June 25, 2018 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Northern Shrimp Benchmark Stock Assessment will be peer-reviewed on August 14 – 16, 2018 at the Residence Inn Portland Downtown Waterfront, 145 Fore Street, Portland, Maine 04101. The assessment will evaluate the condition of the Gulf of Maine northern shrimp resource and inform management of the stock. The peer review is open to the public, except for any discussions of confidential data when the public will be asked to leave the room.
Confidential data (see NOTE below) are data such as commercial landings that can be identified down to an individual or single entity. Federal and state laws prohibit the disclosure of confidential data, and ASMFC abides by those laws. Each state and federal agency is responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of its data and deciding who has access to its confidential data. In the case of our stock assessments and peer reviews, all analysts and, if necessary, reviewers, have been granted permission by the appropriate agency to use and view confidential data. When the assessment team needs to show and discuss these data, observers to our stock assessment process are asked to leave the room to preserve confidentiality.
Additionally, the public and all other workshop participants will be asked to leave the room during the Peer Review Panel’s final deliberations.
For more information, please contact Patrick Campfield, Science Director, at pcampfield@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.
NOTE: In determining what data are confidential, most agencies use the “rule of 3” for commercial catch and effort data. The “rule of 3” requires three separate contributors to fisheries data in order for the data to be considered non-confidential. This protects the identity of any single contributor. In some cases, annual summaries by state and species may still be confidential because only one or two dealers process the catch. Alternatively, if there is only one known harvester of a species in a state, the harvester’s identity is implicit and the data for that species from that state is confidential.