 chairs, Scott and Cameron and Rod Mather, who it turns out actually have limbs. So you have limbs. Yeah. All right. Well, good morning, everybody. And welcome to the committee on offshore science and assessment. And thank you. Hi, everyone for joining us. It's great to be meeting in person, while also welcoming some committee members and outside experts who can be joining us via zoom. This is a special course of meeting since it coincides with the 50th anniversary of Boehm's environmental studies program, which has championed use inspired science to manage development of the nation's resources in an environmentally and economically responsible way. And in doing so has made a vital contribution to our understanding of the OCS. Thank you to the National Academies and the leadership of Boehm for their hard work in organizing this meeting. A huge thank you to the folks from Boehm who have submitted the profiles that we're going to discuss and the other staff and subject matter experts who have contributed with their ideas and review. We know you're all very, very busy. Thank you to the regional and programmatic leaders who are going to provide us with overviews of their units and of course to the outside experts joining us today and tomorrow for giving you a time, knowledge and wisdom. We're delighted to say that we have a large number of experts joining us over the next two days. And speaking of volunteering, thank you to our fellow COSA members for all your hard work and your time and your wise counsel. We are confident that this meeting will be interesting and productive over the next two days. We are going to review and discuss 10 study profiles six today and for tomorrow. We'll hear from all regions and all programs. Today the study profiles are broadly connected to renewable energy, particularly offshore wind. We'll hear from headquarters, the Atlantic, the Office of Renewable Energy Programs and the Pacific region. And then tomorrow we will hear from the Minerals Management Program and from the Gulf of Mexico and from Alaska. There's a good mix of disciplines represented, including a solid contribution from the social sciences, something that we've been discussing in COSA over the past year. Some themes for our two days are offshore wind and whales and new or enhanced responsibilities for Berm, including carbon sequestration and renewables. And these new responsibilities mean perhaps we have more baseline studies than may have been typical in the past. The 10 studies that we are going to discuss are a subset of a larger studies development plan, which includes 45 study ideas and profiles. And of those, a smaller number will ultimately move forward to the national studies list for funding. This COSA meeting fits into the workflow of review and discussion of the SDP and those profiles. And so thank you all once again. And I think we look forward to two productive days of dialogue and discussion. Standing overview. And I want to echo Rod's comments and welcoming everybody here today both our, our BOM friends we haven't seen you for a while it's been since early 2000. 2020 when we met in Alaska, and it's great to see some familiar faces back again at the table. We've missed the face to face interaction and we're really looking forward to that here today and plus we have you get to meet our new COSA members who joined us since that time, we're most of the folks at the table. This is an important meeting for us to get together on I think this is the eighth session we've had that I've been involved in when we talk about the study development profiles. I came on when COSA started as an observer for Beezer back in 2015. And I think we've gone through this and this is now the eighth time go around we're going to look at these profiles so it is an important opportunity for feedback from COSA. COSA is charged to give you advice and assistance to help you manage the environmentally and economically responsible development of our nation's energy resources and your mission has gotten, if anything, much more complicated than when we started back in 2015. You now have not only oil and gas and and the marine minerals programs focused on on managing coastal restoration, but you're being asked to go in dramatic growth and renewable energies particularly wind but also looking at other forms of renewable energy, you're being asked to help address carbon capture and storage in the offshore. We're looking forward to hearing more about that hope we'll hear what what your plans are here before too long, and and other challenges as well. I can't think of a more important time frame for you guys to get after this stuff. Given all the challenges our nation is facing right now both in terms of energy security but also in terms of addressing a whole myriad of challenges we face on the science front. So, welcome, and a particular shout out to the, our guests who are coming in we really appreciate those who volunteered to help us and providing feedback to you all today. One request or two requests. I know that in each of the regions, you're going to try to give us a little overview of why we're seeing a particular proposals. We're, we're getting from your groups. That is of interest to us. And also, for the presenters in order to make. I know you've got a lot of stuff to show. We hope that you can limit your, your presentations to time period somewhere in the seven to 10 minute range I think it's been cited so that we have ample time to provide the feedback on the questions many questions which you've already raised to Costa so again thank you all looking forward to an energetic two days. Thank you Rod and Scott. I'll just take another moment. I did cover some of our in the room logistics, but also just housekeeping items for those that are on the line, both in the room and online. So our preference will be to use the raise hand feature in zoom. If you are not at your computer to raise your hand, but you are in the room, please just feel free to raise your hand physically I will make note. But for those that are on their zoom, I will be checking for the raise hand feature for the purposes of our discussion. I also want to echo the thanks we we do have quite a large crowd online. We will not do full introductions for everybody that's joining us today, but I would like to do a quick round of introductions for those in the room. So, we'll start maybe with Rodney and go around and then the last thing I just want to say before we get that underway is if you are online please do remain muted if not called upon to speak. I'm not really trying to monitor that as well but to the extent that you can assist with that that will prevent interruptions so I will go start with Rodney and maybe go around the table and then we'll start back and go around the room as well. Very good. Thanks. I'm Rodney Clark I'm Chief of Balm's division of environmental sciences and the environmental studies program. I'm Jennifer Ewald with the environmental studies program I work with Rodney and the rest of the folks here. I am currently serving as the science communication outreach liaison. Thank you. Good morning everyone. I'm Kevin Stokesbury. I'm the dean of the school for marine science and technology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. And I work on fisheries oceanography and environmental interactions and I'm a COSA member. Good morning everyone I'm Jack Barth. I'm a professor of oceanography at Oregon State University, and I work on a wide range of coastal physical ocean graphic projects, and I'm a COSA member. My name is Emily Young. I'm a canal submarine policy fellow working with Dr. Yoko Furukara in OEP at Balm. My background is in deep sea biology. And this year I'm thinking about climate change at Balm. I'm Katrin Eichen. I'm a professor in marine biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and I work mostly in Arctic and other Alaskan waters, and I'm a new COSA member. Hi there. I'm Jen Bossak. I am in OEP's division of environmental assessment. I'm a branch chief and I'm here to sort of speak on behalf of the assessment folks. Hi, I'm Jonathan Tucker. I'm a National Academy staff. Scott Cameron. I'm a geologist. I was with Shell for 32 years, mostly in exploration and production. I have consulted since then and volunteered for the National Academies in various roles since 2015. Hi, I'm Ron Mather. I'm an underwater archaeologist and applied historian at the University of Rhode Island, and I am co-chair of COSA. Hi, I'm Stacey Karris. I'm a National Academy staff with the Ocean Studies Board and I'm the study director for the COSA committee. Good morning. I'm Jessica Bravo. I am BUM's deputy chief environmental officer, and I also manage the contract with the National Academies. Yoko Furukawa. I work for BOLAM OEP, Office of Environmental Programs, and the branch chief for the physical and chemical sciences working for Roni. Good morning, Kerry Pomeroy, a research social scientist, Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, and my background is in sociology, anthropology, and marine policy. Most of my work focuses on human dimensions of fisheries and marine space use coordination. Oh, and I'm a COSA member. Thank you. Yeah, hi. Good morning. I'm Jeremy Firestone. I'm a COSA member. I'm a professor at the University of Delaware School of Marine Science and Policy and do a lot of work on renewable energy and climate and with special expertise related to offshore wind. Thank you. Good morning. I'm Laurie Suma. I'm a new COSA member and geologist retired from ExxonMobil, mostly in research and exploration, and currently adjunct at Rice and UT Austin. Hi, good morning, Rona Cox, also a new COSA member. I'm a geologist. I'm at Williams College in the Geosciences Department. And my expertise is in coastal geomorphology, coastal erosion, and I also work with tribal communities in Louisiana with the impacts of climate change and land loss. Good morning. My name is Shane Guam. I'm an oceanographer within Bones I'm on the studies program. I work for Yoko, for COA, I'm in the branch of physical and chemical sciences. My background is ocean acoustics and marine bio acoustics. Hi, everybody. Sorry to just play Shane for a minute. I'm Jake Levinson. I'm a marine biologist in the headquarters and division environmental studies sailing broadness group. I work mainly on marine mammals and protect species like sea turtles and some fisheries work as well. I'm a marine biologist. Hi, good morning, I'm Sarah McPherson. I'm the environmental programs and also heroes future. Good morning, everyone. My name is Bob Lewis. I work for ETEC Inc. We do radar for the movement of things. We do the radar. We do the radar. It's a big new landscape for us. But I've got a lot of interest in everything that's going to be on here. I'm a fan of asthmatic matter work. I'm just looking for that. Good morning, Jeff right now, or I'm the chief of the marine minerals division in bones headquarters office. Thanks Jeff, I think with that, we've got everybody that's in the room. I just like to give the opportunity for three other folks that are on the line to introduce themselves they are the remaining co some members that I know are on. We've got Susan parks, Mary Louise Timmermans and less Kauffman if you'd like to go Susan I'm looking at you first so we'll we'll go to you and then Mary Louise and then less. Great, thanks. I'm Susan parks I'm a professor of biology at Syracuse University. My research focuses on marine mammal acoustic communication and the effects of noise. I'm Mary Louise Timmermans I'm a professor at Yale University and a physical ocean on her for my research focuses on the Arctic Ocean. Nice to see you. Unless are you on the line. Okay, hi everybody. I'm Kauffman professor in the marine program at Boston University, and I'm a marine benthic ecologist, and my current research focuses on climate change and the interaction between coastal society and the continental shell marine ecosystem. We're running just a few minutes behind getting started but we'll adjust accordingly. And I appreciate everybody bearing with us I think it's important that we that we do the introductions. So, with that, I'll skip a review of the agenda I think we can just jump right into it. The first remarks that we're going to hear are from Rodney and they're regarding the environmental studies program and updates to the 2024 2025 STP. Great, thank you Stacey. I'm assuming, yeah, there we go the presentation is coming up. So yeah, thanks to the co chairs thanks to the coastal committee, it is really nice to be here in person after so long. It really feels feels good to have an in person meeting where we can, you know, discuss and engage and I you know really appreciate everything they can and even the process so thank you so much. Yeah, I wanted to just give you some updates on the studies development plan and kind of where we are with things and just some updates on the environmental studies program in general, and remind folks and I know there is some new members as well. So, the environmental studies program is is bones environmental science. So it's one program that serves all of our offices and all of our regions, no matter if that's renewable energy oil and gas marine minerals, carbon sequestration. Now green hydrogen, other things that are coming our way. So, it's pretty much across the board. We are authorized in the OCS Lands Act. That's how we're older than bone. Well, it was a little over 10, we're 50. So, you know, we have been around for quite a while and have produced an amazing amount of science and that that time and I might add and scientists, which has been over $1.25 billion on science. Our funding is around 30 million a year up a little bit this year which I'll talk about later for for IRA funds. We do go through a rigorous planning process a study development plan which you've all seen, and then we contract out our studies to interagency agreements, cooperative agreements, or contracts as as we're going down this road to, you know, for folks to produce the science so our were more the managers. Next. The pillars of the environmental studies program are very important to us. We realize that our program is applied and we do science to inform decisions we call it use inspired, because anytime somebody comes up with a study idea. The first question I asked her okay how we're going to use, because we had a lot of ideas and not enough money to fund everything. So we have to really hone in that doesn't mean that we don't have the utmost levels of integrity and credibility in that science. We have a small program we're a couple 100 scientists in bone bones only around 600 people. So it's very important for us to partner with other federal agencies the private sector and academics to do the science of partnering and leveraging is really a pillar of our success. And we make all of our science. We put it all out there on the web. And to try to really educate folks on the science that we're producing and how we use it. So, as I was saying we have a couple hundred scientists so we maintain this core expertise. You know within bone, you know, on these numerous scientific disciplines. The bomb scientists develop overseas and manage the research projects in partnership with again other federal agencies or academics of the private sector. Really across the entire community so while we totally encourage our scientists to get out on ships and do field work and work in that sense they are really the science manager and oversea portfolio. Next. Partnerships are central. I think you got to hit it again for all the logos to come up. I get a program that's as small as ours really does depend on on other agencies we don't. We don't have the assets of ships we don't have satellites, we don't have, you know, ROVs, but we know where to find them and we work with other partners to make this happen so this is really an important part of our program. Next. So criteria for study development approval. We focus on what we need to know. Sometimes that's easier said than done, but what do we need to know to make good decisions on energy and mineral development on the outer continental shelf. We, while we have an applied program we also want to ensure we're contributing to the existing state of knowledge and really enhancing that and I think over the last 50 years we've definitely done that. We maintain a high robust level of methodology. These need to be cost effective again leveraging and partnering are really essential. We have about 2.5 billion acres now. That's including the territories that we have now the five territories so that's quite a bit of land area of the water. So, you know, we really need to partner as much as possible. And anytime we can do a study with multi regional strategic utility. For example, if there is an avian biology study in the Atlantic that the methods can be applied in the Pacific. That's a good thing. And we're trying to get that, you know, which we're trying to be able to use the science for multi regions thought that every every study is going to be like that but but some may. And we want to encourage that kind of learning. Next. So this year we go through this process and you know, I've been chief over a decade now and and the crazy thing about it is it never gets, we just keep doing it over and over again Scott I think you said eight years we've been doing this but it may be before, you know, that with their our own pocket committee we continue to do it now the adjustments happen but each year we request input from our scientists and stakeholders what do we need to study. We have a distribution list with thousands of people that provide input to us we take all that input our scientists put it together into our studies, our city profile development, which you all received our study development plan, we go through an internal review because we want to leverage and use our own scientists, not so much to critique each other but to really create that culture of collegiality where they can add, you know, input if you're studying a certain research on whales you can have perspectives from all the marine mammal experts across foam. So we try to get it as right as we can at first. Then we release the sdp first send it to you all and then we make it public. This meeting National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine COSA review. After this meeting we take your input and go back and our regions and offices will re rank things after they send the three re rankings. It comes back to to us to me, and I'll take it to our director our director does that's what we're going to find. Ultimately our national studies list are based on her decisions. We don't just put 50 things out there and say go for it you know we really you know think about it a lot first and then we began our procurement process, and the cycle starts all over again. There's going to be a couple of changes in the future that it's not on this graph. We're talking about now how to better engage tribes in the process. We're talking about the request for stakeholder input again they're on my stakeholder list, but we want to engage them more. So we're thinking about adding a step in during a study profile development to January, February, March, perhaps time frame, and then thinking about you know towards the end of the process after the director has made a decision, maybe bringing that back to them to to engage tribes again on what we decided to study and how it may affect them. So that's the idea of maybe just doing a series of webinars over over time on studies that are completed. We put out our quarterly reports, which is great. But I think a series of webinars would be really another good, good thing for us to do so we're thinking about not only getting that input up front and during the process but also two or three or four years later when the study finishes. And I know the committee has interest in that as well. So again the state development plan what does it do it's our annual strategic planning document that outlines ESP's direction identifies the information needs prioritizes the research over a couple of fiscal years with the priority being on the next fiscal year but we're looking at it for a couple of years. It's a really important communication tool, not only for this meeting but with stakeholders that less people and further federal agencies for that matter know what we're going to do. So we can use it as a science communication tool. And as the foundation for national studies list again we draw from the plan. I think I think we've got 45 study ideas and here we'll draw from the plan and be able to fund 20 ish depending on, you know, how much they are 2025. Okay, next. Based on our decision context and we write about this in the document so we do try to look at upcoming decisions in the future so what kind of information do we need for those decisions that we're going to need to be making on a lease sale or on any kind of study in the next you know year or two or three or five. And so we really try to think about that. So what are these the current relevant issues we need to consider what's the topics we need to address where are the data gaps, where's those information gaps we need to fill so we think about those relevant issues. And then of course we also think about environmental impact statements and just NEPA and the various other consultations and compliance that we're on the hook for whether that's National Historic Protection Act, Clean Air Act, Marine Member Protection Act, Endangered Species Act, you name it, there's a lot of them. So we think about all these things and they really go into our science strategy, you know, for each region for each program. And then we have our proposed studies. So that's kind of how the SDP works in the decision context which I think is an important point. Next please. Not 45, it looks like 53 he's got in this initiative plan, I think he said 45, but I look, I've got 53, 6 from Alaska, 10 from the Gulf of Mexico region, 6 from Marine Minerals Program, Office of Environmental Programs 18, Renewable Energy Program 7 and Pacific Office 6. So that's what we got on the plan. Okay, next. Of those, we thought you might have interest in which ones kind of go towards administrative priorities, climate change, we got 6 proposed studies dealing with climate change, 7 on EJ, Fish and Fisheries 6, Tribal Efforts 3, the not mutually exclusive, some of the studies and for example environmental justice and tribal may be overlap, right, because you may incorporate both of those aspects. So we have our stakeholder and partner input. We got 15 proposed studies from the stakeholder input, external stakeholders, eight studies and federal partners. Eight, again, when we get in these study ideas, you know, we take them, we'll take aspects of these and we'll build it into our own use inspired science model and kind of what our scientists know we need to know, what are the aspects or pieces of those that we incorporate. And so the stakeholder input is used like that. So just to give you an idea. Next, new and upcoming activities, carbon sequestration, again the expansion of our work throughout the US territories, green and blue hydrogen, multi use activities I wanted to put this on here because you know, we're, we usually when we issue a lease it's for a wind facility or met before oil and gas, marine minerals, but we see in the future, multi activities on a particular leaf, it could be it could be wind and green hydrogen. It could be when green hydrogen and marine minerals that could be, you know, other activities that are going on at the same time carbon sequestration could be the pieces of that so how do we deal with that. Certainly, you know, as a as bone as the overall program but how do we deal that deal with that scientifically so that's really kind of where we're going with this, with this one, and the ocean climate action plan which I think has a lot of interesting that really does promote and prioritize that, you know, for the entire nation, off for when carbon sequestration a couple of the, you know, number one and number two in the plan, get directly home for us. So I think this plan is really important. I think all of our folks use this as another opportunity to partner to leverage and say look, it's, we're all supposed to be focusing on this across the federal government so I think it's a good opportunity for us to, you know, truly point to our program. And next, in the years of coastal and ocean science recently we put together the ESP hub, which is a new hub that is out there on our website. This is mainly for the public to go in and just look at biological sciences chemical sciences physical social sciences, and be able to look at, you know, certain studies that we've done. We've put everything on there. Again, this is not so much for the power user but it's more for community people or people that are just going in looking for the studies that we've done. The information is also on gov info, which is the more powerful system for more of your scientists or for power user I would say. Next. And that's it we want to emphasize we welcome comments on the entire study development plan and all of our study profiles I know we're going to be talking about selected ones today, each of the offices will tell you why they selected them. But any any study idea that we have in the in the plan, you know, we welcome any kind of. Thank you. And I'm happy to take questions or whatever you want to do. Yeah, we are running a little bit behind but I think it worth maybe allowing one or two questions as particularly if they're quick and I will be looking for folks using the raised hand feature, or raise hands in the room. Scott. So here so Rodney thank you very much for a great overview. I was particularly interested in your second or third the last slide where you talked about multi activities multiple. And that gets to the common I was mean about the incredible changes that bone has programmed is seeing here, you know in the past, you know when you're focused mainly on oil and gas and marine minerals programs with coastal restoration so forth. We weren't looking at actually having overlapping activities in the same physical geography on the same leases potentially. Now we're clearly entering an arena where that looks like it's, it's going to happen we're going to have to deal with that. And they're going to be some key research questions focused on, you know how do you sort out the costs and benefits and impacts of putting, say, wind projects versus carbon sequestration projects versus green hydrogen projects on the same leases I mean that's. So, I welcome you flagging that and I look forward to having further dialogue on that so we'll be looking for opportunities to talk more about that and as the session goes along. And again we welcome advice from the coast on how to deal with it we haven't done this before right so it is going to be complicated and it's going to be multiple science questions that we have to deal with. We're a great group of scientists as you know Scott, and it's we're going to put people's minds and the best minds to it, but we're certainly welcome working with COSA to help us think through this. Thank you. Thank you. Sing no additional hands for the sake of time I'll turn it over now to Jennifer. Thank you. So I'm just going to take a couple of minutes to introduce you to the Office of Environmental Programs profiles that will be presenting today and sort of the context in which we p thinks about developing study profiles so I think most folks are aware that as a headquarters focus on a national perspective on things that are relevant across regions and programs, maybe new technologies that that we choose to study in order to then facilitate the use by by other regions or programs. Things that have a national need when we're thinking about outreach or education things that kind of span across the things that we're thinking about in the future are obviously we think about consultation mitigation assessment and studies in a programmatic context so things that we can help streamline or find efficiencies or do the research that's going to support those efficiencies. We're thinking about obviously offshore wind as is everyone else. We continue to think about oil and gas, especially as it is irretrievably connected to offer wind for the foreseeable future and carbon sequestration which we've mentioned a little bit. So offshore renewable energy is obviously taking off in the Atlantic but we're also thinking about it in the Pacific actually we're moving on it in the Pacific and and then the Gulf of Mexico cumulative impact talking about multiple use right so cumulative impacts are becoming more and more important as we expand programs into new new regions. We're particularly thinking about how we're going to fold carbon sequestration into that equation climate change obviously continues to alter habitats and sort of the abiotic processes of the ocean we need to understand that so that again we can look at that cumulative perspective of our activities that goes hand in hand with greenhouse gas and our contributions from the mission standpoint as well as the more acute air quality impacts that that our programs may contribute to. So, all of these studies that we think about, ultimately serve that loop of assessing and consulting and thinking about how these things are affecting both physical human resources biological resources, and typically individual offices and programs are the lead for their National Environmental Policy Act documents or their consultations things like that. OEP is actually the lead for where the lead on a programmatic environmental impact statement for the New York Byte lease areas, as well as we also lead the environmental analysis for the national oil and gas program development. So, when you translate that into our 18 studies that were proposing and I will try to move through these relatively quickly. Two of those are focused on acoustics, mainly driven by our Center for Marine acoustics that sits in OEP right now. Three of those acoustic studies are related specifically to offshore wind and to the conventional energy. We have six studies that are directly related to or touch on the aspects of long term monitoring. Four studies that are focused on social science and this is, we have two of those that you're going to hear about today of the other two there's one that is looking to understand what may happen in the context of, of not leasing for oil and gas anymore in the offshore that's going to have potentially major impacts, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico. We also have a study that is co proposed with the Bureau of Land Management that looks at subsistence and cultural uses in Alaska, southeastern Alaska in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and then in the Gulf of Mexico to try to understand how subsistence use may be more consistent or be different depending on where you are and what you're thinking about. We have four studies focused on technology including one on animal telemetry and one on using high resolution satellite imagery to detect whales. We have an air quality study that's going to look at better tracking emissions from vessels and helicopter activity associated with conventional energy. And then finally we have two literature synthesis studies. One of those is focused on gathering information on the impacts of carbon sequestration, and the other is focused on climate change impacts to sensitive species and habitats. The three that we're going to hear about today are we have one, the first two are your social science studies the first is on thinking about offshore wind lease stipulations to improve engagement. And Laura will explain a little bit about what that means. The second study Megan Cornelis said we'll be presenting on evaluating community benefit provisions for offshore renewable energy again thinking about how we can best serve the communities that may be affected. And entirely non-social science related but still very pertinent to offshore wind is looking at how we might use dimethyl sulfide gradients into dynamic management to predict North Atlantic right whale occurrence in the northeast. And Jake Levinson will be presenting on that one. So unless there are any questions, jump right in. I'll take one or two very brief questions if there are any. Seeing none, I think we can turn then to Laura, who I think is joining us virtually is that right. Yes, I'm here. Can you hear me. We can thank you so much Laura great to have you on the line. Great to be here. So I, I'm going to be presenting on assessing the effectiveness of offshore wind we sail stipulations on improving engagement and this has really been a team effort. I've worked closely with, with Megan, who will present next and then our canal fellow from last year Sarah Parkinson. So in 2022, the New York by offshore wind we sail had a first of its kind stipulation included in the final sale notice. And it was requiring less ease to conduct early and regular engagement with tribes and ocean users, underserved communities and other stakeholders collectively that group is now called tribes and parties. And they're also required to submit a semi annual progress report to bone that includes how they've identified those potentially affected by proposed activities updates on engagement activities identification of impacts or benefits. How, if at all a project has been informed or altered by hearing from those populations and any future planned engagement activities. The stipulation also requires that less ease coordinate with one another, when they have a lease in the same area in this case, it was the New York fight. And that the intent really recognized in the stipulation that that the goal was to reduce engagement burdens on tribes and parties. And ever since this is included in the New York fight we sail, it's also been included in following the sales including Carolina Long Bay California and Gulf of Mexico offshore wind sales. Next slide. So the information need we've, we've scoped to is to better understand the effect of the stipulation on the intended goal to make engagement more meaningful and less burdensome. And then through that understanding that to better understand any potential improvements to the stipulation or any other policy mechanisms that could be implemented to complement the stipulation and improve the intended goals. And we're finding this particularly important right now as bone ramps up its offshore wind leasing activities and refines the sales stipulations in advance of upcoming these sales. Next slide. So the objectives of the study are to basically gain an understanding of how less the engagement activities and reporting that were required in this lease sale stipulation is affecting underserved communities, particularly. To determine whether engagement related lease sales stipulations are improving meaningful engagement and reducing the burdens as intended. And then third to develop recommendations for future lease sales stipulations and improve practices for implementing. Next slide. The methods we've developed are two phases. There's going to be a literature review and then focus groups and a survey. And so the first phase would be a literature review and a focus group in one area where there is no stipulation for meaning for improved engagement. And then we would gather perceptions of engagement and what the stipulation might be trying to address. And then the second phase of the study would be an annual survey in a second area where the enhanced engagement stipulation is in effect. We would plan to do that for three years and have quarterly focus groups going together with the survey to get at questions that might help us determine the level of effectiveness of the stipulation in enhancing engagement and reducing burdens. Next slide. So some of our main research questions are what is the effect of the engagement related lease stipulations over time on perceptions of fairness and trust and decisions and projects. What's the effect on inclusiveness, the effect on burden of engagement, and what are the perceptions of potential impacts and opportunities over time. And then the second big research question are are there any improvements bone can make on the sale stipulations or are there any additional policy mechanisms we could implement to complement lease sale stipulations. And then third, are these enhanced engagement requirements in offshore wins stipulations relevant to other bone authorized activities. And how might they be adapted for these specific applications. Next slide. And so I put in a few questions for COSA. If there's any existing research to suffer should build off of. Are there any areas that particularly stand out with with or without stipulations that would be especially useful to compare to maximize our learnings and apply it to future stipulation development. And then are there any suggestions for revisions and the methods that would better address the research question. Thank you. Laura thank you very much for that presentation and I think I'll speak for the whole committee and just saying we appreciate how concise you were in providing that to us I think it, it covered the basis but was exactly what we were looking for so thank you for that. Thank you all for raised hands both in zoom and in the room for folks that would like to ask any questions or make any comments. And I will just remind folks that are on the line that we hope our invited guests will participate in this process as well by raising your hand and providing any feedback. I do see we have several hands going up already. So I'm going to turn. I think we'll do it. Jeremy, Rona less and then David. Good morning and thank you, Laura for that presentation and for for going through and developing I think understanding the stipulations is really could be quite valuable community engagement is critical. I think this is a really tough thing to, to research, because there's a lot of confounding aspects. The states are doing things in the power purchase agreements and so teasing out what the effect of the stipulations are versus what the states are doing versus learning as well so. So, your control is really critical. I'm not sure that that say one focus group. I don't quite know how you're going to pick it. If I think if you're going to do the study I would narrow the focus as I was thinking about this this morning and I would focus on on New York and New Jersey. Because in those states, then you only have two states you also have states that have both pre lease stipulation areas and, and, and then the New York bite ones and so there you might be able to do a better comparison and get rid of some of that. Confounding nature, but I think you may see that developers are learning as they go. So you may not see much of an effect from the stipulations per say it may be difficult. I don't think you're going to be able to that respondents are not going to be able to tell you what the effect of the stipulations are people in communities. They may know what's going on. As far as engagement, they may not, but they won't be able to tell you whether it was the effect of the stipulation whether it was the developers initiative, or whether it was at the behest of a state. So I don't think you're going to get much there. You, I think your best bet is really to in depth interview developers and try to understand what they think the effect has been at the same time you have to understand the developers have some individual incentives, and you may not get a clear picture, because there's a lot of incentives going on. So I think, I think the literature review is is important I don't think you're going to be able to tell you, you're not going to be able to answer questions per say, I think you need to do a little more sharpening of the number of focus groups, one to six is a big huge range. The number of persons who's going to be in those focus groups are going to be really key and my last point really goes to the tribal issues. And I think you may find that the stipulations are a negative and tribes, tribal nations are very much believe that there should be government to government engagement, not necessarily sheltered you know pushed down to the developers it doesn't mean that developers shouldn't engage. But what's going to be key for the tribal governments is the government to government that means bone to the tribal governments, not developers so that that's that's a sort of add on. And I, but so the tribes may see this is just more of an effort by bone to push this down away from bones responsibility to developers you may actually see a negative effect to so could be interesting. Thank you. Thank you Jeremy turn to Rona next. Thanks for that was a really interesting presentation and my question is possibly sort of a naive one. I was wondering whether you were planning to do your phase one and phase two in series like so you know first phase and second phase or whether you were thinking about doing them to at the same time like so that you could be gathering input from different communities under different sets of circumstances but holding like whatever the zeitgeist is at least semi semi constant. Yeah, we're definitely open to feedback on what you think would would get us closest to to answering some of those research question. We're envisioning it as a, as a sequential thing so we do the literature review and do some, some focus groups to understand general problems with engagement that we were hoping the stipulations would address. And then later seeing if the stipulations actually did address those things or not. We definitely see, like, at the same time how things are being implemented differently. Can't quite nothing comes to mind of particular region that would be in the same. The timing of the lease sales and the stipulations that we could compare at the same time. I mean, I'm not knowing a whole lot about about offshore wind but Rhode Island would be a place for getting the no stipulations in place and wind already up sort of view. And another just in view of German comments about the, the tribal impact I think that's probably correct for a lot of tribes but I think individuals living in tribal communities also in my experience value the direct contact with people who are actually doing the work. And so that not everything is in a top down way so I think that bone to tribal government is very important but I wouldn't negate the importance of having the people doing the work on the ground, speaking to the people who are living there. I certainly the people that I know would appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. We'll go to less and then to David. So thanks so much for the presentation. Most of my comments were anticipated by Jeremy and Rona, but there's one thing that really dogs me and and that's that the communities vary in their preparedness and capacity to engage. And they're right now, particularly the sovereign tribal nations, they're undergoing an evolution of trying to have people who are available and in the right position to represent tribal interests. I don't even know what the situation is with other environmental justice communities. So that's a huge covariate. So my question is, how do we take into account where we are nationally in cultivating an engagement process. And what can stipulations do to foster that. Thanks. We'll turn to David and then to Kerry. Good morning, everybody. Thank you very much for the invitation and the opportunity to comment on it. I think it's great that you all are thinking about this and about funding projects to look at this. I'll try to keep my, my comments brief. One is you asked specifically about other studies that might be attained to this. One thing that's something to keep in mind is that the Northeast Sea Grant Consortium has funded several projects in the Northeast US around offshore wind. And a couple of them would be relevant to this, this project and that includes some work that's going on here at URI. One thing that we've been finding that maybe somewhat of a confounding problem is that for a lot of people in communities and for in interest groups. They don't do a great job distinguishing from project to project and that may be in part due to the burden that they face. So it may not always be easy to control as Jeremy was talking about between specific projects. I think you can try to do some of that. I do think control is really important. You might think about controlling for the developer actually in thinking about a particular company like an Orsted that has multiple projects where you can look at one that was done with stipulations in place and one that was without stipulations in place. One thing that is a big concern of mine anytime people talk about engagement or public participation is the need to really define what the goals are and what the criteria are on which you're going to measure effectiveness or enhancing or meaningfulness and what that really means. And that may require more groundwork up front to try to think about what it is that you're really measuring in terms of effectiveness. I think some of the complaints that go on sometimes is that we often think about engagement effectiveness from a really instrumental viewpoint in terms of, you know, did the project get, is the project approved? How long does permitting take? How many lawsuits do we have? But there's lots of different ways of thinking about the effectiveness in terms of sustainability, quality of decisions, sort of democratic values. And I think now there's been a lot of attention to in terms of this idea of justice and how engagement can affect those effects as well. I also just want to reiterate some of the things that Jeremy talked about in terms of methods. You're really going to have to think hard about who the sample is and what the population is that you're trying to draw from. I think Jeremy's right that the general public may have difficulty understanding the difference in this time between stipulations or not. You may want to think about, you know, communities of practice and key contacts. And that sort of begs the question of what kinds of surveys it is that you're going to do and whether surveying is the right method depending on who's the right population to be reaching for these questions. You know, other people have their hands up so I'll stop there. Thank you very much. David, thank you and thank you for joining us. Carrie, I'll turn to you next. Empty. I'm not sure I have a whole lot to add I really appreciate the comments made I also appreciate the concept and the presentation so thanks a lot. I'm going to turn on my camera also so you can see me directly. There we go. Yeah, I guess I really appreciate the comments made I don't have a whole lot to add, I guess. But I do have a couple of things. One of the things that occurred to me as I was reading this and thinking about the notion of focus groups and surveys, whether or not they're an appropriate tool to use in trying to pursue the objectives of this effort. I apologize but it sort of sounds like an additional burden. And so, especially with a focus group commitment, and yet focused discussions around the topic of engagement in this context could be incredibly helpful and fruitful. We have to be very carefully designed and very bounded, in a sense, with appropriate folks at the table and a very clear understanding of sort of the terms of engagement if you will but also settling on definitions of terminology like engagement and community and so on and so forth. I think this also brings to mind the diversity of players in this situation, diversity of developers and there are numerous case studies in, in ocean related context and in some other contexts. Different developers if you will proceed differently handle engagement differently, whether they have stipulations or not. And I think there's a great deal to be learned about what folks have done in a variety of contexts, whether they've had these stipulations articulated or not. And so I would encourage you in seeking to understand this, this landscape or seascape if you will, to be very mindful of that but of course adds a great deal of variability in terms of any particular assessment of impact of stipulations themselves. One other thing and maybe, maybe I, I'm just repeating something that's already considered but I think of engagement as a learning process and I think that's been mentioned, and I would, I would encourage you to think about the learning that goes on all the way around the table in these engagement processes and think about the relevance of that learning, essentially in the process and outcome accomplishments of engagement. And in some cases we have a tendency to think of engagement as a one way how do we communicate to people yeah we want to hear them, but at the end of the day what we really want to do is persuade them, which may be fine. But there's a great deal to be said for this exchange among people, developers and community members variously defined and agency folks and so on, in learning from one another and I've actually seen a little bit of this happen with the California in some of the localized discussions about offshore renewable energy, ocean wind energy development recently. So anyway that's just a couple of additional comments and thank you very much for the opportunity. Mary. Laura, it looks to me like you were taking notes about as furiously as I was. So, I want to give you an opportunity if you have any questions or responses to any of the folks that have spoken, or any sort of additional questions that you'd like to throw out to the group. I don't have anything specific right now I just thank you all so much for all of your feedback I'm going to, we're going to obviously think really hard about the focus groups and surveys, and whether how to make them most appropriate for the research questions and so. Yeah, if anybody thinks of anything. Feel free to email me ideas. As we kind of try and re scope this a bit to make sure we're, we're getting the information we were seeking. So thank you. I have a process question this is actually an excellent discussion it's you know, great job Laura and staying in keeping it concise and cogent great questions from our group, we had a lot of feedback given. I'm thinking ahead here, Laura offered to take questions via email but I'm also looking to our, our friends from bone, how would you like questions to come in or a comment additional comments because we'll probably get other situations during the meeting for further for further feedback we can't catch in the meeting, do you want it to come to you to pass on to the to the authors or how do you want to. I'm looking at Rodney and Jessica here. Okay, well, I guess let's make it consistent, because that will be most efficient. So, Dr john Lilly sitting behind me comments coming in. I think john you can coordinate, and then we can get those to the right people so I think if you do that, send them to Dr Lily and include me and Jessica will be helpful because that way nobody nothing will slip to the cracks and some might be at a level that maybe Jessica or I or somebody else needs to weigh in and other right. Right. Thank you for that. Absolutely. And the National Academy staff is happy to coordinate that as well. I'll just add that we, we do have some invited guests that we're not able to join us today who plan to who either already have a plan to put it in feedback as well so we'll make sure we get that to you. And with that. Thank you so much Laura will move on to our second profile, which is the evaluating community benefit provisions for offer renewable energy, and we'll have Megan presenting I believe Megan is online as well. I am. Can you hear me. We can thanks Megan. Okay. And are you guys projecting slides or shall I. It looks like we have them up for you. Okay, we can go ahead and do it unless you would prefer to. If you're able to that's perfect I can, I can say next slide next slide. Perfect. Yeah, we've got them. I think that's Laura's presentation. The same one. Would it be better if I go ahead and share my screen. Oh I see it down there underneath couple, couple down. Yeah. Okay, thank you. So yeah, thanks for having me my name's Megan for Nielsen and I'll be presenting this profile on community benefit provisions for offshore renewable energy. Laura and I worked on this profile together. We are both social scientists in the division of environmental assessment in the office of environmental programs. We can go ahead to the next slide please. Some background on community benefit provisions as we're considering for this study as defined by Bristol at all community benefits are some form of additional positive provisions for the area and people affected by a major development. These provisions are typically negotiated between developers and local or state entities or are provided voluntarily by project developers as part of their corporate social responsibility portfolios. Some examples include negotiated agreements such as community benefit agreements or host community agreement. They can also include direct investment such as investing for example in a training program at a local community college. I want to clarify that by benefit provisions we're referring to, like I said some form of additional kind of directed positive provisions beyond the beneficial impacts of an action such as employment. As such they are not typically included in environmental analysis of specific actions. An important note to make here also is that bomb does not have statutory authority to mandate community benefit provisions or have a whole lot of you know financial implementation or enforcement authority. So these are kind of typically agreements between like I said communities and developers. What we can do bomb can do as the lead federal agency for offshore energy development is provide resources and serve in in a convening role. So that's kind of laying we're in for this study, we can jump to the next slide please. Right so why does bomb need information on community benefits. We're hearing a lot about this topic from a number of directions where we often hear in public meetings from stakeholders and community members that their community should benefit from specific projects. We've also heard repeatedly from community based organizations about the importance of considering procedural and distributed equity considerations around community benefits. The groups have also indicated a desire for benefit provisions to be included in analysis and to be more a piece of the picture. So like I said we're being asked to engaged in these conversations kind of from a number of fronts. We also recognize that directing benefits to underserved communities is broadly part of a just energy transition, which as we know is currently an administration priority. As Kosa and others are aware and as we've heard from from Rodney and others bomb has other emerging program areas we will need to engage on now and in the future. And this study well it's written to focus on renewable energy could provide useful information or a study model for other programs. We can go to the next slide please. So this slide is messy and I won't spend a lot of time here. This is just some additional background information. You can see a few examples of recent news headlines on established community benefit provisions just to get a little sampling of what's out there. And then I included a virtual whiteboard from a brainstorming exercise that was part of a discussion exploring topics around community benefit mechanisms. A recent environmental justice forum for the New York fight when leases. Some of the themes expressed here center on process or pathways by which benefit mechanisms are developed transparency and accountability throughout the entire process including through implementation of benefit programs. Recommendations for best practices for working collaboratively with communities on developing profit benefit provisions. So you can get a sense that there is a lot going on already in the space and a high level of interest in the topic. Next slide please. Okay, so the study objectives that you can see are to provide a comprehensive understanding of the content of community benefit provisions and the process by which they have been implemented for offshore renewable energy in the US and abroad. These include themes, issues of concerns, typical benefits, potential lessons learned and good practices from existing benefit programs. Provide information on impacts of community benefit provisions that can inform environmental assessments. Help phone better communicate its role and authority in response to calls for community benefits during engagement with impacted communities. And also impact on good practice principles for community benefit provisions. We can go to the next slide please. Okay, so the methods of the study consists of a literature review, a systematic review of existing community benefit provisions and targeted direct engagement with individuals familiar with a subset of the benefit provisions who can speak to outcomes and impacts of the existing programs. And we know that we may know if the study continues to progress we may adjust the methods to really build off and complement other existing research efforts. We've had some fairly recent conversations with colleagues at the Department of Energy Wind Energy Technologies Office and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory about a somewhat similar study that they're conducting and we would certainly continue coordination. The study moves forward to, you know, continue to provide value to the information learned. We plan to cast a wide net with the literature review and include information from other industries, including oil and gas as well as other geographic areas beyond the United States. We would collect as much information as possible related to existing benefit provisions. Work with a researcher to agree on a method of systematic analysis of materials to explore topics, such as how the, you know, programs came about where they voluntary on the part of the developer tied to a local land use approval, etc. The avenues of benefit disbursements, beneficiaries, and also potentially key groups who did not receive benefits, if that proves to be a topic of to explore subsequent information on outcomes and impacts, you know, for published information on existing programs. And finally, as I said, the study would follow up on outcomes by engaging directly with a subset of individuals who can speak directly to certain programs. The information would be synthesized into a report that could provide the basis for good practice resources that bone can make available. And then provide sort of, like we said, help us engage in this topic that people are asking us to engage on. We can go to the next slide please. Okay, so the research questions, as you can see, or what sort of equity programs have been implemented to date in the US and abroad. Are the lessons learned from existing efforts? What are the pathways by which benefit mechanisms get developed? How do community benefit provisions affect the outcomes, perceptions of effectiveness and fairness and other metrics? Should community benefit provisions be considered in environmental analysis? And if so, how? What principles or good practices can bone identify to related to community benefit provisions that can be provided to our stakeholders? And a final potential question that Joan here could be, you know, what additional efforts could be made to address outstanding gaps in research or capacity to engage in this topic. So with that, I'm happy to hear it feedback from the committee and take any questions and I would invite Laura also to jump in if you'd like to. Thank you. Thank you so much, Megan. Thank you. I was having a difficult time getting my microphone on. I will take a moment now to look for hands and I can see there's a number already. So we'll start with Hillary and then Jeremy, Rona, and then Rob Griffin. Hi everyone. Thanks for the opportunity. My name is Hillary Boudin. I'm at Oregon State University. I had a couple of comments about the literature review. So I think that first of all, I think this topic is really important. And so I'm glad you're focused on it as part of the studies development plan. And one of the things that you mentioned is doing like a broader literature view into the CSR literature and good governance literature and I actually think there's probably enough coming out of Europe and other places and and onshore develop from onshore development using community benefits agreements and community benefits funds that you could probably get enough out of that literature without having to go to a broader literature around this topic. Including lots of stuff about best practices from international development and also even urban development around stadiums and things like that. So I think what might be more useful is to think specifically about what's different related to offshore versus onshore and and I think that might be a really good focus for that. And then the other thing that I wanted to mention is there's quite a bit in there about process and the process of development developing the community benefits agreements. I think another thing to focus on would be timing and when those negotiations occur and because there's particularly out here in Oregon there's some concern about timing of talking about community benefits. Well, there's still concern about the lease areas the actual location of the lease areas and so I think it might be interesting to look at timing in addition to process. Thank you. Thank you very much, Hillary. Next on the list, I'll call on Jeremy. And then we've got quite a long group after that so I'm just going to ask folks to try to keep their comments. Fairly brief so that we can ensure that all of the folks with their hands raised have an opportunity. Good morning. Again, I would echo that I think this is a really critical study and I'm really glad to see that it's relatively high up on the, the priority list. I would recommend highly the written comments of Claire Haggett and and Bonnie Ram, who both submitted written comments very, very detailed, particularly Claire's. I think you've got really good research questions I think that's a strength of this proposal. I think that equity may be almost a separate study. I think the budget is quite small overall. And you may need a larger budget. It may be duplicative of what DOE is in the process of funding to so they're going to at least announce probably internally those awards to the winners maybe in August. You might be able to get coordinate with your your friends in WEDO to find out what exactly those are so that you can perhaps fill some gaps, rather than being duplicative. One thing you didn't mention is recognition justice. And one of the issues is who's not included. So you're you've got a lot of emphasis on what who who's getting these but who's not getting these and and why. And that's a lot of the justice question as well. So with that, I'll turn it over because there is a long list of people. Thank you. There is, which is wonderful. Thank you. We'll go to Rona, Rob, David, Gavin and then Carrie. Thanks Megan for a really interesting presentation and it's a very important project. Okay. Somebody's not there's somebody in the room. There we go. So a couple of things one I would like to see a little bit more detail and I'm sure this is stuff that you're thinking about on on how you would collect the information about what community provisions projects there are out there because I imagine that there's an enormous change in how these things are reported and documented and and what can be found where and and that is related to my second point which is about the scale I imagine that there is a vast difference in the scale of some of these projects. And that would be a really important thing to bear in mind that the also the ratio the relationship between scale of project and scale of community because those things may not also be directly correlated. If that makes sense. Thanks for that. We'll turn to Rob. I'm Rob Griffin with UMass Dartmouth and natural capital project at Stanford. Thanks for the invitation to speak on this interesting topic. I have some longer comments, but hopefully be able to share them with you by just encapsulate sort of main theme I'm thinking of when I was reading this was that maybe some orientation and the objectives around taking a step back and not presupposing that the idea of including community benefits is a good idea in the first place. And I'm thinking about this from the perspective of, you know, they can be costly for a segment of societies that is being affected. And in the slide to slide show there was the example of $180 million community benefit projects and, you know, that's 10% or roughly there of the cost of an entire capital cost of an operations cost of entire wind farm and you know that could raise the prices for other areas could potentially delay the construction or, you know, implementation of these projects just due to higher costs and so you know we don't get all the benefits that we might from reduced climate change effects, etc. So taking a step back and thinking, you know, considering this is in a thick market where there's lots of options for developers and they're kind of, you know, to some extent, subjected to monopoly type conditions where these coastal communities have a large influence over what they can do. And, you know, those sorts of conditions aren't ripe for efficient outcomes from an economics perspective generally and so my recommendations here are to include some thinking about whether this makes sense at all and what objective is supporting by, you know, implicitly endorsing this potentially or normalizing the process of doing this. And then also to, you know, to ideally have some folks with in economics background as part of the consulting team doing this because there's a lot of potential bad incentives here and inefficiencies and it appears to be linked partly now to the sales stipulation process which has got a lot of other reasons for concern, you know, given that that's a whole different animal and it's complicated on its own. Thanks for giving me the time. Appreciate it. Thanks for joining us Rob. Next we'll turn to David and then to Gavin and then Carrie. Hi. Yeah, this is such necessary research right now the phrase that's being bantered around around community benefits is Wild West at this point. And so anything that sort of catalogs what's happening. I would say that while Boa may not have a great deal of jurisdiction for requiring community benefits I think part of this review could be what sort of policy structures have been used in other places in terms of regulating or coming up with criteria for community benefits because I know some European countries have guidelines and guidance or regulation. Okay, another important component is overall this idea of defining community. And when we talk about community benefits we have to understand whether we're talking about geographic communities, communities of interest, or particularly you think about some of the work on communities at sea, and what that means in terms of who is who is accruing costs and who's accruing benefits. And then just one more comment. The budget is, is relatively small but this may be an opportunity to really think in terms of like comparative case study methods. Instead of trying to find out what's going on everywhere but coming up with some sort of criteria for selecting cases, and then really understanding what was done how things were defined and what outcomes are perceived just having come from that. Thank you, David. Next we'll hear from Gavin and then Carrie. And thanks for the opportunity to talk. My name is Gavin, you messed up with socio ecological systems model ecosystem modeling. I think this is I just echo what other people said I think this is really critical project in terms of thinking about issues and how to include them. I think the idea of creating this from bones perspective of having a resource that is available. I think that's really, really seems like it would be useful. I think echoing some of what Jeremy and Hillary said about perhaps stressing trying to think about what's different about this, rather than other things I think is really valuable and I think that includes perhaps you know, can you think when you're doing your review, can you think of ways of ensuring that things that haven't worked or haven't happened, haven't happened before are still considered in this process. I know that's really hard to do. But, you know, if there's an avenue within this project for thinking about, you know, some transformative type work that could be different from what's happened before because, you know, we may have we met we certainly are dealing with populations and socio economic systems that are slightly different from other places. And I think thinking how we can represent that is good. I think the idea of thinking about expected outcomes being able to document those so for the various community benefits mechanisms. I think really, you know, if this project could sort of map those to what the expected outcomes of those might be and how they might interact with other mechanisms or other socio economic or even ecological objectives or on including costs and who's been bearing those costs as David just said I think that would be really, you know, a valuable to outcome for one of the better word for the for the project. So, yeah, really glad to see this. Thanks, Kevin carry. Yeah, thanks very much, Megan, and, and commenters before me for your, for your comments. This is all been really great a lot of what I had in mind has been covered I'll touch on a few quick points. Who is the community. There are many different communities, and some people fit in multiple communities. So, society is super complex, and in this context, you have communities place and interest the communities at sea etc. Thinking about the relevance of that understanding to the notion of community benefit agreements and in evaluating this idea and pursuing this work, I think is really worthwhile. I had a short note about equity versus community benefit agreements and I think some I think Jeremy you pointed out that equity is a different as a whole nother study. Maybe it wasn't Jeremy but someone did and it was great. And what I've heard from these agreements being developed in in various contexts to date. There's been a whole lot of contention, excuse me around some of them, and it's sort of who's in who's out and that point was raised as well. I think in looking to the literature and seeking to understand what these experiences have been so far, and what might be appropriate to develop in the way of guidance going forward let's say or other mechanisms. I think it would be really helpful to address timing issues process issues. Who is included and who is not and how that is handled. And then recognizing that there are many different communities, so to speak. And again, I hate using this word that have a stake in in community benefit agreements and how that might play out. And I think it's a really complicated beast and I think it's important that that be reckoned with and this is a great opportunity to do that. Being careful not to start from the get go of having very discrete categories of things and looking to understand where there may be overlap or connectedness within and among these different notions of community and how that would play out for community agreements and ultimately, you know the who's in who's out also has implications for how, how benefits are distributed and how costs are distributed. And that's been touched on a bit I think that's a critical element of every aspect of what bones involved in really. And so to be able to to look at this and incorporate that understanding into this look at things that community benefit agreements would be would be really worthwhile. That's it. Thanks. Thank you. And Megan I want to make sure to give you an opportunity to either respond to any of the feedback you've heard or to ask any follow up questions as well. Thank you. And you, you've given me a lot given us a lot to think through so we really appreciate that and I'm looking forward to receiving the written comments as well. Just one point and I'll throw it out there just if there's not time to answer that's fine but you know we were I was, you know, we were kind of keeping this pretty broad and not necessarily focusing right on these negotiated agreement pieces and trying to you know, these other kind of voluntary investment efforts that developers might be involved with. Would what would cause you know what would everybody's kind of reaction be to that because I feel like the discussion has jumped straight to you know looking at that kind of more formalized negotiated agreements versus kind of keeping it pretty broad. But it doesn't have to answer, but if one person has time to take it, I would appreciate that. I'll give a moment for any hands. There's fun. Um, thanks Megan for grounding us again. And that's really helpful actually I for one would. I think thinking more broadly is really valuable. Partly because you can use one mechanism, if you prioritize one mechanism where you look at just one mechanism, and what's been accomplished or not and what can be learned from that I think that can be really valuable but there are a lot of ways of doing things. There are a lot of contexts, right. And so, and sometimes the other types of arrangements, perhaps less formal are actually more productive, and more satisfying to different groups of people and might not engender the same kind of tension might still engender that but but it's it's worth a consideration. So if I'm understanding you correctly I'm appreciating it and I think thinking broadly is worthwhile especially because even for different ways of doing things. There are a lot of design principles if you will that can be distilled from different types of arrangements and different processes and just seeing how they've played out and learning from people who have had that experience. So, thank you. Did anybody else want to provide Megan any feedback on that before we get ready to break for the lunch. David go ahead. I just, I agree with Kerry I mean I think it's good to go broad and in some ways that becomes an empirical question, right. Are the formal CVAs better or worse, or really basically the same as these other kinds of arrangements. And Hillary I'll give you the last word. Yeah, I just, I, a word of caution is that literature is very big. So I think, you know, just still. But it might be that the, the best practices and principles are very similar. So, you know, I don't. It would be a, you know, kind of a look see first I think to see are you going to gain a lot more from, from adding all that to your review, or, yeah. Or get the same thing back. Thank you each we have made up a fair bit of time over the last couple of profiles, and this is always the uncomfortable part of our meetings where we are in person meetings. We break for lunch and unfortunately I have to tell the feds in the room that we cannot eat you. So we do have lunch for the committee members catered. We do have an hour for lunch. And if it makes a difference to those that have to go out to get any we'll make sure to start back at 140 instead of 130 instead of 135 so please take the extra five minutes. But we look forward to joining then my suggestion for folks that are on the zoom is that you just go ahead and turn off your camera and you're the mics in the room but if you prefer to log out and log back in you're welcome to do that as well. And for those on the line. Thank you for joining. We will reconvene at 140. Welcome back to our annual meeting focused on committee input to the studies development plan process for bone. The most folks that were on that are on the line were with us for this morning session as well. But we've covered two of the profiles coming out of the office of environmental programs. And now in our post lunch session will turn to the third from them and I think I'm turning to Jake for that. If you're ready. We might be missing one or two folks in the room but hopefully they'll be able to join us shortly and I'd like to keep us as on time as possible. Go right ahead. Sounds good. Can you hear me okay and everything. Great. Well, you know, it's exciting to be able to present. Oh it's weird to see myself on screen. Okay. You know one thing I really enjoy about working in OEP is how we're always striving to find better ways to do our assessments. It's something that I learned early in my, my career with bone and what I really like about studies is how we always push ourselves to do sort of comprehensive and innovative that's still cost effective. And I think you'll find this study on using dimethyl sulfide gradients to predict North Atlantic right wheel occurrence sort of follows that same same theme of innovative cost effective and really top notch science. And so I thought what I what I'm hoping to share from this is that they give you a brief run through to the study obviously. And that what I hope and I think the stakeholders that submitted this as a study concept. Another tool is that the study can fill an important niche in in right what we do for mitigating impacts North Atlantic right whales and one where we'll hopefully have another tool to really predict the occurrence of these critically endangered species with finer temporal and spatial accuracy than the tools we currently currently have. So let's go into it here. So the information need. Why do we need to study really much of the on the water mitigation methods are limited to reactive approaches there in animal peers in the area and we react accordingly. What I mean by that is by the time they're detected in real time passive acoustic monitoring or detected in visual observations, it's sort of like a surprise I'm here kind of moment. It's already occurred the animals already in the area. And it's important to point out here that mother calf pairs are the most susceptible to vessel collisions, but using passive acoustic monitoring which which we depend on highly for mitigation is limited for this segment of the population in fact, Susan parks has a great paper about the process some years ago in North Atlantic right whales and this segment of population that's most vulnerable ship strikes are not very acoustically active. So it's concerning because in any endangered species it's the moms that have a critical role in stabilizing the population. And so what is the study objective and research question here. It's to identify the thresholds of DMS concentrations that we can we can use to predict aggregations and dissipation of North Atlantic right whales and basically can we use DMS to identify where those thresholds are at which these animals aggregate. So what is DMS. Now the, the 12 year old immature boy that sits on my shoulder whenever I read these things would say to you, it's say it's plankton farts, but that's not what it is. It's, it's a gas that's used to maintain the internal osmotic pressure and phytoplankton. When zooplankton consume phytoplankton, the level of DMS increases, and right whales seem to show up whenever DMS density and zooplank density reaches a certain threshold. So what about DMS is that it's detectable from space, but also sensors in the field that can be vessel based or a UV based or whatever or even really based. Imagine sensors that we can have they are constantly monitoring this fluctuating gas. And I think what's really important here to see is that North Atlantic right whale behavior makes visual observation challenging even on the calmest days. This is a video a friend of mine took during a glass calm day during Michael Moore and Carolyn Miller's photogrammetry research and Cape Cod Bay. Now this is a glass calm day. And what you really can't see here is the right wheel that's just off the bat and sort of see it right there just surfacing. But these animals, even on the best case circumstances are really hard to spot. And even with a drone image here that you'll see in a second, you can see the animals that hang out just below the surface of the water. But even drones have a limited endurance for visual observation. And it's pretty clear that right whales can be easily missed in visual protections. So how would we go about doing this study. We continuously monitored DMS values and water and count whales along a track. And so we conduct the same track before North Atlantic right whales aggregate starting in January every other week. And count whales add survey data and collect DMS data with the goal of identifying those thresholds those DMS threshold the DMS the finer DMS thresholds that we can identify that identify the aggregation or dissipation of animals so what is the DMS value like just before right whales show up and what's it like right when they leave. So we ground truth this data with with, we would use remote sensing data and ground truth the data that we collect on the vessel to look at, can we get finer scale predictions out of what we collect currently that's remote says remote remotely sense basically refine that algorithm to work matter, which we know works for other other areas as well. I guess what I wanted to show what I wanted to show you know when I first presented the study at for bone a couple year or two ago now. We wanted to do, you know, do some pilots because this seemed like a sort of out there idea with a lot of risk to it. And so what we believe really is that animals are actively using the info gradient years you actively using smell to find those dense patches of prey. So here's bone and know of supported pilot studies looking at DMS and the occurrence of copepod feeding whales. And so we have had three or four different studies on copepod feeding whales Cape Cod Bay in 2021 and 22 right whales that are south of the island south of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket in 2022. And also in 22 we did a bone funded study on say whales in at the Stelwagon bank National Marine Sanctuary. This slide here will show you a map. And what you're looking at here is the combined results of a few of these studies, mainly combining the say whale and right whale surveys. So the green yellow and red represent concentrations of DMS and the black or blue X's represent say and right whale occurrences. So what you can see here is that most of those X's if you look closely are occurring in areas where there is high, high DMS. If you look at that top left of the photo you can see the blue check marks for say whales and down to the bottom there, where the red circles are you can see the black check marks for right whales, looking at correlation with those two, two animals, or two, two, two values. And so, really, my point in this presentation is that it's going to sound cheesy or maybe it sounds a little cliche but we can do better, and we can do better for right whales, you know seasonal limitations have their limits, and we now know right whales are largely around all the time there, we've seen several papers that have observed them visually and detected them acoustically. And then acoustic monitoring in our, you know, which is an important aspect of our, our mitigation toolbox that we have. It doesn't, it may not address the mother and calves most at risk of vessel strikes. You know we have tools like satellite monitoring but you know in real time or on cloudy days or timelessness timeliness, it may not be effective. And so we can be doing more to enable effective dynamic management of right whales and wind energy areas using dimethyl sulfide and so using the study to, to identify what those thresholds are is the next sort of obvious question of step in the way to make this a reality. So that's really, that's my presentation and, and having to take any questions. Thank you so much, Jake. I'm going to look around the room and online to see if there are any hands. Hi, hi Jake thanks for for a good presentation I think it's really exciting. Broadly, to be able to use this to predict locations of aggregations of top predators not just right whales, I'm partial to right whales but I think other organisms in the habitat might be also of interest right like other other top predators that be feeding on it. I had two quick questions for you one is, could you provide any more detail about the potential for satellite remote sensing of DMS. So sort of like vessel based surveys would be sort of, you know, slow and to cover a region but if you had any other information about the remote sensing with satellite and the potential for that. So I have some remote sensing information is funny. I, I cut out a couple of my slides because I was worried about time. And of course, my remote sensing satellite slide is one of the ones that I deleted that I wish I could pull up right now. So if you don't mind Susan, can I can I follow up with you by email with that information I don't know if I have a whole lot of great information except for, you know, been in touch with the folks at NASA that have been doing the the remote sensing analysis and have a few papers and things like that. So I think that's really interesting, you know, fine tuning the algorithm to to get better predictions. We've just had conversations about that conceptually. And so I don't have, you know, a whole lot of really clear methods and how that would work right in front of me. Okay, yeah, no, I mean I think that's totally fine but I think it's something to keep in mind like with the if you're getting baseline data would be really useful to directly to connect that to the existing models like the DMS models right now just use. I think chlorophyll A and the photosynthetically available radiation so there are already sensors that are there so that would be really interesting. The second quick question I wanted to just ask about to is so you talk about the concentration threshold for DMS for these aggregations. And I also wonder about including temporal aspects of the DMS. So when you're doing these these linear transects you're getting a snapshot and you're getting snapshots of the animal presence but presumably if it's being released through grazing of the phytoplankton there may also be a dial trend right like with movement in the water column. And so the time of day might actually matter if you're doing vessel based visual surveys you're also probably just out during the day and relatively calm sea states and so just thinking about getting some data on the temporal at variation of the DMS would be really helpful as well. Thank you guys. Somebody else here's that sounds. I was kind of struggling to hear some of Susan I just want to make sure that wasn't just my head. We had some noise interruption here in the room. So thank you for bearing with us as we get that taken care of. We've got less Katrina and Kevin. Let's turn to you next. Yeah, hi Jake that was that was a great presentation. What impresses me about this study is that my understanding. It's going for exactly the data that are needed to perfect the algorithm for going from chlorophyll a to DMS, because we're not detecting DMS remotely directly. And so this is like a surgical operation to improve that link. And, and I can't imagine anything more important right now our models for a white right well distribution don't take into account non feeding activities and knowing where they last fed can help with that tremendously. Right. Yeah, thanks less. Thank you less. We've got a few more folks with their hands up we'll go to Katrina, Kevin, and then Matt. Yeah, thanks that was really interesting. I was wondering sort of what is the time delay that you would have between actually processing any kind of remotely sense signal between knowing that actual location knowing the threshold and then maybe going there and ground troops that the way it was really there. So, so I don't know if we have a clear answer to that question. Okay, that's part of I think would have to be part of the research obviously. Okay, but that's, that's like the first reaction that people often ask me when I, when we talk about this is that that what is that temporal delay and so that would absolutely be. It's a great question and would have to be part of it. So for ground troops and you could probably figure this out by having, you know, vessels in the area or comparing it was the pan data or something like right, but if you want to use this as a response tool or something like this when let's say something happens and then you need to know where the whales were. Yeah, if you need to that. So that time delay might become more critical. I think we need to continue right we obviously we do the study and answer some of those questions about the time delay and, and, and refining the remote sensing before it can be obviously become any kind of mitigation to work and like that. Yeah, of course. So yeah, so there are a bunch of questions to answer. Thanks that that I was, I knew that question was going to come up and Hi, Jacob. Thank you very much for the presentation. So I got a couple of questions the first relates to your, your, your map where it looked like there were some red dots that did not have access or associated with them. Is that right. Yeah, so, yeah, that's a good point. So, there are definitely occurrences of where DMS was detected and whales weren't detected. The majority of when the DMS is high whales are detect whales are detected more often than not so part of refining the detectability there would have to come in and understand this is a very broad map right now. I think it needs to be, you know, if we could tighten up what those thresholds are that would be what would the study would accomplish. Right. And you think that perhaps some of that might be observer error on the fact you can't see the whales not that they're not there. They have ability bias or anything like that. But there's, there's no other way that this gas is released than feeding. Not that I know of. Not, not that I know. The second question I have, I was talking to Stormy Mayo who works on right whales a lot and has presented to this committee before. And he was telling me that the work they're doing, it really seems that the right whale needs to feed on on aggregation. So these copepods like like high. Yeah, there's a threshold to how viable it is for the animal for feeding those maps is just very wide distribution of copepod aggregations I mean they're, I was surprised to see it because I thought that the copepods would be much more aggregated do you think that reflects the aggregation of it or I think it does I love stormy's research and stormy and I've had a ton of conversations about the getting to zooplane is density, where it's energetically worthwhile to feed. I think that those maps, I mean, just my gut tells me I think that that is relevant of density. There would be big gaps in density I don't know what the timeframe is there though between the check marks in this in this map. I don't know offhand so it could be that that we're looking at, you know, that like the southern right whale track there. I'm not sure what the timeline is on those red, you know, what the red is to the to compare to the dots that are seen the VX is that are seen there. Hey, thank you. Yeah, no problem. That's a good question. Thank you, Kevin. Matthew. Yeah, hi. Thanks for the presentation and for the invitation to talk here with you all. A lot of my work was on my PhD work was on DMS in the marine food web. And so this is really exciting work to to see be brought to to serve a management funding discussion like this. I will say that to me it seems as though like there's there's still a debate in the literature if and how these large whales can sense anything with their olfactory or gussetory senses. So how they use chemical senses at all. They have reduced olfactory neuro anatomy. So presumably they are able to detect this stuff but even that is not certain at this time. And so I was wondering if there were any plans because I think what would be really neat about to use this DMS in sort of a modeling framework where you look at the power of including these DMS concentrations in model predictive models for right whale presence. And you can use things like abiotic variables like the symmetry or ocean temperature or things like that. Biotic variables of indicative of lower trophic level activity like chlorophyll A DMS. And then combine it with passive acoustics even though they tend to be quiet they're sightings things like that. They're not from the US West Coast that do this pretty pretty well. Like if you're familiar with whale safe calm. That's the whale. That's the really really cool sort of modeling products. And it includes predictive ocean initiative funds on the west coast to mitigate ship strike to blue whales and it includes predictive forward looking models using abiotic and biode variables and it'd be really really need to do this something like this to add this to the west coast. The sensor ability to detect these DMS aggregate you know sort of accumulations there or to use this on to use that modeling framework on the east coast for right whale so is anything like that being done. You know it's great to hear you say that because I'm smiling I don't need to have a goofy science geek smile right now I kind of can't help it because really my vision in my head when I close my eyes and picture that that sort of what that dynamic dashboard is it's similar to what's going on in the west coast you know with like remember Elliott Hayes and whale watch stuff. Yeah, that same thing. So when I when I close my eyes and I think about what is what do we do for right whales it's that it's that dynamic dashboard that brings in all those factors together. You know, in a one stops shop, because right now these, you know these products are scattered all over the place. And, you know, it wouldn't be cool to bring in everything that you just said but also, you know be able to like, you know, look back because we have right well, you know, survey history and passive acoustic monitoring history and all that stuff to go back and look at you in historical correlations and whatnot in the data as well so I guess for financial and capacity reasons and things like that. That sort of dashboard view isn't included in this. But if if I could, you know, snap snap my fingers and make all the money appear. You know in the world and that that would be the sort of the next step for me. It's nice to hear you think along those same lines. Yeah, I see there's a comment in the well chat here where it basically says that yeah DMS is this kind of this link between these lower level processes a biotic processes basically like why whales might aggregate in certain areas. It would be really interesting to to basically add this into the models that it seems like they may already exist for right wells I haven't seen a lot of them but I'm more of a West Coast. You know, I don't know as much as what's going on the East Coast at this level of detail but yeah adding DMS in there and seeing how it improves model accuracy or model performance would be really cool to see if DMS would be management ready to add this into a management level. I guess right now it sort of strikes me as more basic science which is really interesting, but I'm unclear to me how management ready it is at this time but it. Yeah, no I agree with you this is sort of answering those sort of basic questions that we need to answer first but and then feed them into the into the models. I think this has huge West Coast with ability to I was focusing this on right whales because the priority. You know, you know, for the right whales but I mean you know we know about the correlations with birds and other predators and so there's a lot that would this would all fit into for sure. Great well yeah happy to chat more with you all if you ever want to get in touch offline. I work with Ellie and those folks over at NOAA on the West Coast and I'm sure they be applying this type of stuff on the East Coast if there were interest or funding to do so so anyway. Great opportunity great to be here. Great thanks for the questions. Matthew thank you for joining us. I'm going to turn next to Scott, Rona and then less. So that's a very interesting presentation thanks. Thanks very much Jake and I want to follow up on question for Kevin asked and then that one, a point that Susan made. So Kevin noted there was there were some red dots, which I guess are the high concentrations of DMS, where there are no whales. There's also down there in the corner, some green dots where there's a look like there's a lot of whales. And so it's the era where the blow up is right the blow up green dots where there's a lot. Yeah, there's a bunch of checks with the green dots. Yeah, with the inside. Yeah, so so you got kind of. I'm just kind of just just as I look at this data here I'm not quite getting the sense that the correlation is all that great. Well, what this isn't showing is that the lack of whales when there's no DMS so like when there's no DMS and years where there's no DMS. Times when there's no DMS there are no whales in the data. Okay, so good. So the, the, and the other my other question kind of gets to Susan's which is the romance of this struck me as the proposal was the remote sensing aspect that you could like do this from space and we could, we could get big survey of information. Yep, is the, it's also one of the most expensive proposals in the, in the plan. Yep, not this I think it may be the second most expensive proposal. I'm just trying to, is it to get more data of the type we're seeing right here there's kind of ship, ship and I think it's, or is it to, is it to include the remote sensing study aspects as well what's, it's, well I think mainly in the, in the cost proposal how I count to the 1.9 was the, if there's a lot of vessel and a UV based. So, so the testing of the kind of the romance part of it the the remote sensing stuff is not part of this proposal. There's definitely a remote sensing element but it's the majority of the cost came from the vessel and a UV based. What's the remote sensing element is it. Oh, offhand I don't have the budget in front of me here. I'm sorry what what you mean what cost wise or what, what did you know what's the scope of the work if the satellite I mean there was some mentioned about the satellite remote sense. It's really just to ground so basically to take the, what we ground truth what we did but what we sample in the, in the field to ground truth by was detected early. That's really the, the limitation of the remote sensing stuff now. Okay, thank you. Thank you. I'll turn next to run up. This is really, really interesting stuff and not something I know much about my question is in part. And this speaks also to what Matthew was saying about linking with a biopic of biopic factors are current is current activity explicitly brought into your thinking about how these. I presume the cocoa pods will get wrapped up like currents and so the diamond and so I would get wrapped in currents. And then are these. It's easy to spot by the plankton aggregations cross space right and I don't know whether coca pods automatically show up wherever they're fight a plankton balloons. But are there ways to use remote sensing data and other visual indicators that might be easier to access than the dynamic of software remote sensing data to tie into some of the field data you're collecting and think about ways to figure out where these coca pod aggregation files. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I don't have a good answer for that offhand, but I'm just I'm writing this down. I'm thinking and writing down at the same time. Sorry. Because when when this profile is coming forward, we were looking at why couldn't we use chlorophyll and and what would be the differences between DMS and chlorophyll and getting to that finer temporal and spatial outlook, but I don't have a good answer for you. Thank you, Rona less less you're muted. Thanks, Stacy. I'm not directly involved in this study but I am a member of the Stelwagen Bank sanctuary research team so we discuss this a lot. And I just wanted to point out that even though the proposal is not that explicit about the remote sensing side. The sanctuary staff are extremely adept at that and thinking about it all the time. And I'm quite certain that that link would be a major part of the work. Excellent. Any other questions or comments thoughts in the room. Any other questions comments or thoughts online. I understand that Mary boatman who's presenting the introductions or the O rep group maybe running a few minutes behind. So I think what we will do in that case is go ahead with the profile presentation from the office of renewable energy programs. And we'll give Mary the opportunity to do her introduction as soon as we heard the profile. So with that, if you're ready I think john's online to present is that right. And he's presenting on brand engines. So, I think we may have some folks on the line that are not muted to if I could just ask folks to please mute yourself if you are not speaking. And john will give you the opportunity to go and then we'll allow Mary her time as soon as we've concluded with the profile itself. Okay, can you hear me. We can and it's very good to see you. Great, great. I am in circus New York just finishing my annual leave. Hi everyone. I am john primo a senior social scientist with the national office of environmental studies. I am presenting in place of my colleague Brandon Jensen the profile and PowerPoint are his work. And I'm happy to help out as he's on leave. I'm going to provide a short summary of the presentation and then we'll open it up for questions. Next slide please. Okay, as many of you know, the Gulf of Maine is of increasing interest for wind development. We have a complex and rich ecosystem with various fisheries of significance. The least of wishes is not or is not ground fish. We are particularly interested in cotton lobster and developing offshore wind. We're interested in understanding the significance of the parameters of these fisheries spatially and temporally, as well as their dynamics through time. We're also interested in their social historic context to adequately account for them in the planning process. We found out that fishers environmental knowledge FEC provides a great avenue to strengthen what we know about these fisheries from landings data beacon data and various modeling efforts. Next slide please. As bench as mentioned bone relies on a diversity of information to understand our country's fisheries. In the last 20 years there's been a rise in interest in the use of cultural and data, cultural information on the environment to provide context to enhance our understanding of historical conditions to better understand trends and changes over time. As well as contemporary conditions and insights to what might happen in the future, not just generally but also with regard to things like climate change. And the knowledge related to the environment has been codified to some extent into several variants. Many of you are probably familiar with the term traditional ecological knowledge or T E K. Another variant is local knowledge, an umbrella concept indigenous knowledge is really the, as far as I know the precursor of all this stuff and this was discussed probably 30 or 40 years ago by anthropologists and other kindred cultural scientists. Recently they've talked about F E K fisheries ecological knowledge, cultural knowledge on the environment is developed over time. It's shared with a group of people. And to knowledge about their surroundings their environment and the activities they engage to varying degrees that identifies patterns and dynamics in in the environment. And researchers at in the Gulf and in bone have realized this information will enhance our understanding of the region's fisheries and assist our spatial planning efforts. Next please. Okay, there are two main objectives. One is to enhance our understanding of fishing activity. And secondly is to height our understanding of the various fisheries significance to the regional social economy. The second bullet here is not really a study objective. It is actually part of our approach. We hope by partnering what we think is a trusted broker Rosa the responsible offshore science alliance. We hope to improve our chances of success in collecting data, and in developing a product that's both useful to us and to the communities and region at large. Next please. Our methods are very general at this point. We're looking to identify willing communities are associated with the fisheries of interest, particularly cod and lobster. We're looking to conduct primary research that is directly talking to people and collecting data. Some type of history mapping is most likely as we're looking we're hoping for for map or GIS data. And we're hoping to use a smattering of one on one interviews, small group discussions focus groups. Really, we're open to what researchers might have to say about that. But we think those are the approaches that are probably most amenable to getting us the type of data that we want. We do envision that while we provide a general direction for the conversations and discussions. We really want to hear what fishers have to say. So these will be what's referred to as semi structured or open ended that is fishers will be able to focus on what fishing practices are important. What issues in space and time with fisheries are of relevance to us. What historical trends do they see as pertinent or any other information they want to pass on. We will push an ethical project using informed consent and voluntary participation, mainly fully explained to two participants, what the purpose of the data is, as well as that their participation is 100% voluntary and that they can leave the project at any time for any reason they are being significant. A secondary function, not necessarily a research method but an approach that we'd like to use is part of this project is really capacity building effort. Throughout Weach and Ed, we want to heighten the various communities knowledge on the various spatial tools available, which we think will help them with the current various planning processes and other activities related to offshore wind. We also want to keep abreast of the development process offshore the schedule and status so along with the research function there is a capacity building function. Next slide please. Yeah, there were, I think he identified a number of strategic questions. Just two of the sort of more high arching questions. One is we're hoping to get a historical perspective on the golf from fishers. And two is we're hoping to get their perspective on changes in the ecology over time and the fisheries over time. That's really the presentation we wanted it to be short. I just wanted to give you a high level since I was pinch hitting. I'd like to open it up for questions I thought Mary was going to be here so she is getting on she can dive in if there's something that I don't know but yeah we'd like to use this time for questions thank you. Absolutely thank you so much john. We do have Mary with us now so Mary if you'd like to take a seat at the table. I'm here. Yeah, great. Yeah, do you want to sit there's a table with a seat with a mic right here if you'd like to join us. We can do questions now unless you unless you'd like to, you know provide any background on the other side. Yeah, I think that's okay. Yeah, absolutely you may wherever you're most comfortable. Um, sorry. Nice. My name is my girlfriend. And I'm with the office of the management programs. And I thought, first of all, introduce john. And also, yes, strategy. And I also thought it was, they cannot hear you. Let me switch to the microphone. Oh, that's right. Okay. So I don't know. So again, Mary boatman with the office of renewable energy programs. And as I was saying, I'm supposed to introduce the first two studies. But I'm also supposed to Rodney said, talk a little bit about the strategy of the renewable energy program. And also, it is 50 years of the environmental studies program. So I thought what I would do is, you know, strategy I have difficulties with strategy so I thought about pro being very similar to strategy. And thinking about the history of what's been done with the renewable energy program. I thought about using examples throughout the history of what our strategy has been. And so first of all, you know, you all know that, excuse me, I just ran here from the metro. As you all know, the energy policy act was passed in 2005 which gave bone responsibility for alternative energy, obviously wind was the most commercially practical. So that's what we focused on. And as typical in the studies program the first thing you do is you hold a workshop, and you put together a literature synthesis. And so in 2007 we held a workshop worldwide and did a worldwide synthesis, gathering all the information of what was known at the time to form the basis of how we would plan our studies. And of course hosted by Beth Burkhard. And then we went with that, looked at some of the key issues, and then we offered for first four studies. The first four sites the first one focused on birds, because everybody knows wind and birds it's a big issue. And we funded the something called the compendium that the USGS and finish a wildlife service was working on gathering all the basic data about birds along the Atlantic. And we also funded something we understood visuals was important so we funded a study to understand all the historic properties that could be impacted along the Atlantic. And then we also heard that, oh, electromagnetic fields was important. And we funded a study on emf. I want to point out Donna Schrader led that effort did an excellent job, as well as Chris Ferrell did the visualizations and Sally Ozel did the work on the birds. Our own Rodney Clark started the study space use conflicts, because we recognize that space use conflicts would be a critical issue. If you think about it, and I way I think about it is there's been fishing in the ocean for millennia. There's been the use of the oceans for commercial reasons for millennia. And there's been military activities for millennia. So there's a lot of stuff going on and you had to introduce this new thing into the ocean offshore wind. So we really needed to understand what those conflicts were and over the years we've always engaged, and we've always tried to minimize those conflicts they will never be zero, because we're brand new with a new kid and everybody else has been there forever. And then we moved on from there started having our task force meetings, engaging the public through environmental assessments we hear all the issues and concerns raised by the public. And we started developing our studies based on those concerns. We also continue to have workshops. Jennifer organized a workshop, we had another European experience workshop because we're always wanting to learn from the Europeans. And we started hearing their different issues and concerns in a couple of examples. And today I was just at a kickoff meeting for an updated study on chemical usage we heard from the public what if all the turbines will fall fall over. What's the spill going to be what chemicals are going to be there. So we did a synthesis and tried to understand the risk of spills from wind turbines. We understood sound we all know sound is a big issue. It's an instrument that all the black sea bass don't like the sound so we've done a studies with sound and black sea bass, as well as long fence. Squid, excuse me squid. And so we again addressing concerns and issues that are raised by the public. I also want to understand the environment that was going to be there and I don't like the word baseline because there's really if you think about no such words baseline it's not static, but we do want to understand some basics we want to understand who's out there. Where are they, what are they doing how many are there, and when are they out there so that's basically conducting surveys over a period of time. And then I also want to add that we like to do partnerships, we always try to partner wherever we can because we all want to learn the same things answer the same questions. And we've, for example, we've partnered with the Massachusetts clean energy center for over 10 years conducting surveys over the Massachusetts Rhode Island wind energy area, it's the longest surveying activity in ever forever really or at least along the Atlantic. And also we now have, I think, 10 turbines in the water that have just been put in the past three weeks. So we're actually seeing that development and we've got a really good backup baseline history of information from which to compare and look at whether there's any alterations of changes, which is really fortunate and we did that through a partnership. We've also done other types of partnerships with our other federal agencies, Fish and Wildlife Service, we did a diving bird study, in which we use tags so we've always been pushing using newest technology tag technology. We've done nano tagged studies with Fish and Wildlife Service. We found out that the piping flow over which is a list of species doesn't hop along the coast it actually flies across the water but it's such a tiny bird that you would never pick it up in surveys so it's really the only way to get that information. So I wanted to just give you these are just a few examples of all the different things that we've done. We've also tried to understand from what I call soup to nuts. We obviously collect information about what's out there. We funded the development of an application for birds that people can collect the data consistently. We've also funded a database that these data would feed into. We've funded the generation of maps of relative relative use and abundance. For that, and then we've also funded and promoted putting these out into the data portals to make sure it's available to the public so all the way from data collection to having that information available to the public. So we started using the flow using it, but everyone using it. And again going back to we're always trying to address the issues. Obviously the latest one is hydrodynamics. We started addressing that in like 2013. What was the presence of the turbines, the base of the turbines all to the flow fishermen were concerned that that could affect scallop larvae. So understanding that we've since been expanding it and we recognize there's also the issue of the turbine spinning themselves removing the kinetic energy, causing wakes, does that reach the ocean surface does that alter currents as well. So we continue to answer and address the questions as they come up. It's always evolving so I can't say what we did 2015 years ago probably to be doing 15 years from now it's going to be something different. And I also wanted to introduce, unfortunately, I didn't miss introducing john right away, but as an example that study was submitted as part of a request for information last fall because we are looking to do leasing in the Gulf of Maine. And people send in their study ideas their information requests what they'd like to know about. And this one was received from Rosa and another group, a very large group of people is available on the public website and we evolved it into a study profile and we hope to partner with others when we actually execute this particular study. And then the other study that Shane will be speaking about has to do with the National Science Foundation putting out their pioneer array and again, taking advantage of what's already being done, adding something that would be of interest to us and everybody learning from it. So that's how we move through the studies program, listening to people using the American people's dollars properly to address the issues and concerns they have. And we can do them effectively by partnering with whoever we can. And with that I'd like to say that you can go to the bone website drop down box on renewable energy. You hit studies and you can see all of our ongoing and completed studies I think we now over have close to 100 completed studies, and at least 20 to 30 ongoing studies. And then I guess I'll turn it back over to john. Mary thank you so much that was incredible context really appreciate it. Thank you in five minutes. I honestly I was not looking but I think probably pretty close. So thank you so much john back to you. Thank you. We'll now open it up for questions on that profile so I see a couple of hands will go to jack first and then to less. Yeah hi my question is actually from area if that's okay. And collaboration with other federal agencies like enrol, for example, can you just say a few more words about cooperation in the space you just described with DOE, DOE, etc. Well we certainly enrol in the seer project where they're collecting and disseminating information about offshore wind and we participated with them that's one example. We do quite a bit with Enrol from an engineering standpoint and outside of the studies program but with with our engineering group. So we've always like working with Enrol. Right we've worked with them on a couple evaluation projects, one early one was down in the Gulf. And I'm forgetting his name what Walt Museum and his team and so they did an economic social economic assessment, they did a wind assessment they did an assessment of nine different renewable tools. More recently we're working them up in Alaska on a similar project. But we have collaborated with their water energy group Mary water group on a number water the wind people. I've done, funded some studies with them. And right now we're funding something called project while with. We're working under an FOA that's going out and they're going to be trying to tag whales in in August, and see how they interact well during the pile driving for the venue when project, along with many other things they're doing. Thank you. So I'll turn next to less, and then Kelsey and then Kevin less you're muted. Boy, there's probably some deep psychological significance to that. And this is relevant to the stuff I put in the chat to you. I've, I've led some fe k efforts, mostly trying to collect information, linking different NOAA programs. And what I find over and over again, is that I get different stories when I'm on the boat. I'm in a group, and when I speak to fishermen individually. And when we report back to them the result of our study, which we thought we didn't filter at all. Some fishermen get really annoyed, and they don't like it. So my question is, how do we, how do we extract the best info from all of this social dynamic. Are you asking me to yeah, because I couldn't figure it out, because there's other carries here and I don't know if we have Kevin St. Martin. But I mean, you know, one thing is, you need to triangulate so you want to you want to take from different sources. The other is is that, you know, cultural knowledge is is different. So, something that I had written down for a presentation comment that I didn't give because I didn't want to go into it, but but you're sort of touching on it is that it's, it's often referred to as purposeful knowledge or you use purposeful sampling meaning that cultural knowledge isn't spread evenly amongst the population. There are typically those who know more than others, and you can find this in any domain. In fact, we've coined these terms for environmental knowledge but they are their cultural knowledge about the environment, and we have distinguished them by traditional local for different groups. But so, so one is, you want to triangulate you want to know who you're talking to are they, and typically how do you find out who are knowledgeable you talk to others. So people often refer to snowball which is a sort of a way that makes us look on systematic, but it can be done very systematically. So, so, so you want to talk to enough people. So that you feel like you have an idea of who is in the know who knows who knows more about a particular topic. This is also where you bring in really expert social scientists who are who have done field work in the area and who know the methods and understand how cultural knowledge works so it's not a task where anybody can walk in there from other disciplines. So, and on here right now I would defer to Kerry, maybe Rod I don't know who else is on here maybe Jeremy. I didn't see Kevin I think we had another sociologist on here. One or two meetings back but thanks john. Yeah, I'm going to turn. John not saying some of the folks that you've mentioned I'm going to turn next to Kelsey, and then Kevin, Bonnie, Kerry, Rod, and then Jeremy. Wonderful. Thanks so much john and everyone for the presentation you shared with us today. I wanted to see if you could go a bit deeper in terms of the collaboration and partnerships that will help to execute the research so mainly I'd love to hear a little bit more on how the project intends to work with tribes in the region. And then I have a subsequent question to that. I, you know, I don't. I don't want to speak to something that I haven't discussed with my colleague. We gave some feedback and I think we were still waiting for him digest it. So it would be premature and I'd be. But there is a sincere intent to collaborate. We see that is a way to make meaningful research. And also we can't get. You can't really get good data unless you have trust and collaboration in there with this kind of social science approach. So, and we are we are open to interested partners. I, what I said was sort of a sketch of what we're interested in doing and we think Rosa is the logical one with interest. But we are certainly looking to others in the region and I would hate to start talking about tribes just without without having specifics for you. Okay, well I think that as it stands the profile is a bit insufficient. So I'd love to have us like have some type of follow up after today to Cosa that that answers that question because it's a major methodological question for the region. Rosa doesn't have tribal representatives on its leadership organizational chart as I have seen it. So I think, you know, deploying a large study of this nature in the Gulf of Maine without actually having some type of response to how tribes in the Gulf of Maine are being engaged is an insufficiency at this point but like you said it could just be that it needs to be flushed out more with the research team and with the fuller profile. Oh, go ahead. Let me say two things. One is, we have extensive engagement with a number of tribes over there. I am not. That's not my belly with so I don't I don't want to speak to others. So that's a separate. I completely agree with the project. I think the project is an earlier stage that then then maybe you might be thinking so we definitely have open ears and I'm glad to get the feedback. For sure. And I think just, you know, in terms of research ethics at the outset you've named Rosa at the outset there should be a named indigenous collaborators tribal fishermen that are there alongside. So that's sort of what I'm back into. And then the other thing I didn't really see in the profile and maybe you can expand upon it, or it's another area for us to flush out is sort of what the DJI J environmental justice lens of intersectionality and inclusion will look like when you're working with fishers, you know, Rosa right now does not have any non white fishers involved with it. So I'm just, I'm curious how we're going to get, you know, fishers you and I think someone else asked this later on in the chat about folks who are already doing these studies in the region people being overtaxed and maybe having a bit of research fatigue. How do we get folks who you know our minority fishers in the region. How do we get folks who maybe aren't necessarily the holders of power in terms of commercial fishing in the region, but are the folks who actually do all of the work like maybe some of the, you know, immigrant populations who are working on the boats but, you know, have some potential interests and need to be included so. Yeah, sorry that was maybe a more comment feedback but I'll leave it there for as a sort of overall question of kind of your broader impact DJI approach to the research. Thank you. Go ahead, John, did you want to respond. Yeah, duly noted and and appreciated and yes, we will definitely take this back to the shop. Thank you. Kevin, Bonnie, Rod, Jeremy and then Kerry. Hi, thanks. Hi, thanks for the presentation. I guess my questions are more on the on the literature that was presented in the in the pre proposal and and it seems like they're, you know, if you look at your two specific research questions. So, you know, where are the historic fishing grounds located in the Gulf of Maine, and how these fishing grounds changed over decades. And there's a lot of literature on that and there's a lot of science underway particularly with with Noah there's the, the stock of the fishing group that has just come out with their report there's Doug Damascus work you mentioned great decels work there's also Alexandra's at all in 2009 that the date right back to the 1860s. The spawning areas in the fishing grants in the Gulf of Maine have been identified fairly well but they're not really mentioned in your document documentation here at all is it is it that you're looking for additional information on to that is that what you're in which case Kelsey's point I think is extremely relevant. I'm trying to say, you know, I'm trying to get at what your, you know, when someone in the comments said that you know there's a fatigue going on with with people being asked these questions over and over again, it does seem to me like these questions have been at least answered on one level. I, I don't feel comfortable answering that I would defer to Mary, I am not Brandon, I have my own thoughts but they would be my own thoughts. We're certainly aware of the breath of work, you know, going back to Jim Asen's agents in lobster gangs of Maine. So, you know, I, this is sort of an interdisciplinary study so we have sort of gaps on knowledge on both sides of our house that the other ones helping with so I can't answer that. On my own or would not want to provide an answer on my own. Mary do you have anything to say. Profile is just a starting point, right. And then as we start evolving it and learning more we hone it into what's needed and what's identified in the area so we spend our time and our energy for its best use. What we really need help with and as john has pointed out is not so much understanding what fishing grounds are and such but understanding more the cultural nuances of the activity. And that's what we're hoping to look for, but I'm not a social scientist so I always step my foot in things, as well as, you know, who else we need to engage. So this is just getting the idea on the table getting your all of your input and feedback and then involving it into something that would be incredibly useful within the Gulf of Maine. So, so cultural nuances. What do you mean. You can put importance. Oh, I go and put on the you could do the participatory GIS moved on that and other areas where you circle on the map and this is where we go fishing. We scanned all the books from the 1970s of the historical usage to see how it compared to with what we knew today and what it was moved. You can do that type of thing but you miss the stories of the ancestors and the long history and the cultural history of fishing and everything I think that's putting it on something on the map and this is so much of a dynamics, but I would leave that open to others to expand on. We do still have a number of hands raised so I'm just in the, for the sake of time. I'll ask folks that go next to just keep their remarks brief. So, Bonnie, Rod, Jeremy carry and then Kelsey may have her hand up again so Bonnie. Hi, can you all hear me. We can. Hi Kevin hi I know several of you on the board. Thank you very much for the time I'm Bonnie Brady of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association. Hi Mary. A lot of the issues that fishermen have have not been really listened to from the very beginning of a lot of the issues I know I heard Kelsey talk about having indigenous knowledge as part of Rosa, several of the industry advisors belong to various fishing associations are fishing processors. I'm not sure whether indigenous people work for them or not but people of color definitely do. And the ability to reach out to those advisors if you have questions I may not be more than glad to anything that you want to bring to the attention of the board we could do that. I just want to point out, we've got the responsible offshore development alliance has their fisheries knowledge trust. A lot of, in addition to fatigue is the idea that where fishermen fish is somewhat proprietary and if we say okay I'm going right here to do that, then 10 people may follow them. I know with Marco and back again, Kelsey and Mary you probably were involved at both the time and some of those meetings. We had one stakeholder fisheries meeting in 2014 and that was it now if you're talking about ecosystem based fisheries or any spatial planning as to where to put these things and why we've had virtually no input and fishermen did not have any input in Marco because we were told that as private businesses we couldn't qualify so it had to be only indigenous people from the three states. Having a fisheries we had the council member one person that would sit in but that really isn't the same as being able to push into the knowledge. Marco site portal only has a is for some fisheries or has specific fisheries and not all of them that exist. There's no way to show in state waters sorry the dog is chiming into, and the issue is the years that were used. Did not always have a full grasp of what the fishery was, and we've had that problem since empire one. So anyone that wants to reach out to me further I'd be more than glad to explain a lot the synthesis of the science that was just completed a report might be a good way to go for future things that have not been addressed. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Bonnie. Rod, Jeremy, Carrie, and then maybe Kelsey. Thanks john this is interesting and I'm the information I think is important. I think that the questions identified in the profile are probably not the correct questions. But when I hear about historical data and I think well, we've got a lot of historical data as Kevin pointed out, and I think well, there's a lot of work by historians that are done a lot of this, this kind of analysis already but I think that what you're trying to get at is important. I just think that the questions need to be more refined and the some of the questions that Kelsey raised also need to be addressed I think it's a different kind of study perhaps than, and what is fully represented in the profile. Thanks Rod. Jeremy. Yeah, thank you. Thanks john. My question might kind of just be brief. I'm not sure that your area isn't too large. So you may benefit by a smaller area than the full Gulf of Maine we would probably expect that there's going to be tomorrow offshore wind development pressure in the southern Gulf of Maine call area so you might think of that, but more broadly the question is why the Gulf of Maine. We might think that there's going to be more pressure off the Pacific coast and the issues get potentially more complex because especially as you go into the Pacific Northwest you caught tribal fishing rights. So, you know I think you should think about the best area to do the study and that sort of also relates to the question of the, you know, what's the best research questions as well thank you. Thanks. Yeah, and thanks john. Nice to see you again. And thank you everyone for your comments. Yeah I, I have to say on a couple things that have been inspired by this by my read of the profile but also by the conversation today. So I think the objective stated and then the research questions stated they don't fit with one another. And, and I think those object the objective statements are actually less are are important. And I don't want to say that the research questions are unimportant but yeah anyway, I think that the questions under the object as stated under the objective or the as implied by the objective are perhaps more important. The other, the other thing that I was thinking about just in terms of capturing people's knowledge and the connection to coastal economy or community variously defined social and economic well being and so on and so forth. And the discrepancies that people may find when they participate in some kind of discussion and then see the product of that discussion and thinking through some of the work that we've been involved in on on the West Coast and I think there are a couple of insights gained that might be useful in thinking this forward. One is, and this is gory detail but involved in a mapping project around the Channel Islands for sighting of marine reserves years ago, and we mapped with individual fishermen. We did a summary product. We went back to fishermen and we handed each of them their own map, based on what they had told us, and we explained the process whereby we went from individuals input first we made sure we got it right, and how it was that we got to the summary product. And we asked them for input on what they felt was important about that summary product as well. And so I think you know it points out the importance of iterative process, and helping people, making sure that you don't create a black box, helping people understand the steps you took to get from point A to point B and how their individual input factored in you don't have to go to every individual to explain that. But that's that's one example of how we did that in that instance. And I guess the other thing is capturing what fishermen and other fishing community members see as particularly important, and how things may be affected economically, culturally, culturally, by change and let's say for wind energy development. Again, you know, thinking about fishermen leading or co leading a mapping project that is less about the details of the map per se, and more about the stories that accompany the map. And again that gets down to Oh that's messy that stories that's narrative. But how do you interpret the map if you don't have the stories. And so, in thinking through this kind of an approach I think there's great value in trying to tap into this knowledge and think about how it can inform programs going forward. There's a lot of work that's already been done in the region you're talking about and in some other places. There's a lot to be said about engaging from the get go with those whose knowledge and understanding you seek to engage, collaborating with them to build something that's mutually useful and I think that's the intent here perhaps. But getting there requires a lot of work up front to cultivate that partnership, as much as it is to cultivate partnership with other scientists and so on, and working with Rosa could be a good way to do that. In the Gulf of Maine instance. But anyway just offering far too many thoughts but there we go. Thanks. Thank you. Kelsey your hand is still up is that from earlier or is that a new comment. It's a new comment, but I won't be long I just wanted to say that I think I agree with what others have said I think potentially there's a bit of a methodological insufficiency or need for sort of further depth in the development of the methodology and I think that this is because this is, you know, bow I'm entering into a new waters pun intended around social science. But there is a, you know, a whole canon of literature in this space and scientists who work in this space, as you were pointing to earlier john. So one I would point to Victoria Reyes Garcia, the University of Tonya, Tonya my Barcelona. And then there's also work in the space out of Scotland that do work in, you know, in the context of Fisher's local knowledge, and the intersection of energy transitions and climate change and how you capture that for, I agree with you Mary and alternative term other than baseline, but being able to ensure that we have sound data and the best available science to make decisions moving forward so just wanted to lay that as maybe guiding posts for the team to go back to you to try and bolster those methods. Thank you Kelsey and john thank you for presenting today on on Brennan's behalf. I do want to keep us moving just for the sake of time we're running a approximately 10 minutes behind so I want to turn next to Shane who will be presenting to us on ocean environmental monitoring and sound propagation study at the mid Atlantic shelf break offshore wind area. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. My name is Shane one oceanographer with bone OEP division of environmental sciences. I'm going to talk about the ocean environment monitoring a sound propagation studies at the mid Atlantic shelf break at offshore wind area. First, I'd like to acknowledge my co authors, Dr. Mary Bowman and Dr. Tom Q Patrick. Next slide please. So the integrated ocean observing system I use are very effective ways to conduct long term, large scale ocean environment monitoring. However, these systems are very expensive to design, deploy and maintain and develop. For this talk I'm going to talk about the National Science Foundation has, they have this ocean observing initiative and has maintained a couple of coastal ways. One of them is called a pioneer way, and they plan and what they're planning to relocate into a area that we, we think will provide as great opportunities for ocean monitoring to address many of forms on environmental assessment questions. The pioneer array is currently located in Southern New England shelf break, which is about 75 miles south of Martha's vineyard. It is consistent of 10 moorings in seven more, seven low mooring sites, and they include moorings and underwater gliders and a uvs. The water depth of this morning systems like 2090 to 450 meters. The objective of that moorings is to study the shelf break processes and of shelf and deep water exchange circulations. So the NSF is planning to relocate the mooring pioneer arrays to meet a ladder shelf break of the boundary of the coast of North Carolina and Virginia, which coincidentally is, you can see this map. I'm sorry, I don't know what, you know, there's some overlapping typing, but if you can see this map is going to relocate it into a off the coast of Midland shelf break, which is coincidentally close to two of the wind farms being developed on the coast of Virginia offshore wind, Sea Vault, another Kitty Hawk offshore wind. And the distance from the, especially for Kitty Hawk, the southern most distance of the wind farm is about 15 kilometers to the proposed new relocation site which we think it's going to provide great opportunities for bones to conduct acoustic oceanographic studies incorporating with the physical oceanographic data already being collected. Next slide please. To address some of the bones information needs. So I had listed major areas like we need informations one is, you know, as I already mentioned, you know, the monitoring long term monitoring a large scale oceanographic conditions is not easy it's always very expensive. You know, we could use this opportunity to, you know, deploy acoustic sensors to conduct environmental studies in combination of the physical oceanographic data already collected to address to look at the ocean variables, the condition in relation to the wind farm construction and operations. And also, you know, as we know, we have observed the variable of environmental conditions been changing and due to the climate, especially for one example is the Atlantic meridian overturning circulation of the A mark in the past decade, we have observed, you know, there's a great variabilities of the A mark Gulf stream, and we don't know whether these, you know, to to address whether you know those oceanographic changes is related to climate change or it's a result of the wind fun development is difficult to teach these parts so we hope that you know these this study could answer some of these questions. And also there's a need to develop updated oceanographic parameters for some propagation modeling. And as as you know, the sound propagation is driven depend on the ocean temperature and salinity and the density. And these variables are constantly changing and to have a good way to know how the sound propagation to address to develop reliable models for impact assessment, we need a new update in real time data. And lastly, there's a need to understand the species. And such as species presence and habitat use gain from passive across monitoring that combined with physical oceanographic data to understand in the ecological ecosystem context. Next slide please. So the objectives is the first, we have three major objectives, one is the innovative ocean monitoring. So there are a lot of I use they do not have acoustic sensor components and mostly the where they focus on physical acoustic data sets, and we understand that with acoustic sensors, if we're operating with the physical and the chemical variables, we can look at bigger pictures in a larger scales using the acoustic inversion and see how the current stratification and mixing these pattern change in a long run in relation to the wind fun development. And then is the improved impact prediction. As I mentioned, you know, the sound propagation varies, depending on the sea, sea temperature and salinity and the density and these are constantly very changing. So in order to have a better way to predict the impacts, for example, you know, the sound generated from pilot driving associate wind fun construction, we need a constantly updated sound velocity profiles. And third is enhanced environment assessments. So the passive acoustic monitoring that I will know of only, you know, using distributed acoustic sensors that, you know, gave information of the animals presence on, you know, very few of the incorporating with the physical oceanographic data sets with a combination of acoustics data sets with and the physical oceanography data sets we can looking at potential changes of habitat and also looking at animals. And just to get information of animal presence. We can also address, looking at the presence and absence and looking to address the, how the, the habitat use and the change of the ecosystem found acoustic data sets. Next, please. The methods. Well, first, you're deploying the acoustic sensors collocated it with the pioneer of ways locations and we have been preliminary discussion with NSF, maybe we could piggyback NSF vessels to save deployment costs. And second is the methods is the collecting long term time series acoustic data sets. We envision most of the data sets will be collected using either more acoustic sensors or bottom on the acoustic sensors. But we also open to additional acoustic data sets using gliders and or AUVs. Then, of course, we're going to, you know, leverage on the physical oceanographic data to address to analyze the, the oceanographic processes in relation to wind funds and we're also going to use the biocruistic data sets to analyze and a stand in the environment effects, fun, you know, the following fall for wind development. Next slide please. And we're also thinking about the deploy active sources. This is going to be a low intensity, largely less than 160 dB in reference to one micro Pascal. That's the, you know, the kind of the behavior threshold for marine mammals, and also the low frequency lasting two kilohertz active sources such as this low bell sound, sound source to look at the we investigate the sound propagation in the area and also look at the oceanographic change. And lastly, the real, the sum of acoustic data sets collected would be, you know, broadcast the real time to predict forecast major you know, graphic events, hopefully, and also these real time acoustic measurements, such as from the, you know, when from pie drippings could be used for real time mitigation monitoring, if needed. Next slide please. That's pretty much it. So this is the list of the research questions we have based mostly build around our objectives to address the, you know, using acoustic data sets to addressing oceanographic processes in the study area related to wind and also the sound space soundscape characterization and dynamics in the area, improve propagation modeling and looking at the potential noise effects from construction activities of the signal to noise ratio. For example, see whether the construction noise could be detected in various various moorings, and also supplement the data for the passive acoustic monitoring to address animals, potential effects on animals. That's all I have. Happy to ask any questions. Thank you, Shane. I see some hands are already going up quickly. I will turn to Bonnie, Jack, Kelsey, and then Al. Hi, thank you. I just wanted to ask of the presenter what are they planning to do regarding the type of code our radar that apparently will not be hf high frequency radar that will not be workable within the arrays because of issues that were initially I want to say two to three years ago when the wind turbine radar interference mitigation workshops with DOE were done. And at the time they had a working group but they said it would take about five years. If they were fully funded to actually be able from proof of concept have something that would work in place of the I think it's 11 or 13 radar from South Jersey all the way up to perhaps Rhode Island. Thank you. I'm not aware of that. Could you elaborate a little bit more on acoustic sensor radar. The high frequency code our radar that's used for the ocean observatory systems both for Noah for oil spill modeling and also for searching rescue by the Coast Guard they plug that in. And because of the wind turbines being in it's a line of sight type of radar, and so they will not work. And so I'm wondering how or if there's a solution that's part of your plan that as these sites go up you might not be getting the information that you need. Thank you. Hey Bonnie, it's Mary. How are you. So as you know or may know we've been studying the code our issue we would work with code are spent a lot of money to help them address it's the HF radar this does the ocean surface surface currents the radar stations are all along the coast. It's managed by the eyes. It's been important for oil spill as well as search and recovery. And the presence of wind turbines will cause interference. We've known about this issue for many years and bone has addressed it through working with code are. We've gotten through maybe 90% of the interference issues using software fixes on the interior part but there's still some issues. There's talk about potentially you can put devices on the wind turbines to assist. And we've been talking about that so there's lots of different solutions that are under discussion. And it doesn't really have anything to do with this particular NSF array which is primarily underwater measurements it's not above water and this surface, the HF radar is above water. So I hope that helps address your question. Thank you Mary will you have any of that documentation on a bone website to take a look at that would be great thanks a lot. Oh, absolutely. And Bonnie when I get home I'll send you an email. Thank you Mary and thank you Bonnie. Jack, Kelsey and then how great thanks Shane. Good description of what's going on there. I think this is exactly what well my to be doing is making use of this other federal asset, and it was specifically designed to do just that host other instruments, and a couple of with what we know about the oceanography. I have a couple of questions about time and space so. Have you looked carefully at the time you'll be able to get your instruments into the array versus when the wind farm will be built out, etc can, and then secondly the spatial aspects. So you know what are the sensors you're putting in and how are you said a little bit about how they're different from the sensors. My last question is, is there, you actually said it there's a couple of coastal arrays for the ocean derivatives initiative. So the West Coast is prime just as well to do this so I encourage you to look at that. Yeah, thank you. So the first question was the timing gets good very good question and actually that's my question as well we're still still actively developing this study ideas. So the planning is the NSF is starting collocating the data system in April next year. Which is, you know we don't have to really match their time because we already talked to the pioneer we managers and also NSF. So basically where our sense is not going to fit on the array but we'll be collocated for various engineering reasons. Yeah, they will be starting relocating in April but I got a sense, it could be delayed probably will be summer so for our studies planning process, you know, if this one's getting funded which we, you know, we're getting used by, I guess, October we will start soliciting, you know, putting out the IFP and then we get the PIs and we'll be working with whoever with awardees and also work with NSF to call to look at the census. The spatial scales. I think there was a map on that I'm not exactly sure but by looking at, you know, the current pioneer array of New England is nine, I might understand is about 10 kilometers by 47 kilometers that is your deal to be about the same number of arrays but the configuration. I think it was like number 10 by 47 so it's kind of like elongated, but once they will relocated to the mid Atlantic shelf break, look at the pictures and more like a more like a square. So, my guess is probably more like, you know, trying to, trying to by trying ish. And we are thinking about, of course, this still need to work with awardees to PIs but we're kind of proposal with the vertical line we like vertical acoustic arrays. If these are the moins collocated with whatever census they have, but near very nearby so I forgot what was your last question. I just was asking about the same type of study for the West Coast. Oh yeah, West Coast I understand they have endurance array right and SF I have not looked into that for the pioneer array is just happened because they are relocating to an area where we have to win funds that's a great opportunities. We'll see, you know, if we have to, if that locations that happen to be where we need informations where, yeah, we can start talking. I'll send you some comments about that. Thanks, Shane. Thank you. Kelsey and then out. Yes, probably two questions. The first one is, do you know why it's called the pioneer array. I think I'm so amused. Why do you know. Oh, I, I don't know. I'm sorry. Yes, you know, I know that yeah it's because it's it's named for the pioneer C Mount chain that it's fairly close to. Why the pioneer C Mount chains call that I do not know. Thank you. So I think just flagging that for bow and then for everyone on the committee it's it's kind of a racist term to have as, and then you're going to be moving it down into a coastal area and you know, the pioneer is moving in. There's just a lot of like justice issues with that implications. So I just wanted to flag that that if the study allows for it to be funded and you're, you know, it to be potentially renamed I think that would be purpose, you know, important, I mean using American dollars to to move something. The other sort of area that I had as a question was it's potentially I think on the map you said it would be moving down to just outside Chesapeake Bay Del Marva Peninsula. I'm not sure what the bottom disturbance if anything looks like for the moorings, but that is one of the highest concentrations of Clovis points in that area along the outer that shelf area. And so I just think that I curious what the, you know, at some point and maybe it's not right now is a profile stage, but that there's a consultation with the tribal historic preservation officers for the area that the potential array will go. Okay, thank you. All right, we've got a few more hands, and we are already passed the three 10 time on our agenda so I'm going to just ask folks to keep their remarks fairly brief but I do still want to allow everybody an opportunity to speak so I'll Michael and then less. Okay. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to talk. I'll try to be quick and give the highlights so I think this is well posed. And potentially the opportunity is is a is real combination of acoustics with the environmental monitoring from the pioneer race so that's good. In terms of the implementation though I have some concerns. I don't. So here's so here's the issues the pioneer race in the midst of a NEPA environmental compliance process. Maybe that's going to involve a name change we'll see that process involves the core instrumentation not acoustic monitoring devices right so any additional process requires a specific process within oh I and furthermore adding passive and active acoustics I would guess is going to require environmental review and additional rounds of approval. So with these with these issues in mind, I have concerns about the timing, basically is the bottom line. I'm not clear to me that this can be managed in in a timeline that is going to be ready to roll by April 2024. So I think that's the gist of my concern. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, this is also something we are, you know, we are aware of that. And we're working with national science foundations and to see if you know the amount of compliance issues. So basically, I don't think there's a much environmental issues for passive acoustic monitoring. So we also in talk with the Navy's and that's a separate issues but for active acoustics yes I'm already reached out to the know our concerns regarding the sound sources we proposed to broadcast, and they say you know this 160 DB up below 160 DB should be no issues and also frequency we have not decided not not acoustic frequency I mean how often we broadcast that we have not decided but it's if it's like an infrequent. That's like so we we we think we can get in our concurrence from our officials but we're still working on that once you know the project going forward. Yeah, thank you. Okay, thanks. Michael. Thank you, Sean. Thank you very much for your presentation today. This is around acoustics and the passive recording of sub audible or infrasound in the acoustic systems. This would be in ranges below 20 Hertz, and seems to be a critical range for some of the communications of the whales. So establishing the environmental baseline for that frequency range in your survey so that can be then followed up upon with the wind farm operations that seems to be a gap in some of the studies that I've been reading. That's all I have to say. Thank you. And last we'll give you the final word. Um, I'm just curious if we really had our wish list. How many of these invaders. I mean pioneers slash acoustic arrays would we like to have ideally how short are we selling ourselves here. Are you asking for the ocean of graph. I use the ways or the crew. Yeah, the I use the I use. Well, the I say imagine and I use slash acoustic combo, but it's specific I use a raise. Yeah, I think it's a very, very rare. Yeah, because the, I use the way is typically my understanding is noisy because the more is not set for listening because you have a lot of noise and to overcome that issue is engineeringly expensive. So that what that's what most acousticians just deploy their race separately. Yeah, yeah, but in general the observational system is what's being proposed at the capacity we would really like to have in terms of the data stream coming out. Yeah, it's, I can see it's not that many. It's okay. Yeah, we would like to see more close. All right. We were scheduled to take a 15 minute break at 310 to 325. I'd still like to offer folks an adequate break so I'm not going to ask folks to come back so so quickly. But maybe it's 317 now maybe if we could try to get started at 330 so we're about five minutes behind. If that's feasible, we'll take a quick break and we'll return at 330 and thank you to our guests on the line that are being patient with us. I'll wait for the slides to get up, but give you an overview of the Pacific region in our programs which then ultimately guides our study priorities and our science strategy. Great, you can click to the next slide. So the Pacific region, you know just basically is areas off California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii we have five planning areas on the OCS there. And until recently we were the only bone region with ongoing planning or development in all three of the core program areas I think the Gulf now has joined us in that. We have conventional energy renewable energy and prospecting into marine minerals work and fiscal year 22 we had we funded $6.4 million for environmental studies in the region was 12 studies six new ones at 2.3 million six ongoing at 4.1. We have approximately 50 people now in our regional office and generally one subject matter expert per resource but we're expanding that capacity. You go to the next slide. So with conventional energy, we have 30 active oil and gas leases in the region, kind of a maturing program so production started in 1968 also happens to be when I started. In mid to late 90s and now our annual production is a bit lower. There's some figures there on the slide, and then due to some other issues, some pipeline ruptures and some shut in issues. We're starting to plan for decommissioning for up to eight platforms right now so this mature oil and gas field is now working towards decommissioning and removing platforms. And then our science strategy as a result is continued study of the marine environment near these activities. You know to keep up our understanding of these impacts through time, and then also collecting this information for the decommissioning activities. You go the next one. And I will try to move through these swiftly because I know you're all thinking the Pacific region is standing between you and cake right now. So, the region's big priority has really moved towards renewable energy and I know I started in Bowman 2010. You know they brought me on because we needed a bird guy because wind energy was starting to really take off or they were prospects of it coming on to the west coast and so probably since the last time you heard from us. We have a few updates so we've issued a marine hydro kinetic lease to Oregon State University and I think that's the first one in federal waters. We also just held a wind energy lease sale along the west coast in December for five leases offshore central and northern California. So I think if those are still provisional or whether we just issued those. And that brought in the tune of, I believe is over $700 million. We also released some call areas off of Oregon in 2022 and have been continuing to talk with the state and in a variety of stakeholders and other agencies over that. Also have the potential for wind energy offshore off Hawaii there's two call areas on the map there. We've had a long duration since 2016 some of that may reshape and become different but right now that's what we have on the map for Hawaii. And then we also received two unsolicited lease requests offshore Washington so really busy with renewable energy a lot of different things going on so then with the next slide. You know that helps define our science strategy there, which is really refining information about environmental conditions and biological communities. And then also really working on cultural resource and human use issues. Certainly two of the groups that we engage with most on these wind projects are tribes and the fishing community so we also have to obtain baseline information on these cultural and human uses adjacent to these areas. Next slide. And then with marine minerals despite more than 50 years of marine minerals exploration. There's been no federal leases issued in the Pacific. However, we are considering environmental studies and resource evaluation efforts to inform potential future industry interest. And currently been funding several projects in partnership with USGS and some others and we're also working closely with bones and marine minerals division. And so we had recent to scientific research expeditions off Hawaii, and then also went to the Escanava trough off the coast of Oregon. And so here our focus has been resource evaluation efforts in these areas that are anticipated to have the greatest resource potential because there's been formerly like an interest in in sand and gravel but now it's kind of these rare earth minerals that may be out there on the ocean floor. So next slide. And this is just kind of a sort of a high level overview of the Pacific and our research areas and the studies and we have over 330 studies that have been complete and completed in the Pacific and I think about three of the first 300 of those were really geared towards oil and gas based on that program out and this all started in the early 70s, but a lot of that, especially our baseline biological studies and some other things have been able to be applied to renewable energy and now with a lot of our ongoing studies the focus has been more towards renewable but still with some things that are moving to renewable energy as well as things that cover both of the programs and with a variety of partners here on the right. A lot of federal government studies with no on USGS and some others but also collapse with universities and then some other different groups there. And then for the last slide. And this is going to set up the talk that you're going to hear from Ingrid here but you know the input in the one profile we requested input on this year is this pre development distribution and behavior of key coastal cetacean species near Morro Bay. And we really selected this study to kind of generate and explore a larger discussion with COSA on responsibilities for funding and acquiring data and maybe who's most responsible for that at what scale like when is it appropriate for bone versus industry so you know I think you've seen those questions and I didn't put them on here because Ingrid's going to have them on her second slide. So, that's going to be kind of a segue into her talk and that input that we were seeking from COSA. Yeah, any very quick questions for David before we turn it over. Okay, lucky winner I'm sorry but you're going to get a question from me I live on the Pacific coast of Washington I live within one of the areas that's proposed to the wind area. It's also within the Cascadia subduction zone. You're not a geologist but I will tell you that it is the number one hazard catastrophic hazard identified by FEMA for the United States. For catastrophic earthquake and tsunami rivaling that of the Japan event of 2011 put out anywhere from 10 to 25%, depending on what part of the coastline you look at in the next 50 years. So it's a biggie it's also was the number one sea floor hazard identified in the Nomex study from the White House that Rodney is very well aware of. And I was kind of astonished to see that there were no research proposals related to geohazard risks in the renewable energy portfolio for BOEM, because three of the four identified wind energy areas lie within the Cascadia subduction only one that doesn't is more a worry about taking leases but the Humboldt area does by the way the Humboldt area had an earthquake two weeks after your lease sale and there were fatalities and and they shut the ports down. And there's still that hazard for the areas to the north. I don't understand why bone has not bone did do a study on risk associated with offshore wind development and earthquake tsunami hazards but it was totally inadequate did not cite any of the relevant literature of the last 10 to 15 years. I don't quite understand why bone hasn't taken a more active stance on looking at that before offering up leases and before many millions of dollars are invested by by companies and by utilities to try to figure out whether they're going to do these projects. So that's a, that's an ongoing concern I have, and I just couldn't flag that for you. Yeah, well thanks I appreciate that I'll take that back and discuss that with the appropriate people and yeah, I appreciate that. Scott just let me say also, and I think you know I've talked about this a bit you know through our environmental studies program. We may fund some aspects of geology but there's another part of home with a resource evaluation group, and there's that's the geologist said, and, but it is a good question so we can take it. Well it's going to become even more important for you guys because there was something passed last year called the Disaster Resiliency Planning Act. And I think it calls on all federal agencies to coordinate their plans for major disasters I think OMB not once they've gotten by this budget thing we've had to worry about, and FEMA are going to start coming around all agencies to talk about what is going to happen and I think this is going to be high on their list. So I would encourage you to get ahead of the curve. So you don't get more delays than you know you need to have I just think it's, it's coming down the town pipe for you I would, I would get after it. Yeah, thanks really appreciate that. Thank you Scott. So our next presentation will be by Ingrid Bidron. I hope I pronounced that correctly Ingrid I apologize on the agenda that I had does I read listed. But this profile will be on the pre development distribution and behavior of key coastal cetacean species near the morrow by wind area. So Ingrid, whenever you're ready please go ahead. Thank you, and thank you Dave for that introduction. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to present to Costa today. I'm Ingrid Bidron, a marine biologist in bone specific regional office. And before I begin I want to acknowledge my colleagues Desiree Reeve, Kathy Dunkel and Dave Peresta collaborators on the study and presentation. Next slide please. As Dave mentioned, I'll talk about our proposed study to collect targeted data on coastal protected species and morrow by California. But I will also be using the study is an example to illustrate some broader questions that we wanted to bring up here for discussion. We want to acknowledge and thank you the Costa members for your early feedback. We have attempted to incorporate it throughout this presentation. So bones environmental studies process follows an internal review of proposed study ideas. And while going through the studies process, we received internal feedback questioning who is responsible for funding these types of studies, bone or the less ease. And then this feedback prompted us to consider to consider the questions we post here. Before jumping to the rest of the presentation, I want to give you a quick refresher of bones commercial offshore wind authorization process. The wind siting follows an iterative process, or by targeted data needs can be more accurately identified once wind energy areas are designated. Offshore wind regulations require that less sees provide results of biological surveys to support their site assessment plans. In addition, during and post construction monitoring by the less see is required through plan approvals, for example, construction and operation plans. So our guidelines encourage early engagement between bone less scenes less sees to define baseline data needs. Therefore, we feel that discussing and clarifying some of the answers to the above questions will help them to be more fully prepared for this process and these discussions. The questions we proposed today for discussion are listed here. Should bone and or industry fund these types of targeted studies to learn about potential impacts from offshore wind. And prioritize focused, recently based or broader context based studies to learn about the potential impacts from offshore wind. And as close to have any other recommendations for resolving these questions. Next slide please. Now I'll give an overview of the study. I'll start by sharing our research questions up front. How do resident harbor porpoise ray whales killer whales and bottlenose dolphins use more obey and potential transit corridors to and from the port of moral bay to the wind energy lease area. Our endangered western Pacific ray whales present in potential transit corals corridors of the moral bay wind energy lease area. And can any actions interactions between these species be defined. For some background, three wind energy leases, three when wind energy leases have been executed offshore moral bay California and post leasing survey activities are expected to begin within this next year. Impacts to marine mammals need to be evaluated and are of high concern to stakeholders. Therefore, there is a need for robust pre development data on the habitat use of protected species. This would be a pilot based field program focused on collecting habitat use and interaction data when the target species are known to be present in the area. Next slide please. More obey and the anticipated offshore wind vessel vessel transit corridors are used by protected species including gray wells, both endangered western gray wells and protected eastern gray wells killer whales bottlenose dolphins and resident harbor porpoise. We need more local habitat use data for these key protected coastal species to build upon existing regional data to more accurately assess potential impacts from floating offshore wind energy activities. Next slide. A newly completed bone funded studies supports the need for more localized data collection to support comprehensive risk assessment. Some of you might have heard of this study of we called the VIN study. And these baseline data would be used for comparison of data collected during survey construction and post construction activities. These data will be vital and implementation of management and monitoring plans in the lease area. Next slide please. As mentioned before, the broad objectives of this study are to understand the local habitat use and interactions of four protected coastal cetacean species that occur in and around moral bay, which are likely to interact with vessel of transiting to and from the moral bay wind energy lease area. Next slide. To address this study objective, we propose a focus field program using drones photo ID and photogrammetry to clarify habitat use individual patterns of residency and interspecies interactions. Passive acoustic monitoring will be used to complement and expand the photogrammetry data to inform for movement patterns. Existing passive acoustics data will be integrated to further inform these outcomes. Fieldwork will be appropriately permitted and will involve cost effective shore based small boat operations to collect the data for one month per year over the course of three years. Fieldwork will likely occur in the spring when the species of interest are expected to be in the study area. Thank you and at this point I would invite any questions or feedback that you have. Thank you Ingrid, I'll take a moment to look for any hands and I see Dan go ahead. I'm curious why you decided to do coastal species. When the actual wind farms can be far offshore where most of these species don't exist. I've got a bunch of questions but that's first one. Well, we do have another proposed study profile that looks more at the broader skill. We don't use habitat use of these species but this particular study, for this study we wanted to look at those transit corridors because we think that something that's really important is these areas where the vessels are going to be going to and from the lease areas. And there are some important species there's there's a resident harbor porpoise population and then some of these other endangered and highly protected species. It's a good question we do have other studies looking at those things too but this one is focused on those resident and local areas. So, another question is, if you see how will finding, how will identifying of western Pacific western gray whales. If you have that information how will that change anything what will you do with that and I say that because we already know that they're going, they've been identified in the look of green gloom so we know that some proportion of the population is making its way up and down the west coast of the US so I don't see how photo ID especially during a one month period of time you're not going to really the probability of seeing a western gray whale since there are very few of them. We already know they're there so how would that change anything what would you do with that information. Well, so this study is. We're trying to focus on you like you say it's a very specific time of year we tried to we chose that one month because it's when we've identified that the most you know there will be the most like the highest presence of those those animals that we've highlighted and especially some of some of those migratory species and so we like this is going back to the broader we're trying to understand more about the. You know we're looking at the big picture but we want to now that we know where that wind energy lease area is we want to look more at the local data and so this is part of that baseline information we want to get and we're trying to so that we can know moving forward if we need to, you know, fill certain data gaps, or if you know that can inform the types of types of mitigation activities that are required under, you know, for the less ease. So this is not supposed to be a one this one study isn't supposed to be the end all be all this is just help to help us fill some data gaps and get more information for what we want to do moving forward. Yeah, but what about, I mean there's other marine mammal species, and if there didn't be other studies, there's a whole variety of pets there's a sea otter. What about the other species that you're, you haven't addressed. And this, I mean, yeah, again this, this is, you know, we're trying to look at this is one piece of a much broader research program and you know, in terms of trying to keep the budget reasonable and looking at the. You know, the tools available to us this, this is only going to be one piece of, you know, broader research activities so we acknowledge there are other protected species there. But for the field work, you know, the tools and the methodologies that are proposed here, we wanted to target on these target these migratory corridors and, again, like it's only one piece of a much larger. Yeah, I guess if, if we're, if we're assessing this, it's, if you get, you know, it's called, you know, peace mailing if you don't have the larger picture. It's harder to put this in context of, of what else you might do so that's why I asked the question is, is getting this little piece without knowing what else is being done is it's hard to to say this is the best piece or this is comparable to other pieces. Okay, yeah. I'll leave it at that. That was probably more. No, Dan, thanks so much for the question and Ingrid, if you don't mind, I'm going to jump in. Hi everybody, Desiree Reben, sort of a co-author on the profile. Dan, I know that some of the members have actually had an opportunity to take a look at the vulnerability impact analysis, which is the VIM study that Ingrid mentioned. One of the motivations of this profile is not only to sort of ask those bigger questions of, you know, when should bone be doing these types of studies if bone should be doing them at all, talking about the regional sort of very localized scale. Part of the outcomes of that VIM report indicate that in order to do a really comprehensive risk analysis, we have to have better understanding of what these regional animals or localized animal groups are actually doing when we're thinking about impacts from offshore wind. So the VIM study looked at huge the whole California coastline, including Oregon, Washington, and, you know, divided things appropriately, but then we need to have final resolution when we're trying to answer these more specific questions. So that's why, you know, this, this study is part of a much larger program, obviously we've got many other studies and we, we actually are pursuing another profile on sea, sea otters, which is not presented to the National Academies. So we're certainly not proposing that these are the only species of interest. We're basically just saying, because we've identified that Morro Bay is now an existing lease area. And we know that we have data gaps for some of these species, and it's going to be intersecting some of these activities. How best do we actually fill those data gaps. I hope that helps. Thank you Desiree for joining us as well for that. Next I'll turn to Mike, and then Carrie, Jack, and Lee. Hi Ingrid, it's good to see you. Mike Conroy from Responsible offshore Development Alliance. I kind of want to piggyback on what Dan was asking about, you know, given the two ESA listed species in particular that I'm thinking of humpback whales and blue whales that transit through those areas and further given that a lot of the it is envisioned that the shipping traffic that will get the turbines to and from those locations will generate from LA Long Beach or San Francisco or points north. So I think it stands to expand the scope of this study to look at those two species in particular, given those two species ability to have dramatic impacts upon the West Coast crab fishery. Thank you Mike. I mean, I would say in a similar answer to the previous question that this study is very focused on this area but it's meant to help us understand that area and then we do have like we have ongoing strategies to look at those larger scale areas and also those those to encapsulate all the species of concern so short answer yes but not specifically with the study is not designed specifically to target those larger areas. Okay, thanks. Thank you. Yeah. So, two questions one is, are you planning to collect environmental data for example, temperature at a minimum because we know the El Nino is coming and there's going to be lots of interannual variability. And then second to Mike's point and Dan's about the larger context it seems like the mobile platforms is the ideal way to do that you could actually run them from near the port itself out to the study area and back so beyond just the fixed platforms. Yeah, so I mean to answer that second question. First, um, so we didn't drill down like totally into the specifics of the methodology here because it is going to be up to the person who gets this contracts so that the so we will be overseeing that but we don't know the exact specifics yet so also again, I know this kind of sounds like a broken record and does feel free to jump in but we do have other studies that are looking at capturing some of these more like these oceanographic using using technology and tools that are going to try to capture this oceanographic variables. And looking at some of those other tools as well so again, this is a very focused study this one that we proposed today but the other study profile and other work that's going on is looking at these bigger, bigger questions but does feel free to jump in if you want to add anything. Thanks Ingrid. Yeah, just to reiterate what Ingrid said you know we've got currently we have the adrift study which is using floating acoustic buoys and they're sort of drifting all the way from a pilot process in Oregon all the way in sort of around the California lease areas and you know pretty much covering the California system. So that's one of the ongoing passive acoustic studies that we're doing. In addition, we're supporting the the pack map study which is very regional scale looking at multiple species and partnership with Noah. And a study that's about to be completed and that maybe Dave Perrexta could speak to if anybody's interested is, you know, we've been running aerial surveys that also look at avian and marine mammal and another marine species. That, like I say is recent it's going to be completed soon so you know, again, this is this is one study that we're looking at really to sort of to hone in on understanding how we deal with these very localized areas of impact. We've got a very keen eye on the you know broad scale regional, you know, coast wide data collection, but when it comes down to these smaller questions of this focal, you know, like resident habitat for harbor purpose for these, you know, potential mixing of avian and western gray whales, you know, and to answer Dan's earlier question. What would we do as Ingrid said, part of the VIM study also indicated that there's a potential high need for concern for animals that are not often seen in the area, but because of their impacts, they should require additional mitigation action. And so that is part of asking this question in that if we do indeed in this pilot study that may inform additional work need to take a deeper look as to how many western gray whales are there. That could have a significant, you know, influence on informing how we would provide mitigation approaches to our decision makers. So, again, guys, this is just a small part of a much larger research program we're not, you know, we're not limited to just the study the Pacific region is conducting many, many marine mammal focused studies. So it really is about, you know, trying to understand how much responsibility we have for collecting this more localized information. And if the academies is sort of suggesting that actually we should be not focusing on collecting this more localized information and we should keep our focus on these more large scale studies. That's a valid comment but that's actually, you know, what we're asking to hear. If I may just a quick follow up that's excellent contextual information I just like to encourage bone to show us that some way an integrated diagram or something visual that lets us know that all that's going on simultaneously so thank you. Yes, thank you Ingrid and does right and I'm, I see we've got Lee and Kerry in the queue as well I just want to take a moment to just quickly remind folks that none of the input that we are providing in Costa meetings is on behalf of the National Academy's. We do not reach consensus as a standing committee so it is the individual input of the members and our guest, just like to reiterate that point, but I don't want to take any more time with that so I will turn it next to Lee, and then to Kerry. Yeah, hi. Thanks for all of that so I actually my questions are about your specific methodologies that you've proposed to try to get at these localized residency and habitat use patterns. I'm not quite following how using drone photogrammetry is going to help you do that, I guess, like linking habitat use and individual residency mentioned mark recapture stuff so maybe you could provide a little bit more feedback on that because I don't see how those two align. And also and then you suggest using passive acoustic monitoring to look at movement patterns. So unless you know, you know, I don't, that's not really going to work very well at an individual level, like individual movements and you'd need like sort of a larger array to look at movement patterns so yeah I guess I to get to your specific localized fine scale questions that you're proposing I think. Yeah, do you have any comments about how you expect those methodologies to align. I can pick a stab at those so first of all I think it's part of this is just definition what we mean by localized and fine scale I mean we're not talking about charting like paths like of individual animals we're talking more about still like how they're using that the Bay or the area, you know what animals are there are not there so we're not trying to track I guess is what I'm saying in terms of fine scale arrays. Again, I mean we didn't we provided some of the possible tools and the things that we wanted to address. So I mean photo ID like work recapture some of those are the types of things we're trying to look at we're going to use the fluke book for the great the gray well catalog based on photo ID so. Yeah, we this was something that even in some internal discussion we didn't want to get to in the specifics in the nitty gritty because these things could, the specifics could change of the methodology so that's my general answer does did you want to jump in anything Okay, so yeah we're just we're we really didn't want to get into the details because that part of it could change. Okay, well then, I mean I would suggest not make well, I don't know at this the photogrammetry is measuring you know how long and big and whatever measurements of animals so that doesn't really fit with the context of what you're proposing. And, you know, and unless you're using drones that can do surveys, you know, to look at distribution of animals and that's a whole nother technology and methodology. You know, for me when when you say you want to do residency patterns and habitat use that's doing surveys traditional marine mammal sort of surveys and photo ID, you know from a boat to then look at, you know, matching of animals and individuals to look at residency. So I do think our important issues at that localized scale, but I just didn't follow how drones would help with that aspect. Okay, yeah, and this does include small boat as we mentioned small boat operations and those traditional photo ID type surveys and that sort of thing but okay thank you that's helpful feedback. And Lee sorry I will jump in England now, but thanks it's nice to see you I think, you know, the photogrammetry is another sort of added capability for, you know, just sort of understanding maybe I don't know and this is taking a little bit of a sort of a swing as I haven't finalized everything because this is really just why we wanted to come to the coast and and and and to all of you guys to get your opinion in that, you know, the photogrammetry would not only be for, you know, the harbor purpose where we would be hoping to expand that to, you know, the humpbacks and blue whales potentially and the killer whales certainly and gray whales. So, you know, there's, there's multiple aspects of the types of data that we can collect, but the photo ID for sure is is sort of the mock and that would be focused on the hover purpose. And so we're basically just throwing the toolbox in there to say hey we've got multiple species with different behaviors and we're trying to understand what could be happening here. So, you know, if you if you've got more sort of directed advice on to how we could more appropriately use better tools that is most welcome. Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, I guess if you put together an RFP I might, you know, focus more on the questions so that the tools follow the questions instead of the other way around. But yeah, so thank you for that feedback that was good. Harry, did you still have a question. This may be an unnecessarily picky point but I'll make it quickly and offer it with good intent. I think it's framed as the transit areas to and from the Port of Moreau Bay the point has already been made that more likely than not. Things will be coming and going in terms of construction at least and deployment through LA Long Beach, or possibly the San Francisco Bay Area, and that the more obey area would be perhaps a launch point for smaller maintenance operations I don't know. Just in sort of thinking about okay if you were to put an RFP out or whatever, I would, I would encourage you to frame it with that caveat, very clear, because there will be community members who see that and it's, it's, it could be misunderstood, or it could be misleading so make it really clear. And maybe if the idea is to pilot it also because this is something that would be tractable and this, this localized transit is potentially quite relevant. So if you're planning the patterns there, then speak to some extent, at some point somewhere along the way to how you would account for that larger transit, that longer transit pattern and and the potential for interactions there. Anyway, thank you. This is really interesting. Thank you. Thanks Carrie. I'm going to turn Scott to you. I have a question. Did we get a question from Susan. Yes, so that is my. That's, that's all. Yep, we have. So Susan parks who is a committee member of COSA she was trying to stay on the line as long as possible today, but had some conflicts with this particular time. I do think most of her questions have been anticipated by others. But I'm going to go ahead and just read them verbatim so that I don't misconstrue anything. The first was what preexisting baseline siting data if any is available for this region. And the second question that she had was why the selection of these specific species rather than all marine mammal species in the area, primarily about exclusion of other recognizable bailing whales such as humpbacks that are present there. And then in response to the questions posed on the slides. She says my response question would be whether bone could require pre construction surveys from industry and or partner with Noah for interagency surveys for data collection to supplement bone funding for these baseline data. So, I know she would have shared those on her own had she been available to do so. Yes, yeah, thank you and would love to yeah maybe you can get written copy of those eventually too so thank you for sharing this. All right, I think that wraps up our profiles for today. And so, David, go ahead. One thing before we do go. I know like again like we're just the second time you're going to be accused of getting in the way cake but do do we want to discuss this issue or maybe over cake about the appropriateness of what level, say government funds studies versus when it's appropriate for industry to do it. Folks would like to have that conversation I guess I'll defer to Rodney we'll be eating into his time a little bit, but I'm happy to open the room to additional discussion. I will defer to the committee. And, and, you know, to me as we move forward with all these activities on the OCS and all the science needs, it really does have to be kind of all hands on deck. The developers need to be part of a solution and that means be part of the science funding with the federal government. In many cases we're looking towards opportunities to where we can pull that funding together and work together to solve these problems but another aspects there may be stipulations on the lease that the developers need to go out and collect certain data, and there may be other stipulations. So it is, you know, it is an important question and moving forward. And, you know, I think I think how we deal with it and kind of the, it was going to be very important and it's going to be really important for the developers to have clear an understanding and what the expectations are moving forward because, you know, their business they got a plan they got a plan. All right, so we're going to have to work together on this. So, you know, perspectives on the committee on this over. Now, or over cake or whenever our, our welcome or just in the future. Well you do have some hands raised. So we'll go ahead and run through those and then, and then we can move along so we'll turn to Scott rod Kevin and then carry. So, I have, I'll start with a question. Am I correct that this is the first such study of this kind undertaken by Bowman support of a wind, wind offshore wind development the US have you done anything like this in the Atlantic, for example, or is this the first time you've tried this, if you did do anything in the Atlantic what were the key lessons that are learned that are relevant to this discussion that you want to have here, and the question you posed. Well, I can jump in and try to answer that. We did do some some researching to reach out to our colleagues on that in the Atlantic and kind of depends on how you depends on how you want to define the study but it really was the for this is the first of, if we're looking at. The first of this kind of this focus type of study. Okay, okay, then, then you've answered that quick so then I will go on to give my, my comment then you, the region asked if this study should, and I already shared this with you Rodney and Jessica so maybe it went to Pacific region I don't know but Pacific region asked if this study should be funded by industry, which I assume means the leaseholder in this case. If such funding was not a stipulation of the leases then no, not in this case I would not, I would not retroactively I don't think you can do that. My sense is that bone should take the lead role in establishing the template for such baseline studies described here. And so should fund this first ever study is if this is the first of this level of detail and I think you guys need to do that. It's the logic for the leaseholder to fund follow up studies on the lease to monitor impacts over project life over the project lifestyle cycle. But only if it was included in the stipulations the lease so you have to change change things going forward. I can see merit and bone taking the lead for the baseline studies for all leases in a particular region to insert sure consistent quality of that critical baseline data. And that will be needed to ensure independent peer reviewed assurance of scientific integrity of any such work to ensure that at the end of the day can withstand legal challenge because that's kind of what's driving this is it not you want to make sure that we do not go in violation of the endangered species act or marine mammals protection that we're trying to, you know, safeguard, you know, your role as environmental stewards right. So, I think you're you got skin in the game and you know, for now and and but I think there's a pathway to, you know, get others to fund it down the road but you got to be up front with them right. That's my, that's my two bits. Thank you. Rob, Kevin, Kerry and Rona. Oh, I couldn't agree with my co chair more. But it was, it wasn't my natural. It was brilliant. So I think that I think that this is important. It's not in my area of expertise. I think that you need to go back to decision making and requirements for leases, if you see how this is used in decision making, and how this will impact what you do with leases, then you don't need to know the whole picture you need to know how it's going to impact decision making for the bone and for leases going forward and if that's, if you see the way that that is going to be used then I think that this is something that you should be talking about and moving forward with. So, so I would say, you know, these these. So this is something we've kind of grapple with on the East Coast to because you have the impact of a particular development site, which, you know, there's, there's NEPA requirements there's there's getting the license for the, for those studies to the EPA and and a part of that burden has to be carried by the developer, just in order to meet the requirements but then with these migratory animals you have to have a regional component and right now we don't seem to have a really good mechanism of pulling together the whole regional component on the East Coast, it's, it's even more complicated where you have several companies having different lease areas up and down the coast and stuff so there has to be some kind of over, oversight of that. And, and, and I think that bone can can take a lead in that that would be my, my thoughts. And then Jeremy. And so, I agree with everything that's been said so far, my concern is not simply that the study should withstand legal challenges, but that there should be no perception of a conflict of interest and so my worry with developer funded companies would be that it would be almost impossible to keep them staying free in that respect. And so if there were a way that the money was put into some trust account and administered by bone that seems to me to be a much safer way to do it. And just to respond to that when I was talking about pulling funds that's an opportunity that we're exploring that perhaps if we were to work together with the developer that money could be channeled through the coming out it's something we're still working and talking about some just talking about it conceptually. Thanks Rodney it'll be interesting to follow that development should it come to fruition Jeremy I think you are next. I would say is wholly appropriate for bone to take the lead on these you ultimately are the one that has the NEPA responsibility, not the developer. You're the one that has to make the assurance of no jeopardy. Not the developer. And you're the one that we as as citizens and residents of the United States look to to protect all of our interests not just our energy development interests but our natural resource interests so. Yeah, I have no problem with you undertaking this this work and I think particularly if this is new and somewhat novel then let's do it and let's do it right. And let's get a good template out there. Yeah, agreed with all that. And also outside my area of expertise by a long shot, but something that I've heard in conversations with folks who are who do work within that area is a concern that when data are collected and maintained by developers for it's very hard for the rest of the scientific community and the broader public to be able to gain access to and use those data which could be used actually for a whole range of purposes. And so I think by taking some direct responsibility for data collection production etc overseeing that process, not only do you help ensure continuity and quality, but you also ensure accessibility of that information. And I think that's actually super important. So thank you for the opportunity to comment. Seeing no additional hands in the room or online. I think 19 comments on the chat. Yes. There's been an extremely active chat today throughout the whole program so we will absolutely be capturing that as Academy staff but I want to open this to Rodney to kick off our celebration of the studies. Thank you programs 50th anniversary. Fantastic. Thank you. I've got about 63 slides to go through so just bear with me as much as I just, I just got a few, just to set the context. And also our graphics designer so wonderful was looking at that ground here is amazing. So yeah 50 years of ocean science. And in 1973, I, I, you know, I often say in looking back, you know, when Congress actually did the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and actually created the environmental studies program that they got it right. I think it's, I think it's good to have a small program that can actually reach out to other to the private sector to academics and others to pull in research. This time I mean it is, it's challenging. I mean, all the things we've talked about today, you're looking at, you know, the impacts on the human marine and coastal environments. Wow. You know, I mean that's just such a handful. That's why we have the experts we do but it's, you know, it's really a lot. Next. You know, 76 looks like a really good year for the environmental studies program. We're going to get back there. We're a little higher in 23 than we were in 22 that's mainly because of my right fund. But we've been kind of up and down over the years and you know my hope is that as we continue for the next 50 years, which we will. But our budget, our science budget really kind of becomes commensurate with all the activities that we will be overseeing. So for years it was just oil and gas and as you know we've talked about there's so many more things. Now that we're in charge of next. So I think you got to hit it again when when you think about you just talking to people what do you think about when they talk about the environmental studies program nimble, flexible and proactive these are some of the things that that come to mind, which makes me very pleased to be part of an amazing program like we have next. But what makes it amazing is really the people. So, again, we don't have the aircraft, the ships, the satellites, but we got some amazing people and dedicated scientists. And if you look at some of the outfits, you know, some of them were from the 70s there are the 80s and some of them a little more modern but you know you can see some familiar faces in there over the, you know that the entire time we've really existed and I think it's just, you know, really been pretty amazing. Next. So I really think our legacy is really not only to produce the use inspired science but also use inspired scientists is that over the last 50 years, there's been a lot of scientists created through our funding. A lot of people got their PhDs masters a lot of people went on to fantastic careers. And I think that's really an important part of our legacy is something to be proud of. So, with that, we're going to go eat cake. I think so. Thank you. So we have the cake just outside the room that folks are welcome to, and I'll just note for the cost of members we do have a scheduled dinner tonight. Eric, maybe you can give us some input on when and where the reservations are. 630. About five and a one from the hotel. All right. Well, let's see. You've been through a lot of these and this was an exceptionally productive meeting today. I really and really want to shout out to the bone folks for a great job folks presenting your stuff. We had cogent concise presentations left room for a lot of discussion. I really want to thank our guests are special guests from so many of them, calling in some odd hours, really appreciate that. And I want to thank our staff for pulling this all together so I think Ronnie I don't know how you feel but I thought this was a pretty particularly productive day once. Very good so thank you all very much.