The Coastal Marine Institute(CMI) at Louisiana State University(LSU) was formed under a Cooperative Agreement between the University and the Minerals Management Service (MMS), Department of the Interior. The CMI Program at LSU is coordinated through the Environmental Studies Program at the Gulf of Mexico Regional Office of MMS. The first Cooperative Agreement between MMS and LSU was initiated in 1993. The program was continued with a Second Cooperative Agreement for 5 more years. A third agreement extends the cooperation between MMS and LSU to 30 September 2008.

Since the beginning of the agreement in 1993, 128 projects have been funded - approximately 40 are presently active though several of these are in the process of preparing final project reports.

Over the course of the cooperative agreements, $25,538,367 in research contracts have been awarded by MMS through the CMI program to researchers at LSU, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, the University of New Orleans, and the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Each year, $2,000,000 is available from MMS to fund research on MMS/OCS related issues. This money is matched by the scientists on a 1:1 basis from university, state, and industry funds, so that $4,000,000 worth of research is initiated each year. The total funding for CMI research projects is, therefore, over $51 million. In addition to funding the research of scientists at LSU, more than 100 graduate and undergraduate students have been supported through these projects.

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CMI Program is to permit MMS to take advantage of highly qualified, scientific expertise at local levels to:

• Collect and disseminate environmental information needed for Outer Continental Shelf OCS) oil and gas and marine minerals decisions.
• Address local and regional OCS related environmental and resource issues of mutual interest.
• Strengthen the MMS-State of Louisiana partnership in addressing OCS oil and gas and marine minerals information needs.

The Cooperative Agreement of Coastal Marine Institute at Louisiana State University are to:

• Respond to MMS, State, and local information needs and interests with local expertise of national caliber in the OCS relevant disciplines found at Louisiana State University.
• Broaden recognition and comprehension of study results through performance and presentation of findings by a highly credible local research institution.
• Improve existing local capabilities and facilities for innovative scientific research relevant to OCS resource management issues.
• Use the interdisciplinary environment of a research university to foster process oriented studies, needed technologies and concepts, and synthesis of information that will benefit environmental and resource management.
• Achieve consensus between MMS and Louisiana regarding the most important environmental research needs relevant to the OCS Program.
• Reduce the cost to Louisiana and MMS of obtaining resource management information by co-funding information acquisition activities.

With in this Cooperative Agreement, MMS and Louisiana jointly agree on the most important research needs in the context of the OCS Program.

CMI projects address one or more of the following target areas:

• Environmental response to changing energy extraction and transport technologies.
• Analyses and synthesis of existing data/information from previous studies.
• Modeling of environmental, social, and economic processes and systems.
• New information about the structure/function of affected systems via application of descriptive and experimental means.
• Projects which improve the application and distribution of multi-source information.

Funded Projects have come from the variety of disciplines relevant to MMS/OCS needs:

• Sociology
• Economics
• Toxicology
• Biology
• Platform Ecology
• Meteorology
• Physical Oceanography
• Geomorphology