The Coastal Wetland Planning Protection and Restoration Act Task Force was created by federal law in 1990. Funding now exceeds $85 million annually in federal money and almost $2 million in state money. The CWPPRA Task Force is comprised of one member each from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Natural Resources Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Marine Fisheries Service of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state of Louisiana.

While the task force includes considerable expertise regarding Louisiana’s coastal wetlands problems, the group also recognized the need to incorporate the invaluable expertise of the state’s academic community. Academic advisers to the task force are referred to as the Academic Advisory Workgroup. A full task force organizational chart is available at https://lacoast.gov/new/About/OrgChart.aspx.

Dr. Andy Nyman was one of the founding members of the CWPPRA Academic Advisory Workgroup, which began in 1993. In 2024, Nyman became chair of the group and invited three new members including RNR’s Dr. Jeffery Plumlee, as well as Dr. Alex Kolker, of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, and Dr. Carol Wilson, from the LSU geology department. Dr. Gary Shaffer, from Southeastern Louisiana University, who also is an original member of CWPPRA’s Academic Advisory Workgroup, rounds out the current group.

Members of the group collaborate with CWPPRA each year as ideas for restoration projects are solicited from the public and then ranked through an in-office evaluation in the spring. After this, field sites are visited in June, followed by numerical scoring of current and predicted future environmental variables with and without restoration in August. Finally, the resulting rankings are submitted to the chain of committees for final vote by the CWPPRA Task Force.

Although the primary purpose of the Academic Advisory Workgroup is to provide research and outreach expertise regarding coastal wetlands to the CWPPRA Task Force, it also aids CWPPRA by increasing the capacity of the academic advisers to help CWPPRA communicate with the academic community and the public