Collaborating with the fishing industry to improve sustainability of West Coast groundfish

Background/Question/Methods

Off California’s coast, a coalition of conservationists and fishermen are combining science and local knowledge to test new approaches for avoiding bycatch of overfished rockfish. Groundfish  on the U.S. West Coast is a multi-species fishery that has been dominated by bottom trawling for decades. The fishery was declared a disaster in 2000 due to depletion of vulnerable stocks of a handful of species, increasing regulations, and declining revenues and landings. Fishery closures were established to rebuild stocks and some fishermen have switched to more selective gear; however, catch of target species is still constrained by the need to avoid overfished stocks. Currently, there are a handful of overfished stocks with rebuilding plans, but for some of those species, recovery is expected to take decades. As the fishery transitioned to an Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ) “catch shares” management system in 2011, we tested whether collective arrangements for combining quota of overfished species in “risk pools” and implementation of local zoning of fishing effort through spatial fishing plans could significantly reduce bycatch of overfished stocks, while still allowing significant utilization of target stocks.  We developed eCatch, a digital system to capture spatial information on bycatch in near-real time, to support risk pool management and refinement of fishing plans over time.

Results/Conclusions

Through the cooperative arrangements developed for the risk pool, zoning of fishing effort to avoid areas with high risk of bycatch, and near-real time monitoring, we significantly reduced bycatch of overfished species by members of the risk pool (2.1% of available quota) relative to the fleet at large in the first year (greater than 30% of the available quota).  While this was an important result in the first year, the underutilization of target species has highlighted the need to develop diversified harvest strategies (using are diversity of gear types and target strategies) and improve our knowledge of spatial patterns of overfished stocks. We are now combining modeling, predictive mapping, monitoring of bycatch, and field surveys to advance our understanding of the distribution of overfished stocks at multiple scales to inform both fishing and management decisions. By combining the best available scientific data and approaches with the local knowledge of fishermen, we are promoting collaborative solutions for achieving both conservation and economic gains.