Cooperative Agreement 96390801

This Cooperative Agreement award of $535,926 from the Environmental Protection Agency Region 3 will fund the Virginia Institute of Marine Science to improve decision-making capacity regarding the long-term sustainability of coastal wetlands facing sea level rise. Key products and services include developing a repeatable monitoring method for assessing changes to marsh communities, conducting expanded investigations of species' use of newly migrated marsh, and developing a framework to incorporate monitoring changes into vulnerability assessments. A sub-award of $TBD will support the College of William & Mary Center for Conservation Biology to assess any changes in the marsh-bird community in the Lower Chesapeake Bay since 1992 and survey recently established marshes to determine potential mitigation from marsh migration. These efforts support the goals of the Regional Wetland Program Development Grants program administered by EPA under the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance number 66.461.