Saving Seafood

Deadline approaches for Alaska Sea Grant fellowships

February 3, 2017 — Alaska Sea Grant, located at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is offering graduate students, or those who recently completed their degree, the opportunity to acquire on-the-job-training in Alaska-based federal and state agencies for one year as part of ASG’s State Fellowship Program.

This is a paid fellowship ($3,500 per month for a total of $42,000) for highly motivated and qualified applicants who are focused on science or policy that affects Alaska’s marine and freshwater resources.

ASG will accept three or more state fellows for 2017-2018. Successful candidates may be placed at the following organizations:

Alaska Office of the Lieutenant Governor
Alaska Department of Fish and Game
National Park Service
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Alaska Fisheries Science Center
NOAA, National Marine Fisheries Service, Alaska Region
North Pacific Fishery Management Council
North Pacific Research Board
North Pacific Research Board/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Landscape Conservation Cooperative
U.S. Geological Survey
The deadline to apply is Feb. 24, 2017. More information and the application are available at alaskaseagrant.org/fellowships

Read the full story at Alaska Business Monthly.

Alaskans own dwindling number of Alaska fishing permits

January 15, 2016 — Fishing issues will take a back seat to budget cutting when the Alaska Legislature convenes Jan. 19, but two early fish bills (and one holdover) are getting attention already.

One new measure aims to stop the migration of commercial fishing permits out of Alaska.

“We lost over 50 percent of our permits (since) the 1973 original issuance of permits,” said Robin Samuelsen of the Bristol Bay Economic Development Corp., speaking at a two-day Alaska Sea Grant workshop last week in Anchorage called “Fisheries Access: Charting the Future.”

Forty years ago at Bristol Bay, 36 percent of the more than nearly 2,000 permits were held by locals and 64 percent by nonresidents. By 2013, the numbers were 19 percent local and 81 percent nonresident. Similar trends, by varying degrees, are happening in other regions as well.

Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, D-Sitka, said he intends to introduce a bill that would establish a permit bank to reverse the outmigration trend.

The bank would buy nonresident permits and lease them to young fishermen who otherwise could not afford them. It would offer several types of fishing permits (Alaska has 65) that would be proportional and reflective of regional fisheries. A permit bank would not cost the state any money, he said, because it would fall to local communities to raise the money.

Read the full story at Alaska Dispatch News