June 12, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA Fisheries monitors commercial fishery catch to understand how much fish is removed from the ocean and how discarding of unwanted catch varies among species groups and fleets. This information helps us understand the condition of fishery stocks, and helps us develop management actions to reduce discarding.

Today, we have posted four new reports related to required federal fishery discard monitoring for April 2020-March 2021 in Northeast commercial fisheries. Together these documents show how many sea days must be monitored by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s Fisheries Sampling Branch in order to obtain data needed to estimate discard for 15 federally managed species groups and sea turtles in 62 fleets across the region, how the days are determined, and how they are allocated to each of the three trip selection systems used for Northeast federal fisheries.

We are also releasing the sea-day schedule for trips selected for coverage through Northeast Fisheries Observer providers. NOAA Fisheries will reimburse 100 percent of industry sea-day costs for the Northeast multispecies groundfish fishery in FY2020 using the funds Congress has specifically appropriated for this purpose.

A temporary waiver of this monitoring requirement has been in effect since March 20. We intend to begin redeploying observers and at-sea monitors on vessels fishing in northeast fisheries on July 1.  This month, we continue to work with regional observer and at-sea monitoring service providers to finalize their observer redeployment plans, conduct outreach with industry, and finalize internal programs and policies that will support the safe and effective redeployment of observers and at-sea monitors in the region.