An Overview Of Our Solution
Piloting Toward Healthy Fishery and Wildlife Populations
Who is this solution impacting?
Ecosystem
Oceanos/Costa
Ambiente Urbano/Construído
Community Type
Urbano
Additional Information
- Population Impacted:
- Continent: América do Norte
Problem
Describe the problem
The Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders Alliance in partnership with the Ocean Conservancy is launching a pilot program to test Electronic Monitoring (EM) on fishing vessels in the Gulf of Mexico waters. This technology involves mounting cameras onto boats and recording all fishing activity through video monitoring. Armed with more accurate data about the type and amount of fish caught as well as the accidental catch of marine wildlife entangled in fishing gear, regulators and fishermen can make more informed policy decisions on how best to improve the management of fisheries to keep the ocean and its marine life healthy.
Biodiversity Impact
For generations, the ocean has provided the main source of protein to feed the world’s population, but our growing demand for wild fish has put immense pressure on ocean ecosystems. In the Gulf of Mexico, the region has suffered from severe overfishing for several decades with many species at critically low levels, including fish like red snapper and gag grouper. Overfishing does not just damage fish populations. Fishing is often indiscriminate and contributes to the unintended catch of marine life important to the food web as well as the entanglement of marine mammals, including the Critically Endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, bottlenose dolphins and iconic brown pelicans. Rebuilding these depleted fisheries and better protecting the wildlife requires a deep commitment from both fishery managers and sport and commercial fishermen. One of the current challenges is that the current management system relies on fishermen to manually self-report discards of unwanted fish species or accidental entanglements with wildlife, known as bycatch. Furthermore, fishermen are required to use paper logs books to record their catch — a process that has been in place since the first fisheries law passed in 1976. This method is outdated and has not kept pace with the technological developments found elsewhere in the commercial fishing industry. New at-sea monitoring technology, such as EM, offers a more sophisticated, accurate and efficient way to receive, store, analyze and disseminate fishery and wildlife information.
Solution
Gulf managers must look to broad-brush solutions like area closures and quota reductions for healthy species to solve issues surrounding incidental capture. This is particularly critical in multi-species IFQ programs which are often designed to provide fishermen with flexibility and avoid closures.it is possible to design bycatch quota trading systems to avoid areal and collateral fishery closure. Two such closure discussions involving both protected resources and sustainable fisheries prompted the Gulf Management Council to investigate fleet-wide use of EM on commercial fishing vessels. Increased interactions with loggerhead sea turtles and longline fishing gear prompted the closure of a wide expanse of the west Florida shelf in the eastern Gulf of Mexico when the fishery managers decided that EM technology had not been sufficiently tested to allow its deployment as a way to capture all turtle interactions and offer management solutions that looked at actual takes rather than assumptions about the relationship between an area of fishing and likelihood of turtle interaction . In the commercial grouper fishery, concern of depleted gag grouper is prompting discussion of a reduction in co-occurring, comparatively healthy red grouper quota in order to protect gag from overfishing. EM came up as a viable way to understand and control the amount of gag catch and discards in the IFQ-managed fishery, but the technology had not been tested on vertical line vessels and NMFS was unprepared for fleet-wide implementation without the necessary statistics. // The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council manages federal waters of Gulf of Mexico Exclusive Economic Zone. Federal waters begin three to nine nautical miles offshore to 200 mile limit of the Gulf of Mexico. From Texas and Florida federal waters begin nine nautical miles out, and from Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, federal waters begin three nautical miles out.
Replicability
How many years has your solution been applied? 1 year// Have others reproduced your solution elsewhere? Yes // The technology which consists of several closed circuit video cameras, gear sensors, a data storage box, a GPS receiver, and a user interface with monitor and computer will be installed on vessels for a period of six months. Each vessel will carry a fishing logbook where both the fish kept and discarded at sea, as well as any interactions with marine wildlife are recorded while the same events are captured by EM on video. Independent scientific observers will accompany a percentage of the trips to provide another account of the catch. Following the period of data collection, analysts contracted with the Shareholders' Alliance and the Ocean Conservancy will evaluate the self-reported logbook data against the corresponding EM video and independent scientific observations to gauge accuracy and conduct a cost-benefit analysis of EM. Statisticians from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) will evaluate the correct amount of video that must be audited to provide the desired level of precision. The base assumption of 20% video review is based on literature from like fisheries, but a power analysis to determine the exact percent coverage will ensure accuracy and control costs. Further, the cost-benefit analysis of EM relative to achieving the same at-sea data capture from human fisheries observers will provide essential information when NMFS and management council must make decisions about data collection and fishery monitoring in an increasingly spending-weary federal budget climate.
Human Well Being and Livelihood Impact
In fully documented (100% EM), managers can use more surgical, species-specific regulations to address the catch of fish with a large quota that co-occur with a species of concern. We believe the results of our analysis will be an important step toward persuading both regulators and the fishing industry that EM is a reliable and economically viable option and will help drive the fishing community to adopt EM and, consequently, lead to more sustainable management of these fisheries. Additionally, investments in monitoring technology can improve our understanding of the accidental bycatch of marine wildlife. EM will provide an unbiased, consistent portrayal of the amount of bycatch collected on the boats, and will also document injuries and death. This will improve our understanding and estimates of bycatch mortality, which can then lead to further solutions to protect these animals, such as innovations in fishing products and reduced interactions between vessels and marine wildlife. The results of this pilot could also potentially lead to much wider spread implementation of EM in the Gulf, which would have enormous implications for fishery and wildlife health. Data collection has become particularly important in the aftermath of the BP disaster and there is great interest from the government in supporting long-term monitoring — not only to measure the performance of restoration efforts but to take the pulse of the Gulf on a continuing basis. If the EM pilot is successful, this technology could become the de-facto monitoring system in the Gulf of Mexico // British Colombia successfully deployed EM in the multi-species, multi-gear groundfish fishery. Work is now needed in the Gulf of Mexico to ensure this promising technology can be successfully applied to both the longline and the vertical line sectors in the commercial fleet. results of our analysis will be an important step toward persuading both regulators and the fishing industry that EM is a reliable and economically viable option and lead to more sustainable management of these fisheries. Additionally, investments in monitoring technology can improve our understanding of the accidental bycatch of marine wildlife. EM will provide an unbiased, consistent portrayal of the amount of bycatch collected on the boats, and will also document injuries and death. This will improve our understanding and estimates of bycatch mortality, which can then lead to further solutions to protect these animals, such as innovations in fishing products and reduced interactions between vessels and marine wildlife. The results of this pilot could also potentially lead to much wider spread implementation of EM in the Gulf, which would have enormous implications for fishery and wildlife health. Data collection has become particularly important in the aftermath of the BP disaster and there is great interest from the government in supporting long-term monitoring not only to measure the performance of restoration efforts but to take the pulse of the Gulf on a continuing basis. With EM pilot success, this technology could become the de-facto monitoring system in the Gulf of Mexico.