0:58

Austin Esterbrooks

27:06 - 28:05

"prior to the IPA years, you can see the extremely broad distribution of individual vessel level bycatch performance on the left-hand side. And then as you move into the post-Amendment 91, 2011, and to the present, the fleet level distribution has become incredibly homogenized, and that continues to hold true in 2025 and 2026."

prior to the IPA years, you can see the extremely broad distribution of individual vessel level bycatch performance on the left-hand side. And then as you move into the post-Amendment 91, 2011, and to the present, the fleet level distribution has become incredibly homogenized, and that continues to hold true in 2025 and 2026.
Speaker
Austin Esterbrooks
Community
Alaska News
Captured at
June 5, 2026

From the transcript

This is in the report. It's just a box plot figure showing the distribution of every single vessel in our fleet. And the idea is that prior to the IPA years, you can see the extremely broad distribution of individual vessel level bycatch performance on the left-hand side. And then as you move into the post-Amendment 91, 2011, and to the present, the fleet level distribution has become incredibly homogenized, and that continues to hold true in 2025 and 2026. You'll see, um, This is another statistical representation of the same sort of effect, looking at the year prior to the implementation of Amendment 91 and the most recent year.

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