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About GulfTOPP
On April 20, 2010 an explosion occurred on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform, causing an oil spill which flowed for three months into the Gulf of Mexico before the well was successfully capped. The infrastructure that had been created over a decade of the Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) project was ideally suited to help assess changes in animal migratory behavior associated with environmental variables. The effort utilizing this sytems to help assess the impacts of the oil spill is known as “Gulf Tagging of Pelagic Predators” – or GulfTOPP.
The GulfTOPP project utilizes the tools and techniques developed for TOPP data management, and implements them in a more robust and secure way for access by Trustees of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It currently houses datasets from several different laboratories, studying a variety animal species, utilizing multiple telemetry approaches. Additional animal telemetry datasets as well as oceanographic layers are being added to GulfTOPP on an ongoing basis. We anticipate that at some point these data will all be made available to the public, but for the present time the GulfTOPP system is considered confidential.
