This website provides access by report type and by author to a compilation of baseline reports that resulted from research funded by the Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Assessment Program (OCSEAP). The reports were scanned, and the website was derived by Alaska Resources Library and Information Services (ARLIS) from OCSEAP’s Comprehensive Bibliography, published June 1990. The reports are mainly focused on OCS lease areas: Beaufort Sea, Lower Cook Inlet, Chukchi Sea, Norton Sound, Navarin Basin, St. George Basin, Bristol Bay, Aleutian Basin, Kodiak Region, and Gulf of Alaska.
Background: The protection of the marine and coastal environment is mandated by the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Lands Act of 1953, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, and the OCS Lands Act Amendments of 1978. An essential responsibility of the Department of the Interior (DOI), as manager of the OCS Leasing Program, is to ensure that proposed OCS development and production activities will not irreparably damage the marine environment and its resources. To help meet this responsibility as it applies to development of the Alaska OCS, the Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Assessment Program (OCSEAP) was initiated by inter-agency agreement between DOI’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) [now, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, BOEM] and the Department of Commerce’s national Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
