Gulf Watch Alaska: Long-term Monitoring of Marine Conditions and Injured Resources in the Gulf of Alaska Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Affected Area

• Main Author: McCammon, Molly
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Axiom Data Science 2017
• Subjects: Gulf of Alaska; Kachemak; Alaska
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.24431/axds/83479591-af7c-4f64-974f-febb843035b8; https://search.dataone.org/#view/10.24431/axds/83479591-af7c-4f64-974f-febb843035b8

The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (EVOS) Trustee Council (EVOSTC) initiated funding for the Gulf Watch Alaska (GWA) long-term monitoring (LTM) program in 2012. The GWA program is administrated by the EVOSTC under five-year contracts with the current anticipated duration to be twenty-years in length, concluding in 2032. The program is a consortium of 15 projects, ten of which started before 2012 and several with data sets extending prior to the EVOS. The overarching goal of the GWA program is to provide sound scientific data and products that inform management agencies and the public of changes in the environment and the impacts of these changes on injured resources such as marine birds and mammals. The organization of GWA includes three ecosystem monitoring components: Environmental Drivers, Pelagic, and Nearshore. A fourth component, Lingering Oil, was later incorporated in 2013. Descriptions of the project and components are under Supplemental Information. This monitoring has produced long-term datasets for oceanographic conditions, plankton, intertidal invertebrates and algae, fish, marine mammals, and birds in the Gulf of Alaska, including Prince William Sound, Resurrection Bay, the Gulf of Alaska Shelf, lower Cook Inlet, and Kachemak Bay. This dataset is a single text file containing a manifest of data produced and archived under the GWA program. The GWA datasets have been submitted as individual collections for long-term archive. This manifest is a master compilation listing all of the archived datasets generated by GWA in the 2012-2016 time period. The manifest includes the GWA project name, EVOSTC project number, principal investigators, dataset description, time period, and the identifying number for GWA datasets.