April 14, 2020 — After looking at the Northeast Ocean Data Portal, a major energy company wanted to propose a wind farm in the Gulf of Maine in an area where they saw no documented fishing activity.
The Portal pulls together huge amounts of information on every conceivable ocean use, from cultural resources to marine transportation to fishing activity. The fishing data is robust and includes information from dockside reports and vessel tracking systems.
But then they called Annie Hawkins, executive director of Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, RODA. She suspected the area was hugely important to the lobster industry and was certainly used — a lot.
Current regulations don’t require lobstermen to have vessel tracking systems. Where they fish isn’t plugged into any standardized data collection, so it doesn’t show up on the Portal.
“That could have gone in the very wrong direction,” Hawkins said.
She is quick to add the portal does show an incredible amount, and has been useful in a number of instances.
But there are big gaps. When the portal was first being set up a decade or so ago, it was part of a larger “ocean planning” process from which many fishermen felt excluded, said Hawkins. That led to fishermen not providing insight, and a lot of relevant information wasn’t included.