Friday August 4, 2023
Seafood Source —
NOAA Fisheries is preparing to issue a contract worth up to USD 74.5 million (EUR 68.1 million) for support for its Office of Habitat Conservation, which oversees NOAA’s efforts to conserve habitat for managed fisheries and restore fisheries impacted by oil spills.
Under the solicitation, a contractor would oversee some of the office’s core responsibilities and manage the agency’s preparations for an oil spill on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The contractor would “coordinate and manage coastal and marine habitat management” on behalf of OHC and assist the office in developing national fisheries protection policy.
The selected company would also be charged with retrieving, downloading, and processing data needed for the agency’s fisheries programs; would provide services to the Restoration Center – overseeing complex fisheries restoration strategies and monitoring those projects to determine the environmental consequences of those efforts; and would provide engineering services, such as designing fish passages and using advanced survey technology.