A Pilot, Cooperative Fishery-Independent Trap Survey Of Saint Croix, USVI

The re-authorized Magnuson-Stevens Act requires that all US managed fisheries use biomass based annual catch limits (ACLs) to prevent overfishing. Ideally, quantitative stock assessments can be conducted to estimate abundance and management reference points to develop ACLs.  Limitations in available fishery-dependent data and a lack of fishery-independent data in the US Caribbean currently preclude conducting comprehensive, species-specific stock assessments that result in estimates of abundance or biomass based sustainability metrics. A pilot trap-survey was conducted in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands in 2010 as an initial step to address these data limitations. This project was a collaboration among several federal agencies, territorial agencies, and the St. Croix Commercial Fishermen’s Association and represents the first comprehensive spatial evaluation of relative fish abundance for any US Caribbean territory. The survey overlaid two statistical designs, a stratified random design and optimal allocation strategy.  We will present a preliminary analysis of the results of this collaborative survey, including a discussion of the efficiency of the two statistical designs and comparability to a diver-based visual census project in order to highlight catchability concerns.