The Regional Estuary Assessment for the northern Gulf of Mexico represents an effort to develop, test, and implement a new assessment methodology for marine habitats that improves the analytical basis for identifying impacts to estuarine fish habitats. This new regional assessment approach offers several advantages: Incorporates information on fish/shellfish presence/absence from over 70,000 sampling events collected over two decades, so we can better relate fish habitat condition to natural and anthropogenic variables. Better accounts for the high amounts of natural variation found in the marine environment, which can affect the susceptibility of individual estuaries. Allows us to take advantage of regional datasets not available [...]
