Groundfish Fleet Restructuring Information and Analysis Project

2. Geography and Capacity of Fleet

The West Coast groundfish fishery takes place along the entire coast and varies considerably between regions-in terms of the vessels and gear used, the reliance of communities and business on groundfish and other species groups, and in terms of the environmental, weather, and physical conditions that shape fishing practices in different areas. Furthermore, the groundfish fishery is but one among many, and has historically been prosecuted as part of a mixed fishing "portfolio" consisting of salmon, crab, groundfish, and pelagic species. For the purposes of this project, we did not address any interactions with other fisheries and limited even the data acquisition to groundfish-related information. In this chapter we describe the groundfish fleet, first in terms of some pertinent statistics about the fishery and the fleet for the time period from 1987 to 2000 that comprises our analysis (section 2.1.), as well as in terms of its spatial extent and geographic idiosyncrasies (section 2.2.). In the third section of this chapter, 2.3., we describe our method for calculating the capacity of the groundfish fleet in the year 2000, which serves as the base year for the subsequent analysis of various reduction and other policy scenarios. These scenarios form the focus of chapters 3 and 4.

2.1 Baseline Information

Because the PFMC strategic plan and two related documents on capacity utilization in the groundfish fishery are the points of departure for our analysis (PFMC 2000; SSC Economics Subcommittee 2000; Offices of Science and Technology and Sustainable Fisheries 2001), we chose 2000 as the baseline year. At the inception of the GFR project, 2000 was also the year for which data were most recently available. Since then, 2001 and 2002 logbook and fish ticket data have become available, and-together with subsequent years-could be incorporated into the database and analysis. Furthermore, the analysis could be conducted using a different base year. Given the worsening decline of groundfish landings and revenues in the past two years, and the pessimistic outlook for 2003 (Brinckman 2003), the project's 2000 baseline clearly should not be interpreted as a realistic, attainable level of fishing on the coast.

During the time period 1987–2000, more than 11,000 vessels participated in the groundfish fishery at one time or another. Almost 2,000 of those entered the fishery after 1994, and there were a total of 1,824 vessels that recorded non-whiting groundfish landings in our baseline year, 2000. Of these, 40% (782 vessels) participated in the fishery in 1987. Our count includes vessels for which groundfish constitutes any fraction of their total catch, and thus may include vessels that primarily target other species. Our analysis therefore captures both targeted and incidental catch of groundfish, but we cannot distinguish between the two based on the data considered.

For descriptive purposes, we organized all fishing gear used in the recorded landings of groundfish into five major groups associated with the groundfish fishery: any trawl, any pot or trap, any hook and line, longline, and "other" -which includes troll and various net gears. We also use a more detailed breakdown of gears to make the habitat and depth associations used in the spatial analysis of fishing activity, which forms part of our contribution to the Northwest Region's Essential Fish Habitat Environmental Impact Statement (Sustainable Fisheries Division 2001). For a complete list of gears assigned to each, see Appendix A.

In considering the effects of fleet reductions, we were interested in degree of internal diversification of the groundfish fleet, i.e. whether vessels use one or multiple gear-types to target groundfish. Gear choice can be interpreted as an indicator for fishing areas, since it is limited by bathymetric and substrate characteristics. According to the existing data, over half (55%) of the vessels participating in the fishery between 1995 and 2000 of fleet fished with only one gear-type, and over one quarter (27%) used two gear-types (see Figure 1). This suggests that groundfish effort is fairly specialized, although from the data it is not possible to conclude for how many vessels groundfish constitutes the only strategy. As previously noted, data on the other fisheries could be used to determine the degree of diversification of the fishery with other fisheries, notably salmon and crab. Notice that vessels may make landings with more than one gear over the course of the fishing season, so the vessels counts below do not represent unique vessels, but rather the recorded instances of gear-combinations recorded in the fish tickets.

FIGURE 1: Gear Diversity in the Groundfish Fleet, 1995–2000

Over the period analyzed in the GFR project, 1987 to 2000, groundfish landings have declined considerably for most fishery sectors, gear types and species with the exception of the whiting fishery. Graphs similar to Figure 2 have accompanied PFMC documents for a number of years, and the current rebuilding plans and harvest regulations are based on widespread expectations that these declining trends will continue. In the GFR project, we consider the implications of these trends from the perspective of coastal communities, and the particular profile of fishing fleets and activities in various ports. A key consideration for assessing the impacts of a major restructuring that would accompany a capacity reduction program is how well the fleets in each port can adapt, which in turn is a function of diversification within and between fisheries and gear sectors, infrastructure, the overall economic health of a region, and new markets and other opportunities engendered by a more sustainable fishery.

For the purposes of the GFR project, we use fleet diversity within the groundfish fishery as a placeholder for this much bigger set of concerns. Fleet composition, however, is widely believed to have implications for how different ports will be affected by capacity reductions and other structural changes in the fishery. Figure 3 shows the fleet composition in port groups along the coast for the base year, 2000.

As is apparent from Figure 3, fleet diversity varies considerably along the coast. Ports differ both in absolute numbers of vessels that make groundfish landings and in the gear types used. Notice that in this instance we are considering landing ports and not homeports, so the numbers contain double counts of vessels making landings in different ports. In the next section we discuss the geographic idiosyncrasies in more detail.

FIGURE 2: Groundfish Landings Over Time

FIGURE 3: Gear Diversity By Landing Port, 2000

2.2 Spatial Description

One of the main goals of the GFR project is also the most difficult to convey on paper: the spatial extent of the groundfish fleet and its changes over time. We have developed techniques for spatially processing logbooks (trawl) and fish tickets (trawl and non-trawl), which allow insights into the location and magnitude of fishing effort over the study period. For example, the trawl fleet has moved in and offshore at various times, as shown in the three panels of Figure 4.

We have chosen the first and last year of our time series, as well as the year (1997) after Magnuson Act reauthorization. To participants, managers and scientists familiar with the fishery, such spatial considerations may provide useful starting points for analytical or management assessments over and beyond the scenario analysis we undertook in this project. These three, or other intervals, can be examined in detail using the GFR database. The entire, animated, time series for the trawl fleet can be viewed by clicking here, and corresponding maps for the non-trawl fleet are forthcoming.

Most of the approximately 1900 vessels catching groundfish on the West Coast make landings both in the principal port associated with them in PacFIN as well as in other ports. In addition to the aggregate "range" of the fishing fleet, or of non-trawl and trawl gear sectors, there are therefore also distinct "foraging areas" associated with various ports. One way to think about this is in terms of the number of landing ports associated with vessels from each homeport. The home ranges are also suggestive of constraints imposed on the fleet by the gear used, the species targeted and the habitats that support them, as well as weather, current and other environmental conditions that might act as constraints on fishing activities. The landing ports are also in no small part determined by the presence of processors and buyers, and thus the geographical signature of ports may be suggestive of underlying market signals. Over time, one would expect the expansions, contractions and other changes of the port foraging areas to reflect the changes in the processing sector. These, and other questions, remain objects for future inquiry.

Another way of thinking about the forage areas associated with various ports is in terms of the effort exerted within them and the amount of landings associated with them. These considerations may be relevant for considering regionally explicit management or mitigation measures, or to avoid the inadvertent cutting off of particular fleets from locally constrained fishing grounds. For example, certain types of depth or area based management measures may effectively prevent particular sectors of the fleet (in terms of size and/or gear used) from reaching their "forage area". Pending the spatial processing of the fish tickets, it will be possible to analyze gear and/or size specific issues pertaining to depth and/or area-based management.

FIGURE 4: Coastwide Trawl Catch and Landings for Select Years

2.3 Capacity

Fishing capacity is notoriously difficult to measure, since it is a combination of number and size of vessels, their technical efficiency and the time commitment of fishermen (Smith and Hanna 1990; Federal Fisheries Investment Task Force 1999; Gréboval 1999). Of these factors, only the number of vessels is well documented on the West Coast. While technical efficiency is generally assumed to have increased over time, estimating the physical capacity of the fleet is hampered by the absence of comprehensive data about vessel characteristics such as fish-hold capacity, horsepower, the volume of nets and other gears, and other variables. What we do know is almost entirely limited to fish tickets and log books, which record the amount of fish that are landed. This, in turn, is increasingly determined by market and regulatory factors, and is not an accurate reflection of the true capacity of the fleet-only of what it regulatory and market forces allow it to land NOAA's Fishing Capacity Task Force has proposed various practical measures of fishing capacity (Ward, Brainerd et al. 2001). The PFMC's SSC has used one of the techniques recommended for the task force to estimate the capacity utilization, i.e. the ratio of catch to capacity, of the West Coast groundfish fishery (SSC Economics Subcommittee 2000; Offices of Science and Technology and Sustainable Fisheries 2001). Comparing these figures to the allowed harvest, the SSC derived estimates for the "numbers of vessels needed" in each fishery sector to land the allowable catch, which form the basis for our analysis.

Before outlining the way in which we adapted the SSC estimates, it is useful to distinguish between latent capacity and over-capacity. Latent capacity are vessels that have the requisite permits to participate in the fishery but are not making any landings in a given year. Since the permits associated with these vessels are current, they could re-enter the fishery anytime. The PSMFC is in the process of consolidating the permit information from Washington, Oregon and California into one database, which will make it possible to assess the latent capacity in all coastal fisheries off the West Coast (Will Daspit, pers. comm., 9/11/2002). For the purposes of the GFR project, we only considered the limited entry (LE) permit data collected by PacFIN since the inception of the limited entry program in 1994. We compared the number of vessels possessing permits in each year with the number of vessels recording landings of groundfish designated as LE in the fish tickets database. Over the six year time period, there were a total of 257 vessels that had a permit but no landings for one or more years. Most vessels (157) had latent permits for only one year, 49 for two years, and the remaining 51 for three or more years.

Each year, between 65 and 100 vessels with LE permits did not record any landings, suggesting a latency rate of between 12–17% for the LE sector. Note that latent capacity occurs in addition to excess capacity, since it comprises vessels that could be joining the already larger than needed number of vessels participating in the fishery. Latent capacity is a concern for any capacity reduction program since it may dilute the effectiveness of, e.g. a buyback if the departure of some vessels brings latent ones back into the fishery. A future research need is to establish the degree of latent capacity in other fishery sectors, notably the open access fishery. In principle, it would be possible to identify vessels with latent permits and factor their removal or permanent retirement into a capacity reduction program, for example through the consideration of landing histories.

The primary concern with fishing capacity is the presence of excess, or over-capacity, i.e. more vessels participating in the fishery than the number "needed" to catch the allocations determined by stock assessments and harvest guidelines. Many of the groundfish fisheries target stocks that are depleted, such as several rockfish species. Other groundfish fisheries are constrained by measures designed to minimize the bycatch of depleted stocks. Thus, the issue of reducing excess capacity has become more urgent. It is this over, or excess, capacity that we consider in the GFR project.

To arrive at a baseline capacity for the fleet in 2000, we replicated the SSC analysis of capacity utilization in the West Coast groundfish fishery (SSC Economics Subcommittee 2000), which uses landings from earlier, less constrained periods together with current fleet sizes to infer the underlying capacity. The assumption is that vessels were fishing at or close to their capacity in earlier, relatively unconstrained time periods. In the case of the West Coast groundfish fishery, the distinction is typically made between pre and post 1994 fishing seasons, when LE was implemented and vessels either qualified for LE permits or remained in the open access (OA) fishery. Using the 1995-1998 participation in the fishery by fleet sectors and permit/endorsement status, i.e. open access, limited entry trawl, limited entry non-trawl/sablefish, and limited entry non-trawl/non-sablefish, vessels were assigned LE or OA status in earlier years. This assumes considerable temporal homogeneity of the fleet and basically codes vessels in earlier years by the fleet sector they participated in later. Considering the landing histories of each fleet sector prior to 1994, the SSC analysis then estimated the number of vessels needed in each of the earlier years to catch 2000 harvest targets defined for each sector. In other words, how many vessels fishing at relatively unconstrained capacities would have been needed to catch the allocations for each fleet sector in 2000. The SSC analysis found capacity utilization rates ranging from 6% in the open access to around 40% in the limited entry trawl fleet sectors (SSC, 2000; p. 46).

We applied the same logic to the dataset to derive the number of vessels in each of the four fleet sectors in 2000. Since we are working with a somewhat different data set and were not able to replicate the SSC steps exactly (for example, we had no record of the 1984–1988 landing records vessels used to qualify for the limited entry permits), our estimates of the fleet size vary slightly from the SSC figures, but are of comparable magnitude.

TABLE 1: Summary of GFR and SSC Capacity Calculations
Fleet sector	GFR (# of vessels)	GFR (# distinct vessels)	SSC (# of vessels)	SSC inferred # of vessels needed	SSC capacity utilization estimates	GFR capactiy utilization estimates
OA (2000)	1524	-	-	-
OA with groundfish landings > 0.25 MT (2000)	713	614	-	50 (low) 100 (high)		7% (low) 14% (high)
				50 (low)	5.5% (low)

Table 1 summarizes our and the SSC's findings, as well as the inferred number of vessels needed in each sector from the SSC study. In the open access and limited entry trawl fleets, we derived somewhat higher capacity utilization rates. These should not be read as an improvement of the capacity problem, but are rather a reflection of the incongruities between the two data sets. Also, we decided to use our 2000 figure for the number of distinct vessels in the open access (614) fleet rather than the 1995–1998 average (980, which was higher than the SSC's average of 910) because we believe that this reflects trends in the open access fleet better. Our capacity utilization rates for the limited entry non-trawl fleet are lower than those derived in the SSC study. We believe this is a function of our data: since PacFIN distributes catches of rockfish over vessels and areas, our annualized data do not allow for sufficient distinction between targeted and bycatch harvest strategies for sablefish and rockfish caught in the LE fixed gear fleet. Also, upon closer inspection we discovered a high degree of overlap between vessels in the LE non-trawl sector: most of these vessels appear to fish for both sablefish and rockfish, and only 16 vessels target sablefish exclusively. The SSC inferred a need for 40 non-trawl LE vessels total, of which 15 are needed to harvest the sablefish target. In our scenarios, therefore, we apply the reduction logic to the entire LE non-trawl sector, and treat the 16 "sablefish-only" vessels separately.

The number of vessels needed in each sector, thusly derived in the SSC, serves as the basis for our reduction scenarios in the following chapters 3 and 4. In other words, using the SSC estimates as a measure of how large the fleet should be to fish the harvest allocations, we then take the logical next step of asking how many would have to be removed (and how) to bring capacity into line with the resource available.

It is important to note that these numbers are not real vessels, but are more properly understood as an indication of the order of magnitude of reductions in each sector. This analysis of the fleet leads to a number of strange artifacts that result from idiosyncrasies of the database, at least in the annualized form of the data that we consider in this report. In this form, each vessel's catch made in a particular area using a particular gear are summarized. The analytical units we deal with, consequently, are instances of particular vessel-gear-area configurations, and are somewhat removed from actual vessels and fishing practices. For policy purposes, one would want to minimize the number of derivations data are put through for any one of these analytical steps. Also, our numerical scenarios (chapter 3) are silent on how vessels are chosen for removal from the fleet. In reality, the mechanism for this initial choice has significant implications for the kind of capacity reduction achieved. We consider one of these mechanisms in the permit stacking scenario for the trawl sector in chapter 4.

The reduction scenarios we discuss in the next two chapters all follow the same basic logic using these capacity estimates. In chapter 3 we discuss four different, numerical ways of removing excess capacity. These should not be seen as policy recommendations, but rather as illustrations of the effects of different kinds of fleet reduction. In chapter 4 we discuss the effects of the 2002 in-season shelf closures and a permit-stacking scenario in the trawl fleet, as well as outline other potential policy applications of the GFR framework. The analysis is a static comparison to the 2000 base. In other words, in each scenario we remove vessels based on a set of criteria. The immediate effect on coastal communities is to diminish revenues and landings associated with those vessels. Since total landings are a function of allowable harvest limits, which we assume stay constant in our analysis, a redistribution of landings and revenues along the coast takes place. In other words, vessels remaining in the fleet get to harvest the difference between total harvest limits and what they landed before the reduction-essentially absorbing the landings formerly made by the exiting vessels. Correspondingly, the income and other community impacts associated with these landings shift from vessels and ports eliminated in each scenario to those remaining. In economic theory this is frequently referred to as a zero-sum game. There may also be gains from decreased costs due to less competition, and other effects. However, in the absence of well-specified models of the economic behavior of the fleet, we opted for a conceptually rather simplistic analysis rather than introduce further assumptions.

The scenario results are first-order effects of a capacity reduction, and are derived using economic impact analysis that is routinely conducted in natural resource management, including fisheries. Economic impact analysis measures changes in income and employment resulting from management alternatives, before the system adjusts and mitigating effects come into force. In other words, it is only an approximation of what would happen, and only for the short term. Given the trends in the fishery, it stands to reason that over time the harvest limits would be reduced or increased (depending on the effectiveness of rebuilding measures). In the medium to long term, therefore, the "extra" landings accruing to the remainder of the fleet would likely fluctuate. The remaining vessels also stands to gain from reduced costs of competition, and from a comparatively larger share of the overall harvest allocation. Thus the immediate impacts are not the ultimate outcome a capacity reduction. They do, however, indicate the direction and quality of change in different communities.

Vessels remaining in the fleet are better off, since they compete with fewer boats for the total allowable catch. Their trip limits increase, and they bring in more landings and revenues into their port-presumably up to the total of coast-wide landings and revenues from groundfish in 2000. The difference between the "before" and "after" levels of landings and revenues, therefore, accrues to vessels remaining in the fleet. Indeed, to the extent that the remainder of the fleet is successfully managed to achieve stock rebuilding objectives, total allowable catches may even increase again. Those ports associated with vessels removed from the fleet, however, experience a corresponding decline in landings and revenues. For them the "after" effect of our various scenarios may be permanent, and can be interpreted as a cost associated with a fleet reduction measure. For all scenarios, we discuss before and after landings, revenues, and number and diversity of vessels remaining in each port afterwards, plus a number of considerations about community impacts.

About Get Data Links

 

Find your watershed

You are here:
Inforain.org » Research » Groundfish Fleet Restructuring Information and Analysis Project » 2. Geography and Capacity of Fleet