Consortium for Estuarine Ecoindicator Research for the Gulf of Mexico

CEER-GOM is composed of 9 universities who have come together to form a consortium with the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, to develop practical bioindicators to monitor estuary health. CEER-GOM is a piece in a bigger puzzle called the Estuarine and Great Lakes (EaGLe) projects, administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in cooperation with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The main objective is to study, develop and validate indicators of nutrient and dissolved oxygen (DO) impacts on estuarine condition at four levels of increasing biological complexity (Individual, Population, Community and Ecosystem/Watershed), and to integrate the suite of indicator responses through models that can be used to describe the “health” of an estuarine ecosystem. These indicators can be used in long-term monitoring of estuarine conditions in the Gulf of Mexico, which has broader applicability to shallow estuaries of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.