The Mississippi Trustee Implementation Group is planning restoration activities for the 2016-2017 planning years and would like your input regarding natural resource restoration opportunities in Mississippi.

During and after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, natural resource trustee agencies collected thousands of samples across broad regions of the northern Gulf of Mexico. These samples supported the spill response and the natural resource damage assessment.

The case has been settled and the assessment is now complete. NOAA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are making remainders of these samples available to the scientific community. The types of available materials include:

• 36,000 tissue samples from Gulf of Mexico plants and animals, including oysters, fish, birds, plants, and

The Trustees have approved standard operating procedures for the long-term management, implementation, and administration of settlement funds for natural resource restoration.

The Alabama Trustee Implementation Group welcomes the opportunity to continue to restore Alabama’s coastal resources.

The Mississippi Trustee Implementation Group represents a joint effort of the State of Mississippi and federal trustees.

Learn more about the Florida Trustee Implementation Group.

Today—nearly six years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill began—the court approved a settlement with BP for natural resource injuries stemming from the spill. This settlement concludes the largest natural resource damage assessment ever undertaken. We will now begin implementing restoration as laid out in the Trustees’ programmatic restoration plan.

Under this settlement, BP will pay the Trustees up to $8.8 billion for restoration to address natural resource injuries. The settlement—the largest recovery of damages ever for injuries to natural resources—includes:

• $1 billion already

Last month, the Trustees released the Final Programmatic Damage Assessment and Restoration Plan and Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement. The plan includes an assessment of impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on natural resources and the services they provide. It also identifies the types of restoration needed to restore these resources and compensate the public.

We have now made a final decision to select the comprehensive, integrated, ecosystem restoration alternative evaluated in the plan as our approach for restoration implementation.

We have issued a Record of

The Trustees have released a final comprehensive, integrated, ecosystem restoration plan for the Gulf of Mexico. It is based on our thorough assessment of impacts to the Gulf's natural resources and the services they provide following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We are now entering a 30-day waiting period, which will last until March 21, 2016. We will not make a final decision to adopt the plan until this period is complete. We received more than 6,300 public comments on the draft plan, and we would like to thank the public for all their input. We considered all the comments in preparing