National Center for Coastal Ocean Science Grants Funds to Research Toxic Algal Blooms

More help could be on the way, thanks to NOAA’s National Center for Coastal Ocean Science, which is allocating more than $10 million dollars to fund research into one of the undesirable effects of the Bonnet Carre Spillway — toxic algal blooms.

NOAA will fund 12 new research projects around the country to better understand and predict harmful algal blooms and to improve the collective response to them.

In all, NOAA is allocating $10.2 million dollars to fund this research across our nation with about $8.4 million of that covering the first year of new 3- to 5-year projects, and another $1.78 million going to 3-year projects already under way.

Researchers awarded this money will conduct research to identify conditions that increase algal bloom toxicity; model toxin movement from the water into shellfish, fish, and marine mammals; and to improve toxin monitoring and forecasts.