April 7, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
Two newly issued reports provide a snapshot of the Northeast U.S. Shelf Ecosystem. They look at everything from phytoplankton production at the bottom of the food web to the fishery harvests at the top. One report focuses on Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine the other on the waters of the Mid-Atlantic Bight. These are the three major regions within the Northeast U.S. Continental Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem.
These annual reports are part of a larger, ongoing NOAA-wide initiative. It provides a consistent national approach to managing ecosystems that is flexible enough to accommodate regional needs. This Integrated Ecosystem Assessment approach is intended to help resource managers integrate physical, biological, economic, and social components of ecosystems into their decision-making. This will help them to balance trade-offs and determine which approaches are more likely to achieve their desired goals. The 2020 State of the Ecosystem Reports inform the New England and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Councils.
“This approach has helped give the council structure with specific steps to define what our management goals and objectives are, figure out how we can address them, and understand what that means for areas such as economics,” said Brandon Muffley, a fishery management specialist at the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council.
The State of the Ecosystem reports were produced by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, with additional collaborators from academic research institutions, non-profit organizations, and state agencies.