Introduction 



In 1985, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad- 

 ministration (NOAA) began a program to develop a 

 consistent data base on the presence, distribution, 

 relative abundance, and life history characteristics of 

 ecologically and economically important fishes and 

 invertebrates in the nation's estuaries. The Estuarine 

 Living Marine Resources (ELMR) program was 

 founded by the Biogeography Program* of the of the 

 former Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEA) 

 Division of the National Ocean Service (NOS). Through 

 the years, it has been conducted jointly by NOS, 

 NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), 

 and other agencies and institutions. The nationwide 

 "Base ELMR" data base was completed in 1994, and 

 includes data for 153 species found in 122 estuaries 

 and coastal embayments in five regions. Regional 

 revisions were completed for the Gulf of Mexico and 

 Southeast in 1998, and plans are under way to update 

 the Mid-Atlantic and North Atlantic regions in 2000- 

 2001 . This report provides a national overview of the 

 evolution, accomplishments, and regional results of 

 the ELMR program to date. 



The data base is divided into five study regions (Fig- 

 ure 1) and contains the monthly relative abundance of 

 each species' life stage by estuary for three salinity 

 zones (seawater, mixing, and tidal fresh), as identified 

 in NOAA's National Estuarine Inventory (NED Data 

 Atlas-Volume I and supplement (NOAA 1985a). Re- 

 gional data summary reports have been published for 



the North Atlantic (Jury et al. 1994), Mid-Atlantic 

 (Stone et al. 1994), Southeast (Nelson et al. 1991), Gulf 

 of Mexico (Nelson et al. 1992), and West Coast (Mo- 

 naco et al. 1990). Regional life history summary 

 reports have been published for the West Coast 

 (Emmett et al. 1991) and Gulf of Mexico (Pattillo et al. 

 1997). Life history tables and summaries for the 

 Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, and North Atlantic regions 

 are being developed. 



Since completion of the national ELMR data base in 

 1994, it has been updated, revised, improved, and 

 applied to specific problems in natural resource man- 

 agement (Table 1). To further refine the spatial reso- 

 lution of the ELMR framework, a multivariate meth- 

 odology (Bulger et al. 1993) was applied to derive five 

 bio-salinity zones in four "salinity seasons" for Gulf of 

 Mexico and Southeast estuaries (Christensen et al. 

 1997). In addition, ELMR data for the adult and 

 juvenile life stages of species have been revised based 

 on recent resource surveys using trawl and other gear. 

 The revised ELMR data were then linked with the 

 seasonal estuarine bio-salinity zones for the Gulf of 

 Mexico and Southeast regions, and incorporated into 

 a Geographic Information System (GIS) to enable 

 spatial organization of the data. The improved ELMR 

 data base has been used for a variety of applications, 

 including Habitat Suitability Modeling (HSM), Envi- 

 ronmental Sentitivity Index (ESI) mapping (RPI 1996, 

 1997), HazMat response (oil spill) planning, and the 

 identification of Essential Fish Habitat (EFH) (NOAA / 

 GMFMC 1998). 



•Now the Biogeography Program of the NOS Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment 



West Coast 



32 estuaries, 

 47 species 



North Atlantic 



1 7 estuaries, 

 58 species 



Mid-Atlantic 



22 estuaries, 

 61 species 



Southeast 



20 estuaries, 

 40 species 



Figure 1. ELMR study regions. 



Gulf of Mexico 



31 estuaries, 

 44 species 



