Mississippi and Alabama seafood producers have dealt with many environmental and human-caused disasters that have affected the region's ability to supply seafood. The COVID-19 pandemic, economic recessions, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, coastal storms, extreme rain events and harmful algal blooms have had significant negative impacts on the seafood industry, including oyster farming. The COVID-19 pandemic is a unique challenge that is unlike any the region has faced. While past events significantly disrupted seafood stock and supply, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a major disruptor for seafood demand and the distribution chain for seafood products. Increasing oyster farmers' resilience to disasters will increase the sustainability of the oyster farming industry. In this project, the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium will lead the development of an Oyster Farming Resilience Index. Oyster farmers who complete the self-assessment tool will have a better understanding of their vulnerabilities and how to become more resilient to a range of disasters.
The Oyster Farming Resilience Index will be created, implemented and evaluated through the following objectives: 1) To create a new Oyster Farming Resilience Index that accounts for a variety of disasters and emerging needs; 2) To facilitate oyster farmers' use of the index within Alabama and Mississippi to identify common vulnerabilities; 3) To address common vulnerabilities that the index identified and provide technical support to increase the resilience of the oyster farms by delivering engagement and education programs that better equip industry members in addressing common vulnerabilities; 4) To conduct an evaluation to assess the success of the project.

Southeastern United States reef fisheries are some of the most commercially valuable and recreationally popular in the country. Across these fisheries, a speciose assemblage is targeted by a diverse and geographically variable group of stakeholders who collectively possess a wealth of local ecological knowledge gained from years on the water. Broadly speaking, the goal of the proposed regional collaborative is to build upon the conventional unidirectional flow of information (i.e., from research to management to stakeholder) by working directly with stakeholders on a consistent basis to identify pressing research needs and communicate those needs to the scientific and management community (i.e., from stakeholder to research and management). To accomplish this, we have assembled a team comprised of Sea Grant fisheries Extension professionals from across the Southeastern US (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina). We have complemented these Sea Grant professionals with a social-ecological fisheries scientist, management representatives from the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic Fishery Management Councils and an Advisory Panel of commercial and recreational sector stakeholders and state fisheries management representatives. Collectively, this collaborative will work to gather (Objective 1), refine (Objective 2) and communicate (Objective 3) Southeastern US reef fish knowledge to appropriate stakeholders.