What is a ” rapid assessment “?
A rapid assessment is a sampling effort of short duration (1 to 3 days) in a targeted, well-defined geographic area. For the assessment, individuals have been recruited from all over the southeast to sample our coastal waters in a variety of ways, including trawling, seine netting, hand netting, hand picking of animals and scraping of fouling organisms from surfaces, among others. The approach is to collect as many different organisms as possible, return the organisms to a laboratory for identification, separate native from non-native organisms, identify as many non-native organisms as possible, and send those unidentified organisms to specialists for positive identification. The list of non-native species then forms the pool of potential invasive species.
