Saving Seafood

Management & Regulation

Commercial Fishing Vessel Owner Cost Survey Now in the Field

March 23, 2023 — The following was released by the NOAA Fisheries:

The Greater Atlantic Region Commercial Fishing Business Cost Survey for calendar year 2022 is now open for participation. To access and complete the survey online, vessel owners can click HERE.  

This is a voluntary survey, collecting commercial fishing business cost information from federally permitted vessel owners.  All owners of federally-permitted commercial fishing vessels that were active in either 2021 or 2022 may participate. The survey is being administered by our Social Sciences Branch in partnership with the survey firm, ICF.

If you do not want to participate online, there are two other ways to take the survey before data collection ends on September 1: via phone interview or by responding to a hardcopy of the survey that will be mailed to each vessel owner by our survey firm, ICF. Request a phone interview with SSB staff by calling 508-495-2015. In April, hardcopy surveys will also be sent to the address listed on the owner’s vessel permit application.

The survey  was last conducted in 2016. This information is used to track trends in costs over time, assess economic fishery performance, and ultimately inform management decisions. This survey is the only NOAA Fisheries effort collecting this type of cost information in our region. 

Cost information can only be used to inform management decisions with participation from industry members. Your participation in this survey is greatly appreciated!

NOAA Fisheries, Atlantic Coast Partners Release Plan to Improve Atlantic Recreational Fisheries Data

March 22, 2023 —The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

The Atlantic Coastal Cooperative Statistics Program and NOAA Fisheries have jointly released the Marine Recreational Information Program Regional Implementation Plan for the Atlantic Coast. It highlights data needs and funding priorities over the next 5 years for improving recreational fisheries data collection on the Atlantic Coast.

“Our regional and state partners are essential to developing, executing and improving our national network of recreational fishing surveys that inform catch estimates,” said Evan Howell, NOAA Fisheries, director of the Office of Science and Technology. “We rely on partners like ACCSP to efficiently facilitate regional partnerships and joint data collection activities, as well as identify regional priorities through tools like our regional implementation plans. I want to thank all of our partners for their hard work to develop this plan together, and we look forward to our continued partnership as the plan is implemented.”

ACCSP is the state-federal partnership that collects, manages, and disseminates Atlantic commercial and recreational fisheries data and serves as the MRIP Regional  Implementation Team for the Atlantic Coast. It also coordinates state conduct of the MRIP Access Point Angler Intercept Survey and For-Hire Survey from Maine to Georgia. Program partners include coastal resource agencies from 15 states and the District of Columbia, 2 interstate marine fisheries commissions, 3 regional fishery management councils, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and NOAA Fisheries. To provide better data for stock assessment and management, the ACCSP Coordinating Council and Recreational Technical Committee (RecTech) identified top priorities for improving recreational data collection on the Atlantic Coast through 2027.

Fishing industry: Millions more needed to support NOAA surveys amid wind development

March 21, 2023 — Two fishing industry groups have asked a Congressional committee to allocate tens of millions more in funds to NOAA Fisheries to help the agency mitigate impacts of offshore wind development on its long-standing federal fishery surveys, which inform management and ultimately the fishing quotas that are set each year.

A “huge concern” held by the fishing industry is offshore wind farms impacting or precluding survey vessels from navigating in and around wind farms in order to assess fish stocks, which could in turn impact data collection, explained Fiona Hogan, research director at the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA), earlier this month at a panel on offshore wind in Maine.

If data is missing, lacking, or can no longer be collected in the same way, it could bias available information and regulators’ understanding, potentially leading to lower fishing quotas.

“[W]e are concerned that the dollar amount provided for the Scientific Survey Mitigation work is far too low given the rapid pace of [offshore wind] leasing and the number of scientific surveys that will be impacted,” wrote Annie Hawkins of RODA and Leigh Habegger of Seafood Harvesters of America in the March 17 letter to members of the Congressional Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Subcommittee.

Read the full article at The New Bedford Light

Plans to move NOAA hub to Newport are being finalized, Reed says

March 19, 2023 — The federal government is “finalizing plans” to move a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration marine operations center from Virginia to Naval Station Newport, according to US Senator Jack Reed.

Reed said the move from Norfolk, Va., to Newport would mean a $150 million federal investment and 200 jobs in Rhode Island.

“This is a major win for Rhode Island and our Blue Economy that will help NOAA improve mission fulfillment while achieving savings through consolidation and enhancing collaboration with the Navy, URI, the Coast Guard, and leading ocean scientists and marine businesses,” Reed, a Democrat, said in a news release Wednesday touting the development, as well as his role in it.

Read the full article at the Boston Globe

SFP working with FAO to create universal fish IDs to standardize data collection

March 19, 2023 — The Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP) launched multiple new pilot projects with High Liner Foods, Chicken of the Sea Frozen Foods, and Publix Super Markets to design and test the use of universal fishery IDs.

The project, announced in an event at the 2023 Seafood Expo North America, will be partially funded by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The SFP is working with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to create the unique IDs, which SFP said have the potential to “transform the seafood industry.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Collaborating with Industry on Greater Atlantic Electronic Reporting

March 18, 2023 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

For more than 35 years, Captain Sonny Gwin has fished commercially out of Ocean City, Maryland. He targets lobster and sea bass on the F/V Skilligalee alongside two crew members. Like all captains, he must submit reports on his fishing activity to different reporting entities.

For most of his career, this meant filling out a federal paper logbook, with copies for the state and dealers. He had to submit it by mail, generally on a monthly basis. This also meant stacks and stacks of paper in his shop, some dating back decades. A member of the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council, Gwin faced the decision in 2018 on whether to support mandatory electronic reporting in the Greater Atlantic region. He voted in favor of the new technologies that would allow data submission from smartphones and tablets.

“You’ve always got your phone and it basically has your information at your fingertips,” says Gwin. While implementing electronic vessel trip reports (eVTRs) has had its challenges, the efforts have led to more timely, higher quality data that better support science and management. They also streamline reporting requirements by enabling submissions to multiple entities through a single app, and give the industry a better sense of where they stand on species quotas.

Right whales vs. commercial fishing: No ‘easy solution’ for NOAA, says Raimondo

March 18, 2023 — Once hunted to near-extinction, the greatest threats to the endangered North Atlantic right whale now are accidental encounters with humans.

Federal efforts to protect the whale species, which spends most of the year off the coast of New England, from collisions with ships and entanglements in fishing gear — incidents that represent the two leading causes of death for right whales, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — remain stymied.

That’s because some policies meant to preserve the right whale are also seen as an existential threat to another treasured icon of New England: commercial fishing.

Read the full article at WABE

East Coast congressmen seek NOAA response on scientists’ offshore wind advice

March 16, 2023 — Four East Coast congressmen asked top Biden administration officials how their agencies responded to a May 2022 scientific recommendation for wider buffer areas around offshore wind projects to protect endangered whales.

In a joint letter Tuesday Reps. Jeff Van Drew and Chris Smith, both R-NJ, Jared Golden, D-Maine, and Andy Harris, R-Md., sought answers from leadership of the Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

The request announced by Van Drew is a scene-setter for the southern New Jersey congressman’s March 16 public hearing in Wildwood, N.J., billed by Van Drew’s office as “an examination into offshore wind industrialization.”

It could be the first of Congressional hearings by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives into how the Biden administration is permitting offshore wind developments.

“There have been more than twenty whale deaths in just the past three months, an unprecedented number, yet this administration does not bat an eye,” Van Drew said Tuesday. “Despite calls for investigations as to why endangered whales keep washing up on our shores, this administration instead has decided to expand offshore wind development, allocating $60 million for projects in President Biden’s budget proposal.”

Offshore wind critics in Van Drew’s New Jersey coastal district have pointed to this winter’s strandings of humpback whales – a resurgent species along the Atlantic coast, unlike the highly endangered right whales – in demanding a moratorium on surveys to plan offshore wind projects off New Jersey.

They contend noise from geotechnical survey vessels may have disoriented the whales before their deaths, several determined by necropsy to have been caused by vessel strikes. NOAA officials reject those claims, saying the humpback strandings are part of a larger “unusual mortality event” that has been tracked since 2016.

So far this winter’s toll has included one right whale, a 20-year-old male washed up in Virginia, the apparent victim of a vessel strike.

The congressmen’s letter focuses on a May 2022 letter to BOEM from Sean Hayes, chief of protected species for NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

Read the full release at the National Fisherman

NOAA Fisheries Announces Preliminary 2023 At-Sea Monitoring Coverage Target for Groundfish Sector Fishery

March 16, 2023 — Today, NOAA Fisheries is announcing that we have set a preliminary human at-sea monitoring coverage target of 90 percent of all sector groundfish trips for the 2023 fishing year (May 1, 2023, through April 30, 2024). The preliminary coverage target is being announced now to facilitate preparations by industry members and monitoring companies ahead of the start of the 2023 fishing year. NOAA Fisheries has prepared a spending plan for funds appropriated by Congress. The final ASM coverage target will be announced when the spending plan is complete. We expect the final coverage target is likely to remain 90 percent, but, if revised, we expect the target to be between 80 percent and 100 percent.

We will separately announce the video review rates for electronic monitoring video footage.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries