New regulations for electronic monitoring on board pollock trawlers are expected later this summer. The program has been in the works as part of an amendment to Alaska’s groundfish management plan, and was a topic of discussion at the North Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting in Kodiak from June 7 – 12.
According to the 2023 annual report from the North Pacific Observer Program, the vast majority of groundfish harvest in Alaska is observed with full coverage, meaning 100% of all trips are monitored by either onboard observers or electronic monitoring.
After years of testing the program, electronic monitoring will soon be expanded to include pelagic trawl pollock catcher vessels and tenders delivering to shoreside processors or stationary floating processors, across the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands, and the Gulf of Alaska. That includes vessels that already have an observer on board.
In Kodiak, almost the entire pollock fleet already uses electronic monitoring on board their vessels voluntarily. Chelsae Radell, the assistant director of the Alaska Groundfish Data Bank, which is located in Kodiak, said the local pollock fleet has been participating in what’s called an Exempted Fishing Permit, or EFP, to essentially do a test run of electronic monitoring on those vessels in Kodiak since 2020.
“Each year [over the EFP] we added more vessels in both the Gulf [of Alaska] and the Bering Sea,” Radell said. “And this year, almost every single boat that participates in the pollock fishery in Kodiak is a member of EM [electronic monitoring]. There’s only a handful that haven’t joined the program; primarily because they don’t participate in the fishery enough to make it worth it.”
Depending on a vessel's gear type and the federal fishery they are participating in, trawl vessels in Alaska’s federal fisheries can either have observers on board the vessel or electronic monitoring on the vessel with shoreside observers at the processing plants. Participation in electronic monitoring is optional, but if vessels opt out, they are required to have observer coverage.
In the Bering Sea, these pollock vessels are in full coverage. They either have 100% observer coverage or have cameras on 100% of the time, with 100% of their trips reviewed by an electronic monitoring reviewer and all of their deliveries will be monitored and sampled at the dock. In the Gulf, these pollock vessels are in the partial coverage category. When participating in electronic monitoring, they will still have their cameras on 100% of the time and all of their electronically monitored trips will still be reviewed, but they'll only have 33% of their deliveries monitored and sampled at the dock due to their partial coverage status.
In total, 350 observers collected data onboard vessels fishing in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands and Gulf of Alaska groundfish and halibut fisheries in 2023, as well as at 11 processing facilities.
One of the Alaska Bycatch Review Task Force’s recommendations earlier this year in the spring of 2024 was also for the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NMFS, which is an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; to approve a regulatory requirement for the Gulf of Alaska pelagic trawl fleet including any tenders of pelagic trawl caught fish, to have 100% electronic monitoring.
The executive director of the Alaska Groundfish Data Bank, Julie Bonney, said having observers and monitoring onboard may seem like big brother looking over fishermen’s shoulders, but it is extremely crucial to fisheries management in Alaska waters.
“The reality is that observer data feeds into all the stock assessments, which helps inform year classes and different year class strengths in terms of the stock assessments, which determine what our quotas are annually,” Bonney explained. “So the observer program data is also about prohibited species catch and also the discards that happen.”
Aside from informing fisheries management, observer data is also crucial for monitoring bycatch, or the incidental take of non-targeted species. Many fishing communities, subsistence fishers, and advocacy groups want the observer program to monitor trawl vessels 100% of the time, especially in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska.
That request was also addressed in a proposed rule released earlier this year in the Federal Register to officially establish electronic monitoring for pelagic pollock catcher vessels and tenders as a regulated program. Once the final rule is published, the Groundfish Data Bank’s Radell said based on what Kodiak’s pollock fishers are already doing, all salmon bycatch from the Gulf of Alaska’s pollock fleet will be able to be fully accounted for.
“So we have really good salmon accounting, we know that all salmon are being delivered to the docks. And it’s also just a much more cost efficient option,” Radell said.
Based on the observer program’s latest annual report, electronic monitoring expenses last year accounted for $1 million out of the $17.5 million in total program costs.
In the latest annual report from the observer program, the expenditures for observer deployment in 2023 in the partial coverage category was $4.8 million for 3,126 invoiced days of observer coverage. The average cost per day to have an observer at sea was $1,536 in the partial coverage category. Compared to fixed-gear electronic monitoring costs last year of about $1 million in preliminary costs for the fixed-gear EM program.
Staff with the National Marine Fisheries Service's (NMFS) Alaska Region, Gretchen Harrington, said amendment 126 and 114 have already been approved and told the council at the Kodiak meeting that they are in the process of publishing the final rule within the coming months.
When the final rule goes into effect for amendment 126 to the fishery management plan for the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands, and amendment 114 in the Gulf of Alaska, it will authorize the use of electronic monitoring for catcher vessels fishing for pelagic pollock in both the partial coverage category and the full coverage category.
