Whales & Waterways: The 2026 Gulf Ecosystem Initiative Working Groups

 

Launched in 2023, the Gulf Ecosystem Initiative (GEI) is a partnership between the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and the NOAA RESTORE Science Program that supports collaborative science and postdoctoral research to advance sustainable decision-making in the Gulf of America. 

The Gulf is a place where land, sea, and people are deeply interconnected. Rapid environmental change, coastal development, and decades of human activity continue to reshape ecosystems above and below the water's surface. GEI funds interdisciplinary teams to tackle pressing environmental challenges across three themes: climate change, fisheries, and the ecological impacts of management.

This year's funded working groups will investigate two critical but poorly understood topics: the impacts of modifying coastlines and the drivers behind the mysterious declines in whales and other marine life.

Together, these projects exemplify the power of synthesis science which brings together existing data, diverse expertise, and collaborative approaches to answer questions that no single discipline could solve alone.

 

 

The Hidden Impacts of Living by the Water

Residential canals allow people to live close to the water, offering direct access to waterways and an intimate connection with the coastal environment. But creating and maintaining these communities requires major changes to natural landscapes. Developers must dredge waterways by removing sediment from the bottom of coastal environments to create and expand canal systems.

These modifications can limit water movement, preventing water from circulating and refreshing naturally. As a result, nutrients can build up, oxygen levels can decline, and the structure and function of these ecosystems can change, affecting the benefits they provide to both people and wildlife. While these systems have reshaped how communities live alongside the coast, their ecological consequences remain poorly understood.

This working group, led by Chris Stallings (University of South Florida), Holden Harris (Harris Analytics & Research), Nathan Hewitt, and Emily Begin (The Coastal Habitat and Water Quality Initiative), aims to better understand how residential canals affect Gulf Coast ecosystems and inform future restoration efforts.

At the core of their project is a major knowledge gap: despite being a drastic coastal modification, residential canals are minimally studied.

“Residential canals cover thousands of kilometers of coastline, yet no one has studied them comprehensively, and the science exists only as scattered local case studies. They are among the most extensive yet least studied coastal modifications in the world,” the team explains.

The group has four primary goals: reviewing existing research on how canals affect coastal ecosystems, mapping different types of canal systems across the Gulf Coast, investigating connections between canal water flow and harmful algal blooms (rapid increases in algae growth), and developing indicators that can help guide restoration and management decisions.

The need for this synthesis is especially timely as state and local authorities make restoration decisions today, often without the information needed to determine whether restoration is necessary, where efforts should be prioritized, or whether completed projects are achieving their goals.

By bringing together academic researchers, federal and state scientists, estuary programs, and resource managers, the team hopes to create a decision framework that helps communities better understand when, where, and how restoration efforts can have the greatest impact.

“We can close the gap by bringing the data together and creating a transparent way to plan restoration and evaluate whether those efforts are working,” the team says.

 

 

Connecting the Dots Beneath the Gulf's Surface

While one working group focuses on changes along the Gulf’s coastlines, another is looking offshore to investigate a different ecological mystery: what is driving declines in Gulf marine life?

Over the past decade, scientists have documented significant declines in both Gulf cetaceans (whales and dolphins) and nekton (small fishes, crustaceans, and cephalopods that live in the open ocean). Nekton form the foundation of the deep-water food web and provide critical prey for marine mammals, yet the reasons behind these simultaneous declines remain unclear.

Led by Libby Fetherston (NOAA Fisheries) and Laura Engleby (New College of Florida), this working group will investigate whether changes in prey availability and distribution could help explain these population trends.

Although marine mammals face many known threats, from vessel strikes to pollution, these factors do not appear sufficient to explain the scale of observed declines. The team wants to finetune how we explore this issue by asking a more focused question:

“What if the story of cetacean decline is about prey? Not just how much prey is out there, but whether it's available in the dense, reliable patches these animals actually need to survive.”

To explore this question, the team will use participatory modeling, an approach that combines quantitative modeling with the expertise and knowledge held by researchers, managers, and practitioners working across different fields. This approach will allow the group to explore complex ecosystem connections that are difficult to study through traditional methods alone.

“The pelagic Gulf is full of unknowns, and harder still, unknown unknowns. Understanding what is driving this disturbance means stepping outside our usual silos,” the team notes.

The group hopes to uncover new connections within the Gulf ecosystem and provide information that can support ongoing Deepwater Horizon restoration decisions, Rice’s whale recovery planning, and small cetacean conservation efforts.

For the researchers, one of the most exciting aspects of the project is the opportunity to create dedicated space for collaboration.

“Opportunities like this NCEAS grant that fund synthesis and integration are rare and exactly what is needed for a problem where the system is complex, the data are sparse, and the disciplines don’t typically overlap,” the team says.

 

 

Building a More Connected Future for Gulf Science

These two projects focus on different parts of the Gulf ecosystem, from residential waterways along the coast  to deep offshore food webs, but share a common goal: connecting knowledge across disciplines to better understand environmental change and inform action.

Through the GEI working group model, researchers are able to move beyond traditional scientific boundaries, combining data, expertise, and perspectives to tackle challenges that require collective solutions.

As these teams begin their work, they will help advance understanding of the Gulf’s interconnected ecosystems and provide new tools and insights to support restoration, conservation, and management decisions for years to come.