NOAA Fisheries reports that President Obama’s 2010 budget has proposed sufficient funding for NOAA Fisheries Service to fund an at-sea monitoring program, providing a minimum 30-percent coverage level for all sector groundfish vessels. This would be in addition to the Northeast Fisheries Observer Program coverage levels implemented to support the Standardized By-catch Reporting Methodology (SBRM). Amendment 16 to the Northeast (NE) Multispecies Fishery Management Plan proposes mandatory sector at-sea monitoring programs beginning in fishing year (FY) 2012. For FY 2010 and FY 2011, Amendment 16 proposes that each sector would have an assumed discard rate applied to their landings, unless the sector voluntarily chooses to fish under a NOAA Fisheries Service approved at-sea monitoring program. Under the Amendment, it was also anticipated that the fishing industry would cover the cost of at-sea monitoring. We are pleased to be able to provide support to the fishing industry to help them cover this cost during the initial stages of sector implementation.
For FY 2010, assuming Amendment 16 is approved, NOAA Fisheries Service has determined that sectors should achieve a minimum 30-percent at-sea monitoring coverage rate in order to obtain:
• an accurate catch estimate to ensure that the groundfish fishery as a whole does not exceed its annual catch limit;
• more precise annual catch entitlement (ACE) accounting for each sector to avoid the inadvertent overharvest or underharvest ACE leading to negative consequences for the sector members;
• better bycatch estimates for most stocks; and
• information necessary to better define coverage levels in the future.
This level of sampling in the groundfish sector fishery also corresponds to recent practices in deploying observers in a Northeast fishery with unknown bycatch characteristics (e.g., the U.S./Canada Management Area). According to NOAA Fisheries, it is not possible to determine coverage levels based on historical observations of bycatch in the groundfish fishery since there will likely be changes in fishing practices with the shift to sectors — NOAA maintains that a smaller sample size of observed trips may not accurately represent the entire sector.
For further information on sectors and common pool measures please visit the NOAA Fisheries Sector Management Webpage:
http://www.nero.noaa.gov/sfd/sfdmultisector.html