Implementing Electronic Monitoring in the New England Groundfish Fishery

Electronic monitoring (EM) has been used for catch monitoring and reporting compliance in fisheries worldwide.  After years of pilot projects, and both regional and national workshops, implementation of EM has been limited in the United States.  Understanding legal requirements, data integration, coordination among stakeholders, and costs are some of the challenges facing our fisheries.  Despite these challenges, the interest in EM remains high, and in the case of the New England groundfish fishery, we are on the doorstep.  The Greater Atlantic Region Fisheries Office and the Northeast Fisheries Science Center is collaborating with the Maine Coastal Community Sector, The Nature Conservancy, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, and Ecotrust Canada, to fully develop an EM model in 2015.  We will build the database infrastructure and processing tools for data collected from EM video footage, conduct comparative analysis to the existing catch monitoring systems in the fishery, and address the legal and logistical hurdles associated with a fully functional EM program.  This end-to-end approach tries to tackle the remaining challenges that many of the pilot projects have yet to address, and if successful, we plan to fully implement EM for a portion of the groundfish fishery in 2016.