Mid-Atlantic Council Seeks Contractor to Evaluate Data Needs and Management Strategies to Support Climate-Ready Fisheries Management
The Mid‐Atlantic Fishery Management Council (Council) is seeking a highly qualified contractor to conduct an evaluation of data needs and management strategies to support climate-ready management of East Coast fisheries. The proposal submission deadline is Friday, August 30, 2024.
Background: Fishery-independent surveys and fishery-dependent data collection programs provide critical data used to conduct stock assessments and inform management decisions. Collection of this information is particularly critical as scientists and managers work to understand and address the impacts of climate change. However, in recent years, many federal data collection programs have experienced reductions in sampling effort which have resulted in greater uncertainty in stock assessments. The three East coast fishery management councils each have their own risk policies and harvest control rules that are intended to reduce the risk of overfishing due to uncertainty. While each risk policy is unique, they all operate on the basis of reducing the Allowable Biological Catch in relation to the degree of uncertainty. This means that as uncertainty in the stock assessment increases, fishing opportunities are reduced.
There has not been a comprehensive review of the changes and losses in core survey and sampling programs along the East Coast. Furthermore, there is a need to better understand how changes in data availability and quality, particularly in a changing environment, may affect overall scientific and management uncertainty and the implications for specifying catch limits. Understanding which risk policies and harvest control rules are robust to uncertainty under different climate change scenarios is critical to minimize both the risk of overfishing and the negative socioeconomic consequences of uncertainty.
Scope of Work: This project seeks to use a management strategy evaluation framework to quantify the levels of data collection needed under different climate scenarios to support robust stock assessments and identify risk policies that can minimize both the risk of overfishing and the loss of fishing opportunities. Specifically, the contractor will:
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Catalog and document the challenges associated with changes in federal survey and fishery-dependent data collection programs along the entire East Coast from 2010 to the present.
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Quantify the scientific and management uncertainty implications of changing data availability under different climate change scenarios.
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Conduct a management strategy evaluation or simulation analyses to evaluate the performance of alternative management risk policies and harvest control rules and the associated tradeoffs under different data availability/quality and climate projection scenarios.
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Use the results of the management strategy evaluation to identify climate-ready fishery management strategies and processes that account for these uncertainties.
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Develop recommendations to improve survey protocols and fishery-dependent data collection along the East Coast.
Additional Information: Complete details about the project, contractor qualifications, and proposal submission instructions can be found in the request for proposals (RFP).
Source: Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council
