Area Management

Area Management, Amendment 10 to the Scallop Fishery Management Plan
Latest Updates (1/13/2003, inc materials from Habitat and Scallop Comm mtgs, 1/8 thru 1/10/03)

All of the previous management iterations have had elements that contributed to the abundance presently occurring. Limited entry, multiple changes in gears, reduction in Days At Sea, limitations on crew size, use of the Boatracs system, the research TAC setaside, and cooperative surveys have all played their part. Many other issues have been pushed back in time because of these primary issues and the enormous amount of work they entailed. Several important and inter-related issues remain to be presented as options through the Council process:
1. Methods for determination of areas
2. bycatch considerations,
3. effect of scallop gear on the Essential Fish Habitat for other species,
4. effect of upcoming Marine Protected Area decisions on scallop resource areas
5. stock assessment for the Gulf of Maine,
6. the share of the general access category vessels in the overall TAC for the industry.

Although 'Closed Area' trips are allocated by pounds per vessel, discussion of quota or other output controls and consolidation are not currently a part of Amendment 10, and will remain to be dealt with in a later amendment.

The Fisheries Survival Fund has ably represented the interests of the DAS vessels in the management process for the last several years. From where I sit, it is time for the General Category permit holders to get organized and participate in development of these issues. They are going to be addressed with or without input from this sector.

The Central Issues: Increasing the spawning biomass and allowing small scallops to grow
Based on the unplanned rebound of the scallop biomass during the initial closures, the obvious success of the two further closures, and the increasing biomass in the open areas where most fishing effort occurs, how can we best integrate area management to continue to increase the scallop populations and sustainable yield over the entire shelf? Here's a plot of where small scallops have been found over the years 1982-1996 from the annual NEFSC Scallop Survey.

Early area management proposal to take advantage of settlement patterns seen above (03/07/2000).

Here is an early iteration of an area management proposal presented by MIT Center for Fisheries Engineering Research, with a area rotation method that opened and closed areas based on a fixed time schedule giving all habitats equal protection from fleet activities.

Options for area management are being prepared by the Scallop Plan Development Team for the NEFMC to present at public hearings. Graphics for these options will be added as they are made final. Here are the strata used for the annual scallop survey for Georges Bank and the MidAtlantic. They serve the useful purpose of allowing the timeseries for the survey to be integrated into whatever area management or rotation plan that is developed. Here are the major areas for Georges Bank and MidAtlantic proposed by Deborah Hart, NMFS, NEFSC, Woods Hole.

One obvious insight to be gathered from these plots is that they do not include the Gulf of Maine, important fishing grounds to many of us. The NMFS survey does not come north of Cape Cod, thus there is no virtually no recent data concerning this area that is not held by individual fishermen with the exception of submitted vessel trip reports and Boatracs records from the few DAS vessels working up this way. In the longer run we are going to need a biomass assessment for this area in order to determine catch levels. This is going to take a group effort. While the US portion of the Gulf of Maine is large, the scallop fishing grounds are a small fraction of the whole.

see www.nefmc.org website for updates and full agendas

Meeting Schedules

Date what where agendas
4 April 2001 Scallop PDT John Carver Inn, Plymouth, Mass .
26, 27 April 2001 Advisors and PDT Comfort Inn, Warick, RI .
4 May 2001 Plan Development Team Holiday Inn, Falmouth, Mass .
16-17 May 2001 Plan Development Team NEFMC, Newburyport, Mass .
4 June 2001 Plan Development Team SMAST, Old Westport Road, New Bedford Agenda
15 June 2001 Plan Development Team NEFSC Aquarium, Woods Hole .
9 July 2001 Advisory Panel Radisson Inn, Post Road, Warick, RI .
10-11 July 2001 Oversight Committee Radisson Inn, Post Road, Warick, RI

At the Joint PDT / Scallop Advisors meeting there was a reception sponsored by the Sea Scallop Working Group with presentations on current scallop research topics on the evening of the 26th. See Substrate Mapping link (Figs 1-4) for some of the presentation graphics.

Brief History:
The R/V Albatross NMFS, NEFSC, has conducted an annual sea scallop survey since the mid 1970's. Over the early years the sampling strategy was refined and today has resulted in a survey that captures most all of the variation in resource conditions. There are several notable exceptions: the Gulf of Maine, a small area around Cultivator Shoals, and the alongshore strip along the MidAtlantic seaboard, areas usually not considered major resource areas. However, perhaps because of the astounding number of spawning animals in the closed areas, settlement has been high in recent years. All areas need to be included in any comprehensive area management plan.

Recent background:
New areas with good year classes of small scallop have been identified from the annual R/V Albatross survey. Several of these areas have been proposed for closure to allow growout to a larger size. The difficult part is to shepherd a closure through the management system before the small scallop are caught. At the January NEFMC meeting it was decided not to close any of these areas.
image:
Andy Applegate, New England Fishery Management Council

Biomass Estimates:
The Sustainable Fisheries Act has been interpreted to require limitation on the fishing mortality (F) of marine resources by lowering the catch to a small fraction of the biomass. Some west coast fisheries have used this method for many years. Although this target F is dependent on the status of each resource, ~20% is what we have been using in the Scallop Committee process to determine Total Allowable Catch or TAC. Thus the importance of accurate biomass assessments. Although the Albatross survey has been refined over time, the strata used are more often than not cut across by both the groundfish area closures and the scallop growout area closures in the MidAtlantic, making accurate biomass assessment more difficult.

In 1998 there was wide variation in the biomass estimates from data gathered in Closed Area II during the Cooperative Scallop Survey (CMAST, VIMS, NMFS) using six industry vessels. These differences primarily related to the efficiency of the gear, with depletion experiments giving efficiency estimates significantly higher than previous estimates in the literature. These higher values resulted in considerably lower biomass estimates. After listening to carefully reasoned arguments on methods and results, the NEFMCouncil picked a rather arbitrary middle value of almost 50,000,000 pounds of scallop meats in Closed Area II. This amount from this one area is larger than documented landings from any one year over the entire shelf even under the open access system.

The following year, 1999, three different methods of biomass estimation were performed in two more areas closed for groundfish rebuilding purposes, Area I in the Great South Channel and the Nantucket Lightship Closed Area. In addition to the Albatross survey, there was a two vessel commercial dredge survey, undertaken through NMFS, providing a greatly increased number of stations than the annual Albatross survey can perform on her time limited scallop cruises.

Additionally, Dr. Kevin Stokesbury of CMAST devised a camera pyramid built out of dredge stock, and an intensive sampling scheme to photograph many hundreds of drop sites, to effectively remove the gear efficiency arguments from the calculations. Although resulting biomass estimations using these methods again had considerable variation, the camera survey was judged to be the more accurate, and these figures were used to set the Total Allowable Catch in these areas for the following year's fishery. These estimates were again very large compared to historical landings, the two areas totaling between ~36 and ~65 million pounds. (See NEFMC Scallop Committee document).

Almost 30,000 metric tonnes of meats are estimated to be in the Hudson Canyon and Virginia Beach Areas having been surveyed by industry vessel in 2000 (see Dupaul and Rudders, Virginia Institute of Marine Science). These areas are scheduled to open 1 May 2001 for limited fishing under provisions of Framework 14.

Reseeding from the larger scallop in the Closed Areas:
The best available science on current flow for the local region has been developed by the Numerical Methods Lab at Dartmouth College as part of the GLOBEC Program. Using the information gained from the first phases of that effort Craig Lewis has put together a thought provoking reseeding animation for the scallop populations in the groundfish closed areas. It is probable that settlement on the US side of the Hague Line is in part dependent on adult populations in Canadian waters, and vice versa. In the longer run consideration needs to be given to these larger implications. Here is an image of particle drift over the 40 day time with different start points from the Dartmouth Numerical Lab website.