NROC Ocean Planning Meeting Set for June 4th in Gloucester, MA

We look forward to seeing you on June 4, 2019, for our next in-person ocean planning meeting. The meeting will be held at the NOAA Fisheries Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The meeting will include an update on the NROC Ocean Planning Committee’s work plan, an update on federal implementation of Executive Order 13840, and an update and discussion about offshore wind development in the region. A draft meeting agenda has been posted to the Northeast Ocean Planning website. We will update the agenda and include additional meeting materials as the meeting gets closer. Please register for the meeting here if you are interested in attending.

Also, please note there are many recent updates to the Northeast Ocean Data Portal, including:

• The Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council’s amended Geographic Location Description.

• Communities at Sea maps and a tutorial to help users explore connections between fishing communities and commercial fishing grounds.

• Updated aquaculture data for the state of New Hampshire.

• Data on potential offshore sand resources from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

• The New England Fishery Management Council’s preferred alternatives for the Clam Dredge Framework.

• Case studies describing the use of the portal by the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Navy.

• The Portal’s quarterly newsletter, which was released at the beginning of April and describes all these updates and more – subscribe to the Portal’s quarterly newsletter here.

Many additional datasets are being updated and will be released soon, including high-resolution bathymetry for the Gulf of Maine, updated marine transportation and navigation data, proposed footprints for offshore wind projects, and updated data products characterizing fish biomass caught in the Northeast Fisheries Science Center trawl survey.

Please contact us or Nick Napoli (nnapoli@northeastoceancouncil.org) if you have any questions or comments.

Thank you,

Ted Diers, NROC Ocean Planning Committee State Co-Chair
Administrator of the Watershed Bureau of the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services

Mel Coté, NROC Ocean Planning Committee Federal Co-Chair
Chief of the Surface Water Branch at U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 1