The Department of the Interior (DOI) Strategic Sciences Group (SSG) was established in 2012 to provide the Department with a standing capacity to rapidly assemble teams of scientists to construct interdisciplinary scenarios of environmental crises affecting DOI resources, identify potential interventions to mitigate adverse impacts, and provide results as useable knowledge for decision makers.
In 2013, the Secretary of the Interior deployed the SSG to support the Department’s role on the federal Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. The SSG assembled an interdisciplinary team of experts – Operational Group Sandy – from federal, academic, and non-profit institutions to examine Sandy’s impacts on the ecology, economy, and people of the affected region. The scenarios included interventions that could improve regional resilience to future major storms. Scenario results were used to inform the selection of DOI projects to be funded by Hurricane Sandy supplemental funds.
A report on the SSG’s work is now available at http://coastal.er.usgs.gov/