Collaborative Electronic Monitoring Program Development:

Fishermen and stakeholders have been pursuing the implementation of electronic monitoring (EM) in New England for more than a decade.  Now NMFS regulators and scientists, fishing organizations and NGOs have embarked on a collaborative process to co-develop, field test and implement EM in the groundfish fleet by May 2016.  Foundation and NGO support has proven critical to catalyze progress on EM while the fishing industry struggles to stay afloat amid constraining quotas and rising monitoring costs.  Lessons learned from the process will be presented along with early results from EM field testing, which begins in May 2015.