Groundfish Fleet Restructuring Information and Analysis Project
Author: Astrid J. Scholz, Ecotrust
March 23, 2003
Introduction
This report contains the findings of the Ecotrust/Pacific Marine Conservation Council (PMCC) Groundfish Fleet Restructuring Information and Analysis Project—the GFR project for short. It details our analytical approach to addressing options for capacity reductions and related structural transitions of the West Coast groundfish fleet. In addition, we present the results from a suite of scenarios and simulations. The purpose of this report is to provide the West Coast fishing, scientific and management communities, and other interested parties, with our project results and its extensive documentation. This is an opportunity for them to consider the use of this spatial analytical approach in future fishery management and community planning.
The GFR project has two important dimensions. 1) The project was motivated by the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) decision in 2001 to reduce fleet capacity by at least 50% in every sector as a first step in transitioning the fleet to a long-term sustainable state. The results are intended as a contribution to policy discussions on how best to bring about this transition. 2) Work on the GFR project centered on an analysis of routinely collected and existing data pertinent to the fishery, which we integrated and standardized in a spatial framework. The GFR projects is also a proof-of-concept study of the use and usefulness of spatially integrated databases as called for in a recent National Academy of Sciences study (National Research Council 2002). Applications of analytical framework and database we developed for the GFR project extend far beyond the question of groundfish fleet restructuring, and have attracted the attention of state and federal marine resource management agencies, for example for the analysis of Essential Fish Habitat provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Act.
Correspondingly, the report is organized in two parts. Part I deals with the GFR project proper. In it, we present our baseline analysis of 14 years of fishery-dependent and other data describing the West Coast groundfish fishery and results from four numerical and two policy-driven scenarios that we analyzed in terms of the likely implications for coastal communities. In the interest of preserving space, we discuss the project and present all results here in terms of the aggregate effects on the entire coast. Detailed results for dozens of West Coast communities are available online, at www.ecotrust.org/gfr. Part II contains the methods used and techniques developed in the GFR project, including the architecture of the geographic information system, computer code, and hardware issues, for this project. The technical documentation forms part of our deliverable to the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission (PSMFC), where the analytical processes and products are housed in the public domain. We hope that the kind of decision-support made possible by visual and geographically referenced information management systems such as the one we built for the groundfish fishery will become part of the toolkit for fishery management on the West Coast.
Work on this project was very much a team effort. The Ecotrust GFR team is managed by Ed Backus, and consists of Senior GIS Analyst Mike Mertens, Systems Engineer Debra Sohm, and GIS Technician Charles Steinback. Our project partner, PMCC, includes Executive Director Peter Huhtala, Science Director Jennifer Bloeser, Communications Director Caroline Gibson, and over 400 years of collective fishing knowledge and experience of the PMCC board of directors. The project has also benefited greatly from the participation of Marlene Bellman, who came to us as the 2001/2002 Oregon Sea Grant Research Fellow. The media and communications department at Ecotrust, especially Howard Silverman and Sam Beebe, provided valuable proofreading and production support for this report. Most importantly, over 60 fishermen, scientists, managers, and observers of West Coast fishery issues have given generously of their time and expertise in reviewing this and earlier drafts of the report. Their comments and suggestions have considerably improved the project and this report. The responsibility for all errors and omissions resides with the Principal Investigator, Dr. Astrid Scholz, to whom all correspondence and comments should be addressed: Ecotrust, PO Box 29189, San Francisco, CA 94129, ajscholz@ecotrust.org, Tel 415 561 2433.
Funding for the GFR project was provided, in order of proportion, by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission (PSMFC), the Homeland Foundation, and Oregon Sea Grant.
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