The Southeast Gillnet Observer Program has adapted to the changes of the Florida-Georgia shark gillnet fishery since the program began in 1993 (e.g. Carlson and Bethea 2007 and references therein, Mathers et al. 2015). There are currently about 500 total directed and incidental shark permits issued for the southeastern U.S. Atlantic coast and Gulf of Mexico, while the number of gillnet fishers changes from year to year. Gillnet effort targeting large coastal (LCS) and small...

In coastal and estuarine regions, land use can have a profound impact on aquatic ecosystem health. In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, agriculture and urbanization have transformed major portions of the landscape, though some areas of undeveloped land remain. This document assesses the health of six Bay tributaries with different land use profiles via a suite of water quality and biological condition variables. Linkages are then explored between these scored variables and land use in the...

EX1202 Leg 2 was a combination of Little Hercules ROV operations and mapping operations. The standard daily schedule of operations included mapping in the early morning, ROV dive operations from approximately 0730 to 1800 local, then mapping operations through the evening and into the following morning. ROV dive operations were based on EM 302 data obtained during Okeanos Explorer cruises EX1105, EX1106, EX1202 Leg 1, and the current cruise, EX 1202 Leg 2. Objectives of...

We investigated different climatic factors affecting South Florida (climate divisions 4, 5 and 6) precipitation. The climatic indexes used here are based on over a century of global sea surface temperature anomalies. The climatic associations are studied for different seasons and in three frequency bands (intra-seasonal, inter-annual and decadal). We found that the known ENSO relationship for winter/spring (wetter than normal South Florida rainfall anomalies during El Niño) does not hold during the summer. We...