The Council received a report on continued work by the Fishery Monitoring Advisory Committee (FMAC) to develop new ideas to potentially lower costs in the partial coverage observer category, and requests that the group continue to develop new ideas.
A subgroup of industry volunteers on the FMAC was first convened in 2017, to explore ideas for how to increase coverage rates in the partial coverage category. In October 2018, the Council tasked the subgroup to “develop additional recommendations for how to potentially lower costs and increase observer coverage rates in the partial coverage category.”
The subgroup reported to the FMAC, and via the FMAC report, to the Council, at their April 2019 meeting, and the Council supported further work by the subgroup, including scoping the idea of developing shoreside monitoring for Fixed Gear Electronic Monitoring (EM) vessels. The idea for developing shoreside monitoring of Fixed Gear EM vessels would include brainstorming about how to obtain biological samples currently collected at sea and exploring how many vessels might enter the Fixed Gear EM pool without negatively impacting costs and biological sampling data quality.
The ultimate goal of this concept would be to layer monitoring tools to get maximum value from the existing Fixed Gear EM program. This idea would also leverage ongoing progress by the Trawl EM Committee to develop EM for compliance on pollock trawl catcher vessels with a shoreside monitoring component. The Council tasked the subgroup to continue fleshing out ideas related to integrating different monitoring tools, including shoreside monitoring and EM, to meet overall monitoring objectives. The Council also requested that ongoing subgroup work be reported back to the FMAC during the standard meeting schedule (in May and September), and through the FMAC to the Council.
Staff contact is Elizabeth Figus
