A press release issued on June 30, 2015 announced “…Texas is the first state in the nation to receive money from the RESTORE Trust Fund through a federal award to fund two Centers of Excellence. The two centers, Texas OneGulf at Texas A&M Corpus Christi and the Subsea Systems Institute at the University of Houston, will split an initial $4.036 million.”
The Environmental Law Institute’s Ocean Program has launched the Public Participation Bulletin Board. This new resource highlights ways the public can get involved in restoration in their state and throughout the region.
The Harte Research Institute (HRI) has a new site, GecoView.org, a companion site to their GecoServ.org webpage, to help users understand the critical benefits of coastal habitats. GecoView.org is based on an ESRI platform using a story map to help organize and present information. According to information provided by Sea Grant, a funder of this project, “The project’s goal was to determine how much people in each state would be willing to pay — if at all — for the conservation of Gulf habitats. This willingness-to-pay concept is a standard approach to measuring economic value for non-market benefits, and in this study, passive-use services.” The site went live in May 2015 and will be continually updated and maintained.