ship shoal miles from the coast so there is a connectivity and you know inshore offshore link that could be very unique and very you know very relevant to management of this resource and the value of this habitat that it's not just for you know OCS critters and also when we were back to looking at the sand lance again you can see that through their the bottom X axis is sort of the day of the year and so you can see throughout the year different life stages different life stages are doing different things and using the sandy floor in different ways and so you know depending on the vulnerability of a given life stage you can kind of see how that timing of a dredge project might affect a different life stage or you can just simply see that that big arch indicated by bottom time that that increases dramatically at a certain time of year so if dredging projects are occurring then there could be a bigger impact for that particular time period and then so now that we've sort of kind of gathered that data on how fish and animals occur on the shoal like I said we've also been able to study the response to dredging so I'm going to cover a couple of those generic that's generic but just try to compile some of those findings for you here so the removal the removal of sediment changes the shape of the sea floor now the subsequent water movement tends to smooth those edges and there is some infilling however that infilling rate is incredibly variable depending on where you are it can depend on sediment sources on the hydrodynamics you know very different things can influence that and in many areas the infilling rate just does not simply keep up with the rate of depletion for dredge projects so that is maybe one thing that does not fully recover in every area but as far as the sort of changes to the biological community if the sediment is the same so the the sediment that's left behind is the same as what it was before dredging we do see that the same kind of colonies will be attracted there and so we'll see kind of recovery a peak in biomass in three to six months and then that biodiversity or composition after you know one to two years or it can be longer if it is a kind of slow growing or highly mature community if the sediment is different as we said in the very beginning the type of sediment can determine the type of biological organism settling there so if the sediment changes then often the community may shift to a different kind of community and now looking at at the terribone example so off of the coast of Louisiana there was a dredge event at terribone which is that middle row in the figure there and so the red dash line indicates when dredging occurred so you can see the pie chart that shows the pre dredge state and then you can kind of see the monitoring that's occurred after that dredge event and so for the terribone project the kind of large-bodied amphipods are depleted and you see an influx of polykeets which is a very fast-growing quick to colonize animal and so that kind of follows the pattern we might expect to see and it continues for you know over a year after dredging and the Caminata and reference sites they kind of so they did not experience dredging but you can still see that there's actually a good deal of natural variation in their communities so having those kind of provides that context in which to interpret the impacts of dredging to the terribone site and this project is ongoing and so this is something that we're continuing to explore and learn more about and then going kind of from the benthic to the fish here we're going to look at the fish response to dredging so again off of Canaveral Shulls we were able to look at fish that were tagged and kind of how they moved and how they kind of responded to two different dredge events in 2014 and 2018 so before dredging kind of normal activity then there was decreased fish detections during dredging which could signal avoidance and then several weeks after dredging completed those fish returned and then outside of this these particular you know dredge events the community composition of the fish was the same whether it was in a dredged area or a non-dredged area and then in Sandbridge Shull which is off of Virginia two months after dredging again this was an opportunistic study there were multiple species that did not show any difference depending on whether it was a dredged or non-dredge site and then there were two species one that preferred the dredge site one that preferred the non-dredge site so there obviously is some variability in sort of species specific responses as well so summarizing all this kind of once again in the next slide is that you know through several different studies and several different approaches we are tending to see the oceanographic factors again sort of temperature stratification those type of influences may affect the fish distribution more than our kind of shull or sand features however the shulls in the troughs may be important as a complex together not one on their own but actually as a pair or as a system and we might have you know dredging might mimic the natural perturbations like storms and hurricanes but we really need to also pay attention to the timing duration and mechanisms that are that are part of these you know these sort of different but maybe related disturbances seasonal migrations and annual patterns are becoming apparent I think we have to be careful with this because as climate change affects species communities we do need to be able to stay agile and very critical about the information that we're using and this is something that we kind of have in mind to to you know need to factor into our assessments and our impacts there may be certain species life stages or groups of species that are more vulnerable to the impacts of dredging that could be because of life history it could be because of their prey type or specialization but but by and large for the studies that have had you know the the few studies that have had longer term data sets we have not seen a lot of long-term cumulative impacts to the sort of fish community and benthic communities but I will say that the depletion of sand resources is the one thing that is that sort of physical resource is not recovering to the sort of pre-dredge rate just because of infilling is often insufficient to actually replace that in a one-to-one ratio and then to talk about kind of how we are taking the science out of our studies process and putting it into our decisions and applications on the next slide we can see that the way that it's being integrated can be both at the bohem level and kind of on the by our external partners so some of our practices that are integrated either into least language or other mitigations is to maintain the sediment characteristics so again after you dredge the underlying sediment that's still there should match what was dredged out and then also limiting dredged depths in anoxia prone environments we do have external mitigations that come from resource management agencies again like NOAA fisheries and they have often used foam science for their mitigate to develop some of their mitigations and so sometimes we'll see things like maintaining shoal integrity monitoring projects for benthose and fishes and minimizing harassment and take of protected species of course then next slide so kind of to give you a glimpse into where we're headed since we've now just looked back at where we've been a lot of what we want to do is kind of launching off of what we've learned so far obviously as we're learning more we're discovering where we kind of have some more place you know places to continue our research and so we want to sort of reflect on our last kind of 10 to 15 years and kind of prepare ourselves for for kind of what's to come and so we do have a lot of ideas from our partners and as well as our you know ongoing studies themselves often will point to gaps and new new areas of research that we need to consider so I this is the kind of end of my session we can kind of pause and just do quick questions on the content and then I do have those sort of primer questions that we can jump to for discussion well I imagine there are a lot of questions I certainly have a few thank you thank you very very much so the if I could jump in with it with your shoals your discussion you're talking about the importance of them so so I guess well one question is you're using just the range fishery service trawl data is that what you're using to in that analysis you were talking about for one particular study yes we did use the northeast fishery science center trawl survey data in the new york bite and so that was what we so that project started kind of had two phases it started as a data review and so for that we looked we included state data as well and some shellfish data from the state and then the northeast fishery science center was the most robust data set for that for our area of interest and so we were able to analyze that relative to shoal features that boom had modeled in a different study so we're able to integrate kind of our results in two different ways um and so that's where we were able to kind of look at um you know fact and then we you know incorporated data sets on environmental factors as well and so that's kind of why we were able to look at um influences on distribution for fishing that kind of bigger footprint and and the like are you are our shoals kind of a target or are they more about they're more of an easy uh easy place of mind is that so you'd be like smoothing the shoals out well yeah so shoals tend to have a higher you know a high volume of sand um so that they they may be targeted not always um but they may be um kind of a low hanging fruit to target uh for dredge projects I see yeah so that's why we sort of had a and no fisheries in our consultations had kind of pointed out um you know that shoals may be important fish habitat um and so that's kind of where where we kind of were led down this trajectory of defining um habitat particularly thinking about whether shoals kind of themselves as a feature played a role in um kind of how fish were distributing yeah yeah because I know that I mean for example in the in the mid-atlantic there in the area you showed the elephant trunk is a well it's a large shoal that looks oddly enough like an elephant trunk and uh but that's a really um uh you know a critical place for for recruitment for example for for scallops they seem and part of the reason I think they do that anyways because the shoal brings this the the scallops uh brings the the seafloor up into a colder water stream into the uh labrador current the kind of um the cold water wedge that goes down there and so it's more favorable for for for scallops and there's actually an inversion of the heat so I think that you know linking it to the oceanographic uh I mean with all shoals it's all a combination of upwelling and that's that's why they're so productive so you know really linking it in with the oceanography or the benthic oceanography right pretty pretty important um I had one other thing but I'll let some other people take a take a shot first yeah first of all it's great I mean the way you pulled everything together um there is one thing that might be interesting to look at at some point fish distributions when you look at it as a snapshot you know this can be really altered by the instantaneous distribution of food so like if you have a bloom of capitillid worms it's going to mask any any habitat preferences if if the fish are eating the worms on the other hand the other thing we don't pick up with snapshots is lag effects so like mature bottom could generate greater recruitment success in certain bivalves and crabs but that won't show up until down the road so I mean there's an argument for you to do repeated I'm sure you love this but to to do you know at least multiple seasons so that uh and if we could we put up my last slide um Zoe if that's possible because I had a couple sort of discussion questions so and this is you know you're leading right into that because one of the one of the questions that came to mind um that's actually not even on here it just came from our discussion this morning um but how you know we so we've invested in in you know various methods but kind of the same objective of kind of those ecological studies and they they are even if we do seasonality there is of course a you know even if you go at once a month you're still getting that snapshot effect so one of the things that I'm wondering is like when at what point you sort of pause your current methods or approach or or do you sort of start start integrating new methods and so for example we aren't detecting a lot of long-term cumulative impacts but maybe that's the detection problem and it's not um so it's like do we invest in sort of that really high intensity frequency or um you know kind of alter the methods so that we can maybe increase our chance of detecting instead of doing these more wide-ranging kind of ecological questions so it's the true it's a financial trade-off right one of the things I'd I'd suggest you guys take a look at is link up with the Habitat Committee with the New York Fisheries Management Council or some of the other councils I mean that they've been working on uh what's they're called a sassy model but it's a it's a space um model that looks at it links in the the oceanography it looks and it links into the the benthic structure and the amount of natural disturbance on the seafloor and compares it to different types of fishing gear and and and the disturbance from from fishing in these areas and the whole postage model will see and they've got two or three iterations of it now so that might really uh help in your analysis of this because they've also included a a large range of species from both the uh the the mid-atlantic and around New England so you might want to take a look at their it's a it's a it's a pretty wealthy data set and I think they're doing their I mean that's they've been working on it for over 20 years now so the models are pretty pretty refined I can ask another question um thank you that was an interesting discussion an interesting follow-up do you think we're are we pretty good at since actually sand replacement by natural processes seems like it's one of the most important determinants of of uh of how quickly the sanchels repopulate are we pretty good at predicting where the sand infills more quickly and where it doesn't um do any of my geologists want to take that um I'd say it it seems to vary project by project because a lot of times what we at least from from again a biologist's point of view from what I know we've done is we'll look at um bathymetric surveys from after the last dredge project to before the next dredge project and find the increase and so that's a way that we can do it that is dependent on data quality we've had some issues with our bathy surveys not being up to par so we and we worked that out so we have better kind of quality control for those so that is kind of the easiest way for us to estimate infilling rates we have done some studies environmental studies to look at um specific sites infilling rates um but that's hard to extrapolate site to site dina this is jeff michael i'll jump in on this topic too a very good question um and i would remind everyone that we're generally in shallow water so sometimes 20 20 to 30 meters water depth and so in good parts of the year there's not even stratification so there's a lot of mixing some of these features the crest that gets dredged is as shallow as 10 meters so very physically dominated environments and the souls themselves are constantly migrating so in a place like an atlantic where it's a sand rich environment say the mid atlantic one of the most dense sand ridges in the world um these features themselves are naturally evolving and so you can think of there's not an active sediment supply coming from terrestrial sources that's rebuilding them but along shore and cross shore processes are constantly evolving them and so in many cases when there's a positive relief feature we're deflating it or elongating it you can compare that to a place in the gulf of mexico where you have ship shoal that's an enormous feature and they're creating little depressions in it and otherwise what's a positive relief feature and those depressions fill in with modern sediments coming from the after flyer the mississippi and it is changing the sediment composition and even the inherent bottom boundary layer dynamics within the footprint of the depression that was that was dredged but largely we consider these resources to be um finite and non-renewable on their use scales let me i just want to add to what jeff said uh paul nor so the atlantic specifically sand isn't really a renewable resource in the sense that most of the rivers have been damned so they're preventing additional sediment load coming in so really when a when a shoal feature rebuilds itself it's just reaching a new equilibrium with the reduced amount of sediment that is present so if sand's being added it's being removed from somewhere else on the shelf there isn't some you know magical source of sand beyond the rivers which aren't providing sand anymore so thanks thank you i was just curious how much of the natural variability there is and you sort of just answer that this completely different topic than i ever think about so this has been a fascinating discussion i so i mean i think of things like gray whales bioturbating and that's where my mind thinks instead of what you guys are doing but i i guess the question was how well do we know the natural variability and how that affects these ecosystems it sounds like you started to to address that point yeah i think one of the major things we've encountered in the northeast we could survey for and that's mobile versus immobile sands where the mobile sands are basically the ones the immobile sand sorry are basically the ones with very mature communities of two builders and stuff like that to stabilize it those have the highest biodiversity and fishery value and if if we could like overnight know where they are that would help a lot and we dealt with that with the hapcs except i think we did it right for me just one of these things and one of the one of them contradict contradict well it's it's a little contradictory so so in the in the realm of fishery science and and habitat disturbance you're you know there's there's multiple studies showing that that fisheries disturb the seafloor and that's so so then in your conclusion here that that dredging that the community rebuilds pretty quickly i realize it's a sand sand environment but it seems a little counterintuitive two different sources of data or scientific thinking about it i i think um you know the spatial footprint is uh perhaps more uh intensely disturbed but more contained more you know the the actual footprint is very specific um whereas with some fisheries it it might be more widespread across larger areas of the shelf um and it's again the duration is um also very uh you know fast fast and furious where it's for a couple months usually that the dredging happens and then it's over usually for several years and so um you know the the sense of recovery again that that pattern looks different there's a sort of rebound again with the thing about the benthic in fun there's a rebound in biomass quickly but not to the full community for a couple years and so um and then so thinking about how that might affect fish i mean again our our studies have not identified change like a you know if you go to an area um say off of sandbridge virginia um there's a shoal there that has been dredged many times i think we're up to eight or nine times over decades um but the most recent benthic in fauna survey show that it's the same composition as a control completely undredged site so that's that's sort of what those results are are suggesting um and you know again i think the so when we go a couple levels up the trophic ladder and think about the fish that are feeding on the the you know benthic in fauna it may it may depend whether their specialization or they don't mind if they eat a polychaete today and an amphipod tomorrow so um you know i think some of those questions that specialization question is something that we could use to hone in on certain species or guilds being more impacted um but that's sort of my best guess as far as the the difference in sort of the fisheries um kind of impacts versus like sort of dredging just the the type of activity i think there's a little bit of difference that might account for it is this Karen actually that question is pretty much almost answered by you but i'm gonna ask it anyway because i was wondering how big an area is that dredging and then how have you looked to see if there's any change in the say the recovery time depending on the area that you dredged and that kind of goes into the fishing things the fishing area is so much greater probably than the dredging area and it seems that the impact is much longer lasting for the but i didn't know if you had done any of that with your studies uh i'm writing this down real quick um um so the area of a so we usually lease an area of i'm gonna just approximate here one to two nautical miles by two to three nautical miles that's usually sort of generally speaking a lease area dredging usually happens in a smaller area than that um we have seen mitigation measures that require um sort of patches refuge patches so that recolonization can happen more quickly we don't see that it's not across the board we don't see that for every project a lot of times that does tend to happen just because the way the dredges move they the hopper dredges do not do like a clean cut like mowing the lawn a lot of times it's squiggly lines and there's sort of those kind of furrows are left behind naturally um so i think that could potentially recolonize we do have a study that's currently on our national studies list and funded that is going to look at the intensity of dredging and how that might affect recovery time so i think that could potentially get to that second part of the question Karen this making carl just add point of clarification just because we are leasing an area doesn't mean that the entirety of the area is authorized to be dredged so we're actually authorizing certain volume of material to be removed in a much larger area to make sure that people are paying attention we're able to do those mitigation measures yeah i was looking back you know she's we saw a lot of data about recovery and stuff and i was just wondering if if embedded in there was any information and how big the dredge area not the least area had been and whether there was any trend towards a different recovery time i mean to find it fits right in with the fish thing because the fish thing could be so much greater yeah i think that that that overall sort of intensity or footprint um is is certainly a factor that we would um that we plan to look at in this current study um the issue that i'm encountering right now is that we don't have data sets for every project so even if it was a huge footprint we might not have that actual field data to tell us what happened and so that's what the the study is aiming to use the data we do have and kind of model what we can out of it so yes oh um uh go ahead yeah yeah and then there's of course you know you just said it you don't necessarily have data for every location or whatever but while i think you're you're right that we can make certain generalizations about the effects of shoals and things like this you you do need to and it goes a little bit back to what les was saying um that you do need to consider sort of who the organisms actually are and you know one one thing is mobile versus versus um a sessile but the other one is sort of their reproductive potential for instance and if you have very slow um reproducing organisms versus and i mean that's the person from the architect right it can be a big thing versus you have maybe something that are you know fast and furious in terms of of reproduction so i think it is important to also consider every location in terms of the biological aspects you mentioned in your presentation that you had had some problems with your before after control impact design but you've could you explain a little more what the what the problem was and how you how you fixed it the yeah so the sort of logistics of a before after study can be tricky so um dredging projects are you you know they might be funded by a local kind of county or town but it usually it's usually tied to some sort of federal funding or it might be 100% federally funded which means congress is approving it um so we often see delays or that the timing is not what they expect maybe they thought they would be able to dredge in spring but they don't get the money until the fall or um there's just there just tends to be this sort of flexibility in the project that does not lend itself to environmental studies um like for example off of new jersey we're we're trying to study fine scale fish movement or we are studying fine scale fish movement on essential um you know we thought that there was going to be a dredge project kind of partway through so that we could look at post dredge um behavior which is something that we really haven't been able to do before low and behold you know that dredge project is sort of indefinitely on hold so you know we're i'm sort of like wow we can come back to it in a couple years but it's just it just makes it logistically difficult or if it's an emergency lease if something hurricane comes through and they need to renourish a beach within you know eight months to a year we don't always have the agility to execute the both the funding and just the field work that would be associated with sort of a before dredge monitoring that that's just one one second that's funny though because I thought you were going to say it was selecting the control areas that seems to be the biggest challenge for what with the wind farm sighting that we're running we have also so um our uh study off of canaveral shoals um on east central florida has probably our most comprehensive um research to date on this sort of topic and we not only had we had our dredge site we also had three control shoals to compare to and um that was very helpful but it's very expensive but but yeah like having the control site trying to find something that's comparable ideally you'd have more than one because having three gave us a much better picture about what's happening in that kind of broader system and not just you know if we were one to one we would we would have thought something was way off with the the you know one site or the other but having three it puts it all into a much better context yeah just real quick comment um somebody mentioned cost and distance before so adding one mile of distance to a dredge plan so moving the shoal by one mile for instance adds about this is numbers from about six years ago adds about a dollar per cubic yard of sand so if you have two million cubic yards of sand for your project and you move the the dredge out one mile further you've just added what two million dollars to your project um or four million depending so it's just something to keep in mind it's easy to say well can't you just go dredge somewhere else but you're you're drastically potentially increasing the cost when you do that in a very fun constrained environment yeah this is Katrina again just maybe you said and I missed it but what are the parameters you're using to actually um choose your control sites basically yeah it's it's all obviously very site specific um so we and not every project has um a control site it sort of depends on how much funding there is sometimes it's purely just a before and after um but it's yeah there I'd say it's it's very site specific and we've only been able to to do a control site in a few small instances um so yeah I'd have to get back to you on on the specifics for those projects do you have something or is that you had your card up and then you put it down I'm curious completely different sort of a different question how often the pollution in that in that dredge site and I'm thinking like Southern California by we don't want to touch because the DDT is sequestered and San Francisco Bay which is out of your area it's also heavily polluted so you're not allowed to dredge or the awful is is a toxic but I'm thinking you know in the Gulf there may be the deep horizon oil spill is creating lenses of of you know oil pollution in the in the sands how I mean somehow you must be dealing with those if anybody from the Gulf could get that that's a good question for my colleagues yeah very good question for at least the sites that we've worked on since Deepwater Horizon typically the evaluation of the quality of the sediments or what might be disturbed and suspended happens as part of the planning process for the design of the borrow area right so all the chemical testing and that kind of thing happens in advance at this point I don't think we've seen at least in the Gulf a whole lot of like there's nothing that I know of that's been flagged as a contaminated site essentially so we've for the most part avoided that I know that it has come up recently with a project that's coming up in Texas where EPA was interested in potentially having some sediment testing done but I know the core is part of their standard processes incorporates testing and that sort of thing prior to any dredging that ever happens particularly in cases when you're talking about restoration of an area right you know not necessarily want to move contaminated materials to the beach yeah I figured that's okay I was involved in the Exxon Valdez damage assessment and for years afterwards you could dig on the beaches a little bit and you get this lens of tarry material so but that's also a cold water environment compared to the Gulf maybe I was curious coming back to restore and some of those activities how much opportunity is there through their various restore programs to to do more of the work and how is bone leveraging say cross-pollination of ideas maybe not so oil related direct oil related but answer more of the ecosystem questions that then would inform future restoration yeah good question so restore has been working with us in the Gulf I'm sorry this is Jessica Melendine speaking that's sorry the restore act is different okay yeah there's trusty implementation groups and funding out of the restore act post deep water horizon penalty funds that are funding huge programs across the Gulf of Mexico in short forms right yeah so they we have gotten funds through that program the funds that we've been provided so far have been predominantly at this point for all five states to look at data archives so there's a lot of digitization of historical data that's been going into almost exclusively into the development of mmis that built out the backbone of a lot of the data in mmis but it was it was driven more by the geologic geophysical data that was available as far as proposals that have come up in recent years there's not as much interest in this type of research at least with foam because it seems to be they're really focused on on ground projects at this point and I could be completely off base at least with the groups that we're working with right now they're really interested in you know the states want to see what can be built and what can be built now what can be visible and some of this research is a little harder to show progress on because it's not visible right you know it's data that's available and accessible but that's just my experience from the groups with restore that we've been working with it may be different for others yeah I was curious maybe less the states but more some of the like open ocean benthic habitat like some of the shoaling work and the response and the the backy work would seem legitimate uses of those funds particularly because those funds can contribute to knowledge for future things should those happen so that's what I was curious on why maybe it wouldn't be picked up through more of the ocean coastal related pieces but okay it was just a question nada thanks I was just wondering if it would be too brave to or is there a geomorphologist brave enough to take your atlas and make it breathe make it dynamic so that we can use um like the dynamics of the system as a criterion for where it might be best to mine I even I don't even know if one millimeter sands which is usually what we're looking for are biologically as important as fines or the course or stuff which you need for aggregate yeah uh yeah our um you know the shoal the sort of shoal classification modeling that we did that you know we have this layer now that is housed on both mmis but also the northeast ocean data portal and so we have and we have now integrated it into other studies but that was just a jumping off point so I think that there is a lot of opportunity and even the renewable energy program wants to take you know apply that same concept to deeper water we were only able to go to 40 meters um but we you know we we used existing um data that already you know so we didn't require any new collection um but I think you know the data gets um sparse or what the farther offshore you get but it this sort of uh ability to kind of classify these shoal features is something that the renewable energy program is interested in for the same kind of reasons of no fisheries pointing to that saying you know we don't fully understand this value of this type of habitat but we haven't gone so far as to whittle down that that sort of class to what is actually overlaid with you know feasible sediment size grain size and um color and um kind of the operational side of things so it could certainly be refined further yeah because it's a little like imagine if oil migrated and you kind of want to keep track of where it was yeah so on the schedule I don't want to interrupt the discussion because it's a great discussion I know there's more to go and I would say we have not answered the questions but it is a time for well on the schedule it's time for a break do you want to take that coffee break for five minutes or 10 minutes and stretch and then come back and try and focus our thoughts to focus in on these questions I mean we can and we can pivot and go to Anna's presentation and then we can even combine our kind of questions you know these were just sort of things to offer up if if needed but we can maybe combine them with our other set of questions at the end oh it up to the right you know yeah that would be fine I think the questions are quite quite interesting so I'd be interested to hear people I have my own views but let's so let's take a let's let's take our a quick break everyone can stretch and kind of focus in and then we'll uh we'll come back and then follow up okay great thank you okay everyone we're gonna we're gonna jump back in for the last last session here which is somewhat of a continuation of what we were talking about but I kind of pulling it all together so I'll hand it over to to Anna great thank you so much okay so uh just to kind of recap uh Dina's section like you just heard she focused on the ecological values she gave a lot of examples of ongoing research and now we're kind of switch gears a little bit and talk about research stewardship in multi-use planning so this is more of like a forward-thinking approach I'm going to give some I'm going to highlight some studies that deal more with like ecological economic factors or economical drivers because we think those are important for multi-use planning we think that multi-use planning will dictate our future research for decision making so again more forward thinking approach for this part of the presentation next slide right so similar to Dina I've structured this slide with some bullets that some you know takeaways or concepts that I will be covering in this part of the presentation and then like Dina we also also have some questions that we will be asking so we will be doing a kind of combined discussion with her section and my section at the end of the presentation all right so for multi-use planning economic drivers we think may hold a greater weight in decisions than ecological factors so that's up for debate that that's just where we're headed most likely we'll cover the concepts of how the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic regions use different designations to characterize the availability and usability of sediment resource and then we'll also kind of take a deeper dive into the infrastructure buffers which were we touched upon Jessica already touched upon this and the MMP 101 but I'll kind of provide more context for that and they play a significant role in determining the resource availability so again the questions that we'd like to ask at the end of this presentation is how do we conserve sediment resources if there is a high uncertainty in the value of demand and then what information would be useful to aid multi-use decisions and then that last question you'll probably recognize if that's the first question that I posed at the very beginning when I gave the kind of introductory slide and it's our overarching question that combines kind of both Dina's and my sections for this presentation next slide all right so I'd like to start off with a study that this is an ESP funded study from a few years ago that touched on economic factors so this was a study that was conducted for the Gulf of Mexico in the Gulf of Mexico the title of it was economic and geomorphic comparison of outer continental shelf sand and near shore sand for coastal restoration projects so it focused on developing a coupled geomorphic geomorphic and economic framework to assess whether to use near shore sediment or outer continental shelf sediment for dedicated dredgings in coastal Louisiana so it's very much focused in Louisiana and just to kind of give the general conclusion was that of course using sediment from the OCS comes at a higher cost but there can be an offset in those economic factors in certain cases because there's OCS source sediment has reduced handling losses from fines that appear in near shore resources and also OCS sediment or sand usually has increased resilience because the diameter of the sands are larger right next slide all right so now let's switch gears a little bit and talk about how in the Gulf and the Atlantic we designate what we call sediment resource areas so significant sediment resource areas that's how we define them in in the Gulf SSRAs so you probably saw and we'll revisit later in the MMP 101 presentation there was a kind of a multi-use planning for the Gulf of Mexico slide where those significant sediment resource area blocks were designated that you see them here on the right again so MMP evaluates data collected with public and private partners to determine areas of significant reserves of surface and shallow subsurface mineral deposits so we use all types of data including industry data the SSRAs just because we an SSRAs designated doesn't mean that there's actual significant sediment in the area which is just a potential for significant sediment and one thing that we need to mention here is that SSRAs blocks do not designate a no activity area for oil and gas offshore wind or carbon capture storage you know we need to work with our partners to you know manage manage the multi-use issue so there to the right shows you our latest update of SSRAs so we don't usually update these SSRAs in the Gulf every year but maybe every few years we kind of take a look back at the data sometimes we add resource blocks sometimes we take them away depending on whether you know maybe we have more updated their data in that specific OCS block and we determine that well you know we can kind of take that one away for you know and not designated as an SSRAs sometimes there's a lot of infrastructures you will see so it'd be impossible to dredge that specific block one thing that I'll note for the Gulf is that our state partners are very much involved in the process of designating SSRAs they have been from the very beginning and this is kind of in contrast to the Atlantic next slide for the Atlantic for the Atlantic are the significant resource areas are called sand aliquot blocks these are a lot smaller they're about one sixteenth of the OCS protraction grid block should have mentioned that each OCS block is 4,800 by 4,800 meters so these sand aliquots are a lot lot smaller and for the sand aliquots to be designated as as such they have to be within one such a mile buffer of where OCS sand resources have been identified through reconnaissance and under design level studies so one main difference is that kind of MMIS or the data that's included in MMIS for significant sediment kind of dictates when we designate an aliquot so the data is not in MMIS we don't have an aliquot designation in contrast to the Gulf the state partners don't usually have an opinion or say in what sand aliquots have been designated right next right so we saw this same figure in the MMP 101 Jessica presented it so I'm not going to go over everything that's going on here but now you know about SSRAs those are labeled in gray as Jessica alluded to later but the one thing that I want to mention here or kind of tee up to the next few slides is the impact of buffers in our infrastructure so for particularly for the Gulf as Jessica mentioned there's a lot of oil and gas infrastructure for wells which are designated like as the blue dots there is a 500 foot buffer around each of the of the of the wells and then for for pipelines there is a thousand foot buffer on each side of the pipeline so of course you don't want to dredge too close at my point right because that would be dangerous so we have these buffers but that the buffers actually heavily impact the usability or the dredging of the resource areas so next slide so going back if we remember to the trick question that Jessica asked in the MMP 101 this morning that the right answer was 38.7 million that's a kind of the economical value that is associated with 1000 meter pipeline going right through one of our SSRAs so this kind of gives you insight on so how that number how CPRA in this case came up with that number this is a very specific example just for Louisiana but you see there that for 1000 meter pipeline you have a you have 300 meters or 1000 feet on each side buffer that pipeline will occupy 600 square meters of significant sediment resource area because it goes right through it so it will prevent the access of about 1.8 million cubic million 2.4 million cubic yards of sediment assuming a three meter thickness CPRA came up with an average economic value of sediment of 21 dollars per meter cube so we multiply that by the square 600 square meters that that that pipeline will occupy that's how you get to the 37.8 million so that's that's a pretty high number now for context in the Gulf of Mexico some of these pipelines that we deal with are five to six miles long so you can you know you can do the math for yourself how much how much of an impact pipelines infrastructure and then the buffers associated with the infrastructure is right next slide right this is just to kind of give you a visual this is from one of our ongoing studies the Water Institute is using a source-to-sync geologic framework approach to find sediment resources so in Barataria Bay so this is in Louisiana as you can see by the map there above and then what they did is they found these significant sediment areas and there's volumes associated with those as you can see they're on the left and then they overlaid the pipelines including the buffers and as you can see well that reduces the usability of of the the material there by quite a bit so you can see in the west grant here which is the example on the left you go from 49 million cubic meters of sand to 40 mcm it gets even worse at sandy point and these of course numbers are conservative because there's some areas to the left for example in sandy point where you wouldn't be able to get a dredge in there because just there's just yeah there's just not enough room or a dredge to operate all right next slide let's move on to the an example of the Atlantic and let's move on to offshore wind and the impact of buffers for offshore wind cables so the commission the communication security reliability and interoperability council recommends a 500 meters of buffer for each cable in depths of up to 75 meters and this is actually a very interesting example to the right of I think it was an empire wind project so originally the operator the empire wind wanted to include the wanted to run that pipeline corridor designated in pink there in the figure right along the anchorage area which is depicted by that blue polygon there through conversations with boom we were the ones that had to tell them that you know they couldn't run it through there because there was an anchorage area so they came back and they wanted to run the the cable corridor right through that shawl area which you can see you can see it has high thickness there in the middle so with negotiations with them we were able to you know negotiate with them and they ended up putting the cable corridor in between you know as far south close to the anchorage area but further further north than that area of significant sediment so that was a I guess a win-win for both parties right next slide and this is another example of impact analysis for empire wind this is a very generalized impact analysis case study for the new york harbor so this figure is a little bit deceiving you know you see some proposed cables the hot pink is where the inner sex is significant sediment area shawl area but obviously there's a lot more going on in this area than just those two cables it's a very complex congested area with high multiple use area with a lot of telecom cables disposal areas navigation channels and the bit I believe that for this example we did not have you know very a lot of data to work with I think for this specific example we assume the five meter thickness kind of all across the board but you can kind of see there to the the right that overall if you cannot combine these three areas of intersection that you see in this the total square five foot thickness volume that would not be usable is 16.5 they're milling cubic yards next slide and then here to cap it off I wanted to highlight this recent study that I think comes into play very nicely here because it combines both the ecological and economical factors that we think will be could be very useful for multi-use you know for for making decisions for multi-use planning so this study used a multi-criteria decision analysis to evaluate and quantify technical environmental economic and social factors in the context with potential management and monitoring measures so it was used to create a reproducible planning process and a way to summarize way to compare bar area sites to each other within a certain topography and incorporated operations environmental and economical factors so there you see the the kind of the criteria tree with some of the factors that were I guess all the factors that were used and this is a case study for Canaveral Shoals next slide sorry so Canaveral Shoals was a study that we mentioned that was mentioned earlier in the MMP 101 so this is a bar area so the tool kind of breaks up the bar area and it assigns it a score so for this particular case yeah for this particular case sorry I got ahead of myself here area C as you see there has the lowest future usability since it's farther and has less material and then all areas are good options though the area E may be slightly better as you can see by the score they're highlighted in in yellow which incorporates all the different factors next slide right so this is the final slide where we go back to those original questions I believe now Dina's questions are in the slide right after that so we'll probably end here and we can either focus on these questions or go back to Dina's or however you'll want to take it from there thank you Anna and Dina just thought if you could provide a little bit more context for folks in the room the 16 point some odd million acre or cubic meters of the sediment that would have been compromised I think it was slide 29 that you had the map on there typically what would you expect miles of shoreline restoration using that 16 million like are we talking 20 miles 30 miles like just for people to visualize it a little bit differently than just sheer volumes because these are large numbers very large numbers that's a really good question does anybody want to take a guess do you feel all of the MMP people come like trying to do mental math right now um so I I don't have an answer to the question but what I can say is that that number varies widely based on how what the design of the beach profile is because sometimes there's terraces sometimes it's more eroded less eroded sometimes you're covering certain aspects but does anyone have a ballpark from a recent project Shannon's nodding I'll take a I'll take a guess thank you I'd say it's less than 25 miles is that good enough that Jeff right now our bone so John Jensen from University of West Florida I have a question if you could go back a couple of slides I'm just it's uh let's see that one yes that the criteria tree I just um was trying to get my head around it and I see sediment characteristics and all of these things and there are uh brackets that come off of it and then there's stakeholder acceptability and community opinion that just at least all the way I look at the graphics it's just kind of hanging there in space um so maybe you could help me understand that in that graphic everything else seems to have a very you know it's there seems to be a place for it but I don't I can I can take that one on sure um Jeff Michael from bone so I think in in this framework uh these are things that were tried to quantify where you could use something that was directly um measurable and give it a score and I think in this figure which this the report that goes along with this gets into this one topic a lot more that's something that is hard to pin down to a single number just because the stakeholder views are so complicated so for example if you were to ask um uh environmental justice community they may have one perspective if you were talking about private homeowners they may have another perspective and so getting those into aggregate score was a little more complicated so I gather that part but I'm just sort of pointing out that everything else seems actionable and I'm I'm hearing not necessarily actionable I would say so I guess my question is is how how in fact if at all maybe we'll deal with that in other places does that fit into the to what you do and your choices it just it just looks to me odd the way it's sort of hanging there in the air uh in this in the in this graphic and but anyway I'll sure uh that's a great question and a terrific observation um and I would say that every project has a slightly different stakeholder group a stakeholder process um and so there is is a public um involvement process where people give input uh there are states and local communities other federal other federal agencies tribes uh state historic preservation officers that that that feed into this and I think that uh the framework um that's implied here um using multi-criteria decision analysis those things move in tandem um so the things that could have a suitability score gets qualified but that's gets fed into a process that's accompanied by more like a of a social process there's a compromise there's give and take um and they are to be viewed not as replacements for one another but as companions in a decision process um I said aside tribes which we have to address differently because they're sovereigns I I'm not sure why a lot of that valuation couldn't be done through say a choice experiment uh where you you create a demand curve you provide various kinds of choices of various kind of things so I I think you could put a a value on it um that it just doesn't have to just sit off at the side and be be sort of just just perceptions and attitudes but we can come up with economic values as well that's a great point and we've done like contingent uh evaluation uh hedonic evaluation studies to look at different markets willingness to pay um uh environmental cost that may be things like the quest value option value um there they tend to be complicated because you have interesting communities that um have interests in these areas basically you have a huge tourism um market that influences perceptions of values that are short term users if you will a short term community um in the area uh where these projects occur uh you have people at least in the willingness to pay surveys that we have attempted um not many of them but we have attempted some um there is a lot of uh perceived economic value in uh preservation as in leaving the area undisturbed all those can be incorporated into uh into an economic model and into a state of preference survey so I I think those can be you can get them it doesn't you know the it takes some some work and the same thing with uh you can do uh travel cost studies uh and again look at uh place values on uh on tourism uh and the like and you can look at uh reveal preference studies uh like has been done with uh uh block island where they've done both uh reveal preference on on housing studies so looking at how housing values change uh and and they've done reveal preference on uh air b&b by looking at block island versus moth is vineyard and and so there are ways to do this it takes careful design uh but those those values can be uh again they're they're not necessarily there's there's obviously a lot of uncertainty and people don't understand what they mean and they don't mean always um but they're something that could be added to the decision tree yeah um and given that this whole thing is sort of a Sisyphean enterprise you guys are doing a pretty good job but my question is um as climate change advances as storms become more severe we're going to start seeing a heterogeneous map of the coast of areas where it just isn't worth doing this anymore and areas where it is shouldn't we be like moving toward that map and giving people the honest dope i'm not going to argue with that that's a very good point no so um jeff and i were at the american shore beach preservation association meetings there in dc last week for their coastal summit um lobbying for various things and um that was one of the topics it was several hours dedicated towards is these restoration projects and when is it too much you know i think back to i grew up in friends with texas for the most part um just before tropical storm allison in 2001 there was an assessment and friends would was of the entire country number three on insurance payouts due to flooding events and so community gets flooded homes washed out they get money they rebuild they make them bigger but they build in the same place and just compounds the problem over time over and over again and so i think we're absolutely seeing that across our coast you know don't go up highway one today so you know there's things like that over and over again and you know part of the supply and demand studies that we're doing is to help in that decision making for the communities to make on their own on what they think it's worth moving forward on for their own individual choices Megan if if i could add to that um just a little bit of a golf perspective to a lot of the islands particularly in the central gulf that we are helping restore or sands from boom or from the federal waters are being used to restore um are uninhabited and so far offshore most of the public may not even be aware that they're there and we have a great example of there was actually a video of it in the 101 of the west bow headland that was specifically constructed to help buffer storm impacts particularly from hurricane activity and during construction of the project it got hit three times direct hit and was wiped out completely at 80 construction fema is now funding the rebuild of it again so for the gulf it's a little bit of a different perspective because it's not as obvious that it's there as a protection mechanism for the coastline so trying to articulate that value to the communities is challenging but really important and there's an argument to be made that maybe there's not value in it because there is an infrastructure and habitat or homes you know but there's definitely a correlation with reduction of of storm impacts from these offshore islands so that's another element to it that makes that conversation at least from my perspective much more difficult yeah down cost a couple come one of the somewhere I remember in the political statement managed retreat is not an option which I've always found interesting and in california we have not only the problem with coastal zone but fire hazard and of course if you read the newspapers insurance companies are exiting the state but my the question I has completely different and that is have you looked at you had this nice map that showed the distribution of of assets but it gets back to the Karen's question earlier and that was how big is the the dredging and that made me start thinking about I think implicit and her question was there may be a really big difference and this could not this could be even beyond an ecological impact but is it better to do one strip that's long or take an area and completely denude it but leave it in one area or have a lot of strips that are you know some distance apart as as there been much thought in terms of the spatial way that a dredging occurs and on this fine scale good question I feel like that tees up well with the presentation that we'll be hearing tomorrow with coastal resiliency and kind of presenters there will take a more kind of regional standard more like a basing scale approach where I think those you know that question would be a better fit to be answered in that regard I I think the you know that question has been asked and the prevailing advice we get from resource management agencies is that more shallow but broader footprint approach instead of sort of sacrificing one area and and kind of especially in the Gulf versus Atlantic anoxia can become a real problem if you're in you know digging these deep pits but so as of now the prevailing idea is to do that sort of broader footprint not as deep yeah this is Katrina I can just a clarification that that tree that critical tree or decision tree is that used to define if this area is suitable for what is needed or is that a decision tree to look at the impacts that might happen when it is stretched I think it's more the first yeah so yeah if that's if that's the case then being the biologist or one of the biologists I wonder why there's no it seems there's no biological information that goes into that decision there there is a sub you know a small subsection of I think it's generally stated as you know environmental impact or something like that where it would sort of be fit under and that the tree is still sort of a theoretical tool we have not used it in any like decision making or planning it's it's sort of something that was created it's I think for what we were talking about today we wanted to kind of show an a potential example of how resource stewardship and environmental concerns might fit together and so this is a study and Paul was the COR for this study so I'm glad he just waved his arm at me yeah I almost forgot I did this one I don't like 2018 yeah but I'll pass up to Paul so we worked with the CORE of Engineers the Waterways Research Center and some risk management experts from the CORE up in Connecticut Massachusetts somewhere like that on this study and this is just one branch there are several other branches including environment economics cultural values all that stuff so all those various weighted values then feed into the suitability scores it's not just the geology any other comments or I don't know we've answered these questions but it was certainly a good discussion uh it's well it's it's five to four so I guess on the agenda that's my remarks thank you very much Anna that was great and and everyone so so my closing for now I would just say to thank all the presenters today it's great job fantastic science being presented and really a thoughtful discussion I really appreciated the thoughtful open exchange of ideas so uh it sounds like tomorrow we're going to hear more about this about coastal restoration and also about critical the critical mineral so it's it's going to be action-packed tomorrow as well and with that Jonathan do you have some housekeeping stuff or is that it I'm sure I can just say very quickly first of all yeah thank you again to all of our BOEM guests that have come all the way here and everyone joining online we'll look forward again to a great discussion tomorrow morning