Padre Island Wind Tidal Flats Pilot Project

Principal Investigator
Kim Withers, Ph.D.

Currently there are no methods to restore tidal flat habitats when they are damaged by driving or other deleterious activities. On Padre Island National Seashore, these flats are extremely important habitats for wintering and migrating shorebirds, included the endangered/threatened Piping Plover and Snowy Plover. If successful, this work will provide a means to restore and repair tidal flat habitats in a variety of settings. Three direct cost budget object classes are relevant: personnel, fringe benefits, and supplies.

The Harte Research Institute program GRIIDC will provide data curation and repository services by addressing the full data life cycle from data management planning to dissemination. This includes data management training, planning via dataset information forms, accounting for data sharing requirements, data package review, minting of digital object identifiers (DOIs), and dataset discoverability and availability. GRIIDC accepts links to national data repositories on our site. GRIIDC will collect metadata about the dataset and provide a link to the data at the national data repository. This provides another avenue for users to discover the dataset, allows the dataset to be viewed with other data from the project on the GRIIDC site, and assigns the dataset a DOI.

The long-term expectation is that the methods developed as part of this pilot project will facilitate future restoration of tidal flat acres.