NPFMC 280 Day 2 - October 9, 2026

Their presentation will also include a report on the review of the June, uh, CIE review for the annual deployment plan. So they'll provide that information for the council as well, which, um, is a significant undertaking that, that they had, uh, earlier this summer. And you'll, you'll hear information about that for the first time after their presentation. I'll provide the PCF MAC report from our recent meeting. And the action for the council is, as it typically is in October, to provide recommendations for the final annual deployment plan, which will be provided as a written document in the B reports at your December meeting as part of the NIMS report.

So I will pass it along to Dr. Lucey and Mr. Gretzens.

Great, thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the council. For the record, my name is Shawn Lucy. I'm the director of the Fisheries Monitoring and Analysis Division, the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. As mentioned, I'm joined by Christian Gredstens, and then online, Jeff Mayhew and Jason Genau will join us Together we're going to tag team this a little bit to go through our annual deployment plan.

See, there we go. So just to provide the scope of what we're trying to do here with the annual deployment plan, as everyone knows, there's sort of two categories of monitoring that that we do, the, the larger vessels in the, mostly in the Eastern Bering Sea, are full coverage. So they make up only about 16% of the vessels, but account for nearly 90% of the total landings. The other category is the partial coverage category, uh, and that is 84% of the vessels that are taking 68% of the trips, but are only accounting for 11% of the total landings. And so While both of these categories are touched on the Annual Deployment Plan, really the, the main thrust of it is to focus on the small and complex part of the Alaskan fisheries that is the partial coverage fleet.

So some of the core concerns and why we have the Annual Deployment Plan is that it's impossible for us to monitor all the fishing activity that's going on. And at the same time, we need to be supporting multiple different programs and objectives, most notably looking to support catch accounting, the stock assessment process, accounting for prohibited species catch management, and then also providing protected species and ecosystem information needs. And so the real challenge, of course, then is to how do we monitor this diverse, dynamic fleet given that we have limited monitoring resources to do so.

And so our approach is to implement a monitoring program that can collect credible, statistically rigorous scientific data and trying to maximize the collection of that, that data under the budget that we have using all of the monitoring tools that are, are available to us. So that includes a combination of at-sea monitors, electronic monitoring, and then combinations of the two together. And again, we're trying to collect data for a wide range of analytical needs to meet those multiple objectives that I previously mentioned. At the same time, we're taking into consideration what the council's priorities are in, in this effort, so we're aligned in that we're trying to effectively distribute monitoring so that way we can get as much monitoring as possible for the available budget that we have. Previous requests have included things like increasing monitoring on the trawl fishery for PSC accounting, and that's why we have something like the trawl EM program now, and then overall we're trying to make sure that our monitoring has the least impact as possible on fishing operations.

Together we're working with the council, and why we have this, this process here is to make sure that the partial coverage program isn't contentious.

And so the goals of the annual deployment plan is to make sure that we meet the data needs of all those data users for the wide range of analytical and management objectives, and at the same time making sure that we're collecting data that reflects the full range of the fishing activities. So really making sure that we have a fully representative sample of what's going on in the larger population.

Just to orient you to where we are in the process, so this is really an iterative process going on. So we start with, again, that that box 1 there, talking to the council, taking your policy direction and priorities, and taking any recommendations that come from the council and, and implementing them into our annual deployment plan. We then take those recommendations and develop this plan, present it, sort of a draft here in October, and then any recommendations that come out of this process to help us finalize it going into December. And that really is going to define what our sampling design is, how we allocate our monitoring effort over the, over the next year. That then, of course, will feed into the fishing year starting in January.

So, so this ADP will be for the 2027 fishing year, and this is where we're actually going out and putting observers on boats, having EM systems on, and finding out what the real-world outcomes are of our proposed monitoring. Then we come back in May of the following year— getting an echo, I think— but come back in May of the following year to talk about how we did relative to what the plan had been. And so when we come in May, this will be for 2026, so obviously we wait till the end of the fishing year, and then obviously we get the feedback and refinement from the annual report, take that information and feed it back into subsequent years.

Our monitoring approaches in 2027 aren't any different than they've been the last few years here, so there's a couple different ways that we do it. Sort of our option 1 there is at-sea observers with cameras on board for compliance, and so this is akin to how the Amendment 80 fleet, flatfish fleet works for deck sorting. Amendment 91 Pollock and for 100% salmon monitoring. Option 2 is just at-sea observers on vessels. And so these are any of the catcher vessels that aren't in the EM program.

And this is what most of the partial coverage fleet is doing. Option 3 is electronic monitoring with shoreside observers. And so this is our sort of trawl EM model. And then the final option there is EM only looking to use EM for catch estimation, and this is our fixed gear EM model that we use. One of the things that I'd like to note that the EM options do require vessels to opt in.

There is an opt-in period for vessels for both trawl and fixed gear EM. The trawl EM is an annual opt-in, and you can do that through the ODDS process, and that window opens from September 1st until November 1st. And as of last week, we only had 12 out of the 113 trolley and vessels opt in. So, if you're listening to this and haven't done that yet, I would suggest that you do so because that will change the way that our final ADP shakes out.

Here's sort of what our expected monitoring is overall. So you can see the top box is a combination of the full coverage and partial coverage. In the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, we expect just about 100% coverage for trawl. There's a few vessels that don't opt in to the EM, and that's why it's not 100%, but it's pretty close. Fixed gear is also pretty high.

The full coverage, we expect there to be 2,742 trips monitored, which would account to about 16,374 days. The partial coverage, we expect to monitor 1,404 trips, which would be 4,408 days. And the 46.54 number under the Bering Sea Aleutian Islands trawl, that's for a very small sample size, so there's only 35 trips there, just to let everyone know.

Uh, in order to do this, our preliminary budget for 2027, uh, we've set at $5.45 million to support all the activities that we have going on. This number will be updated before we present the final ADP in December. Uh, the preliminary budget includes estimates of the revenue that'll be generated from the 2026 ex-vessel fees, as well as some carryover revenue from ex-vessel fees from earlier years. And then any federal funding that we can secure for other direct monitoring costs.

Some of the uncertainty that is in our budget surrounds updates to those projected fee revenues, so we don't know exactly how much we're going to bring in, but we have a pretty good idea. Also trying to make sure that we understand what our trawl EM Gulf of Alaska shoreside monitoring needs are going to be. There was a letter sent out to all the processing plants earlier in the summer to hopefully get us that information by November 1st. And then also update our assumptions regarding monitoring costs and other related costs.

Here we have sort of an update of where we stand for the fee revenue. So this is obviously still being assessed for landings in 2026. But as of October 1st, we've collected $3.19 million in observer fees, and that's right on pace for our projection of $3.55 million.

You may notice that $3.55 million is significantly less than the $5.45 million that we are estimating this program to cost. And again, we've been making that up with federal funding And I just want to note that in 2027, the community-directed spending monies, the $2 million that we've had, will probably be fully expended. And we've spent down those monies over the last 3 to 4 years, which is giving us a rough estimate of what the EM system replacement cost is. We do expect that the federal budget is probably going to continue to decrease towards, towards these efforts. And we also expect fee revenue to remain relatively constant going into the future.

But unfortunately, the program, like everything else, is starting to cost more as we go along. And this is just a reminder that FMA has to guarantee our partial coverage contract. So it's 1,200 sea days for at-sea observers and 150 plane observer days, as well as travel to those— for those deployments. And so that, that factors into how our allocation for effort goes here, and we have to fund those before we fund any electronic technology grant, which is our EM fixed gear, EM trawl, and any of the EM review that happens. So just please keep in mind as we move forward, if additional federal funding becomes difficult for us to secure, our current level of coverage and the fee revenue remains the same, that there's going to be a reduction in some of the coverage in upcoming years.

However, we are fully solvent for this upcoming year, so there is no immediate concern there.

And this is the last slide I have here. I apologize, this slide wasn't updated from the PCF MAC presentation. So we are not in September with the "we are here" arrow. That should be over one more month. I apologize for that, but this is just to show that our partial coverage contract aligns with the federal fiscal year now, the beginning of October.

So we've just started year 3 of that contract, which again is fully funded. We're a few months into year 4 of the Electronic Technologies Grant, so we have funding in that through June, and then we will have to look to see about either securing a new grant or starting a contract for those services. And I think that's it for me. I'm happy to take some questions on sort of the overall budget questions, or I can turn it over to Christian, who will go into sort of the nuts and bolts of the allocation.

Yep. All right, go ahead, Christian. Good morning. For the record, my name is Christian Gredzens, and I'm an analyst with the Analytical Services Program in FMA at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. Today I'm going to go over how we came up with the deployment plan for 2027.

So in 2027, we will continue with The same sampling design that we've used since the 2024 ADP. That's the same design that's been used every year since then, so it'll be the same design that was used in 2025 and 2026. As a refresher, we define the partial coverage sector as the collection of fishing trips. In the case of EM trawl, it's the shoreside delivery, so that's the one little difference there. So in other words, those are our sampling units.

We then stratify into different sampling strata, and we're going to define those the same way we have since 2024. So that'll be by monitoring method, either at-sea observer or EM, or no monitoring at all. The second part is gear type, so that'll be fixed gear or trawl. And the third is by Fisheries Management Plan area, so Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, or Gulf of Alaska. We then allocate our funds available to the different strata to ensure that we get equal sample size or equal proximity allocation index in each of the different strata.

And I'll go over allocation, the proximity allocation index a little bit later. But really what we're trying to do is ensure that, you know, we can spend all of our available budget and that when we sample the different strata, that we sample equally through space and time and reduce monitoring gaps in coverage and make sure that each of those strata are sampled enough. Although we have a lot of different monitoring objectives, these two goals were chosen as they generally address the data quantity and quality needs for a variety of our objectives and end data users. And finally, we use ODDS, the Observer Declare and Deploy System, to assign those strata to each fishing trip. So as fishers log into the system, the system uses their information to assign them to a specific stratum, and that's the selection rate they will receive for a particular trip.

So in 2027, we'll continue with the same 8 partial coverage strata. We'll have 4 at-sea observer strata, so that's that's 2 in fixed gear, 1 in each of the FMPs, and then 2 in trawl, again in each FMP. We will also have 2 EM fixed gear strata, again broken up by the different FMPs. We'll also have the EM trawl, so that's that EM at-sea compliance monitoring with shoreside observers at the plant. And finally, we'll have the no selection strata, which is vessels less than 40 feet length overall or using jig gear, and they will not be subject to any kind of coverage.

So we allocate our budget in two different ways. The first thing we do is we estimate how much EM trawl in the Gulf of Alaska is gonna cost, because that is a set cost. That is 100% coverage at sea and 100% coverage at the plant. So we estimate the cost of that, we then carve that off, and what funds are left, we use in the proximity allocation algorithm to decide how to spread our monitoring around in the remaining 6 strata.

So when we do this, we have to use a couple of different cost functions. And so here's the cost— here's what we're looking at when we're deciding how much we're going to allocate to EM trawl in the Gulf of Alaska. We determine how many observers we're going to need at shoreside plants, and so for 2027, our preliminary estimate is about 780 plant days with 7 observers in A season and 6 observers in B season. This is also accounting for lodging and food. Some plants provide lodging and food while others don't, so we try and take that into account.

We also use equipment maintenance costs for each vessel, and that's estimated about $5,000 per year for each of the vessels that fish only in the Gulf of Alaska, because Bering Sea vessels are responsible for maintaining and paying for their own equipment. We're also allocating for 6 tender vessels in the Gulf of Alaska.

We also account for EM data storage and review costs. But I'd like you to note that currently the draft ADP does not account for the installation replacement costs of the EM systems, and that was what was previously covered by those congressionally directed spending funds. So in the final ADP, we hope to have incorporated that in the cost function to account for how much it will now cost to replace or install new systems on vessels. So our preliminary estimate for Trolley EM in the Gulf of Alaska is $732,000, so that leaves us $4.7 million $272 million to allocate to the remaining partial coverage strata.

For our cost function for—. Excuse me, we have a question. Ms. Kimball. Thank you. Thanks for the presentation.

I'm just wondering how the Science Center is determining how much to put toward installation and replacement over time. Like, do we have a schedule for what— when systems would need to be replaced? You're— I'm assuming they all don't need to be replaced in the same year. Through the chair, thank you for the question, Ms. Kimball. Um, we are assuming a 5-year lifespan, which is what we've been given, um, from the EM providers and, and other sources.

Um, but we are still trying to fine-tune how much it will cost over time and each year. So what we've done is annualized the cost of EM systems to be kind of an annualized cost per year. So assuming a 5-year lifespan, but we also don't expect to replace every system every year. It will be ongoing over time, but we're trying to bake that into account for that extra expenditure we will have.

Thank you. And it's a fairly new program. I wonder, is— I mean, is there some latitude to kind of re-review the 5-year time period if these systems prove up that they're working fine beyond 5 years, or are you stuck in that schedule? We're trying to work with the providers to figure that out. For the, for the time being, we are stuck on assuming a 5-year schedule.

Okay, so our cost function for at-sea observers includes labor for observer services, and so that is broken up into guaranteed days, and so we need to reach at least 1,200 days of that. And we also have optional days, which are a little bit cheaper. Once we exceed the 1,200 days, we go into option days, which cost less per deployment day. We also factor in travel costs based on actual costs in recent years to determine how much it will cost to get observers to the various ports. Um, the cost function for EM fixed gear, so this includes the equipment maintenance costs, and for this one we have actually included the annualized system replacement cost for vessels.

So we've assumed that vessels that are active will incur these costs, and we've estimated about $6,000 per active vessel per year, um, for the equipment and maintenance costs. For those vessels. This also incorporates the EM data storage and review costs and then the cost for the EM service provider.

So, here is our proximity allocation algorithm, and this is what we're using to plug in that $4.7 or so million to allocate between the different strata to determine our selection rates. So what we do is we take the number of fishing trips that happened in the last year. So in the current analysis, it was 13th of August, 2025 through the 12th of August, 2026. And then each of those stratum, we determine the relationship between the sampling rate and the proportion of fishing trips that will be monitored or near a monitored trip in space and time. So those are proximity index.

We also take a measure of uncertainty in the stratum-level estimates as a function of the sample size. So that's our variance scaling factor. So we use those two together to come up with our proximity allocation index, and that determines the maximum value that's afforded by all strata. So that is what is assigning our different sampling rates. And one way to think about this is that if you have two populations and one has 1,000 units in it and one has 100, and you sample both at 10%, you'll get sample sizes of 100 versus 10.

So, the uncertainty in stratum-level estimates will be much higher if you only have 10 data points versus 100. So, that is why we include the variance scaling factor here for any strata that have really small sample sizes.

And so, this is how we broke down our budget. As you can see, there's the EM trawl in the Gulf of Alaska at that $732,000.

And then the breakdown between the ATSEA Observer and EM fixed-gear strata. So that makes up that $4.7 million, giving us a total of $5.44 total. So a little bit under our $5.45 of our total budget available, but the allocation index is a method to ensure that we maximize the amount of money we have but also don't overspend. For 2027, in the EM trial in the Gulf of Alaska and in the Bering Sea, our dockside monitoring for pollock will remain the same as it has in previous years. This sampling has 4 objectives, the fir— and this is in order of importance.

So number 1 is accounting of salmon bycatch. Number 2 is accounting of halibut bycatch. 3 Is collection of salmon genetic samples for identification of stock of origin. And then the 4th objective is to collect biological samples from non-salmon species. So in the Bering Sea, both for EM and non-EM catcher vessels, every offload will be— will receive all 4 objectives.

In the Gulf of Alaska, every offload will receive objectives 1 through 3, and then a third of those offloads will be randomly selected for biological sampling from the non-salmon species.

In the observer side of things in the Gulf, offloads of trips will be monitored for— with— by at-sea observers when those trips are selected for monitoring.

Here is the table of our preliminary full coverage sample sizes and rates. So we expect to monitor all the catcher processors and all of the EM trawl vessels in the Bering see at 100%, um, with about 1,000 trips in the full coverage sector and about 1,800 trips in the EM trawl sector.

And these are the preliminary rates for the partial coverage sector, um, and I don't have it on the slide here, but the proximity index this year in the draft worked out to be about 0.8, um, and what that means is that 80% of trips in each strata are either monitored or near a monitored trip. So we got a fairly high allocation index, even though some of these rates, for example, the fixed gear at-sea observer strata in the Gulf of Alaska, a little less than 10%, still 80% of those trips are expected to be monitored or near a monitored trip.

And so I'll just leave that up for a second.

And then that is my last slide for now. If there's any questions.

Thank you. And then we will move on to Mr. Mayhew.

Good morning. I'm going to walk us through Appendix C, which is the fixed gear vessel EM minimum effort analysis.

So, this analysis was a response to a council request to look at how can we potentially increase the cost efficiency of our current fixed gear EM pool by restricting it to those vessels that use those systems. And the ones, the vessels that use them more are going to be more cost effective. And if we were to remove the vessels that aren't using those systems, that we could potentially be saving money and seeing how that extra money could be benefiting the rest of the program if it's reallocated. So, there's both the council and AP motions from 2026 early this year that are up there just for your own reference. But what we did in this analysis is that we looked at the vessels that are in the current fixed gear EM selection pool.

We looked at the fishing history from those vessels over the past 3 years from 2023 to 2025. We did an estimated estimate for how much those vessels cost us as they currently exist in the fixed gear EM pool. And then we also did an estimate on how much they would've cost if they were in the observer pool. So based off of, you know, how many trips taken, the cost of observers, taking into account the cost of EM, all those things were accounted for to try to make a side-by-side comparison for each vessel whether it's cost-effective or not and quantifying what's that delta in that cost in their current state and the hypothetical if they were in the observer pool. In this exercise, we can then kind of see, well, how many trips does it take to be cost-effective?

And then we identify that as a cutoff to use in the next stage of this analysis, which is where we use that hypothetical cutoff to remove some of those vessels from the fixed EM pool and put them into the observer pool. See how that money that's saved is reallocated, and use it to demonstrate what are the benefits that we get from this reallocation. So what we didn't evaluate here was looking at kind of a, you know, any sort of vessel-specific instances where vessels haven't taken observers in the past or are unable to take observers. So just keep that in mind. I think that as we are thinking about this process of removing these vessels from the fixed-gear EM pool, that there wasn't any consideration into whether these vessels currently can take an observer or not.

So the first thing we did here, as mentioned, was we wanted to find what's the relationship between how much you use your equipment and the cost. And so we wanted to first describe here is how we estimated costs for the fixed-gear EM pool. So understand when you're in FixQ EM, there's a high initial cost to get the boat wired to use this equipment. And so we kind of consider this a high buy-in cost. It's kind of a moderate additional cost just based off of equipment use.

So as you use the equipment, there's more wear and tear. Those things happen. There's maintenance costs that are associated as well. But whenever your trip is selected and you're turning your camera on and you're sending in that hard drive and it's getting reviewed, those costs are pretty low. And so the more you use your equipment, the more you can kind of recoup those costs that were initially spent to get your boat wired and also overcome any sort of those maintenance costs.

And so the more you use that equipment, the more cost-effective you become. And so, you know, having this idea of the vessels that don't fish enough trips to be cost-efficient are those that are going to be probably less cost efficient than if they were to have an observer. And so on this figure here, we're showing a distribution of the average numbers of trips taken by the vessels in the Picsou EM pool over those past 3 years. So the count of vessels on the y-axis, the number of trips is on the x-axis. If we can see that a huge portion of our current fleet fishes fewer than 3 trips.

And so we can see that there's about 39 vessels that took 0 trips over that period. And that there were about 37 trips, 37 vessels that took between 1 and less than 3 trips on average over that 3-year period. So when we look at the number of vessels that we had and the 3-year history, there's 172 vessels that we evaluated here, and so we didn't evaluate any of the vessels that were just recently added to the pool. We're giving them a little more time before we evaluate, their cost-effectiveness. We want to look at this over a 3-year time span.

So if we are considering only the vessels that were active, that is those that took at least one trip, those are the ones that we're assuming are incurring costs. I think we're assuming that if you have not fished those last 3 years that you haven't incurred any costs. That doesn't mean that we're going to allow those vessels to stay in because the moment they want to log a trip, they're probably going to have to get their equipment, you know, kind of worked over because it hasn't been used and it's probably out of date. So, but because they have no trips, we can't really evaluate their cost if they were in the observer pool. So in this analysis here, we're looking at only the vessels that were active, that had fished at least one trip.

And so having this relationship between how much a vessel fishes and how much it would've cost if they were in the EM pool versus the observer pool, We're trying to plot that difference in that cost in this plot here. So on the y-axis is that difference in costs, and so it's the observer costs minus the EM costs. So how much more would it cost to be in the observer pool than the EM pool is on the y-axis. And on the x-axis is how many trips were taken on average over that 3-year time span. Excuse me.

So what we can see is that, uh, of these 133 active vessels, there are a lot of vessels that are very cost effective. You can see that some of these vessels are hypothetically saving us, you know, on the orders of tens of thousands of dollars each year by just fishing a lot of trips and really using the equipment. So this is a demonstration that we have a good portion of our fleet is very cost effective and a benefit to the program because they are able to get monitored consistently because they take a lot of trips and use their equipment very regularly. But what we want to focus on here in this analysis is those trips that are kind of to the left of that dashed line. That dashed line is at x= 3, so fewer than 3 trips.

So those vessels that fish fewer than 3 trips, those are the ones that are cost-ineffective. That's where we're, you know, negative, in the negatives on the y-axis. And so even though these aren't— these vessels aren't wildly cost-inefficient, there are a lot of them. And if you were to total up that total cost and efficiency, it comes out to be around $96,000 or about $100,000, give or take, and there are 37 vessels that, you know, met that low effort criterion. And so we're going to be focusing on what happens if we were to move those 37 vessels out of the FICSU EM pool and reallocate the $100,000 to the rest of of both Patsy Observer and fixed-gear EM.

So, when we apply this less than 3 trips per year threshold, we're moving all 39 inactive and those 37 low-active, low-effort active vessels over to the observer pool. So, we redid the 2026 evaluation for rates, and it's, so, in total, it was 76 vessels that were moved, and because, you know, these vessels don't fish very much, it was only 77 trips that we moved from the EM pool over to the observer pool. We did allocation in both instances, both status quo with the current pool and with this negative 3-trip threshold scenario. What we saw is for the At Sea Observers overall that we were able to increase the total sample rates by, you know, 0.83%. We were able to afford more option days.

So as a reminder, We're obligated to purchase 1,200 base at sea days, and any days on top of that are purchased at a lower rate. And so the more days that we can buy above 1,200, the more cost-efficient the program becomes. So, you know, before we were only able to afford 9 of those cheaper option days, and with this new scenario, we're able to afford 112. This additional cost efficiency helps— is what really helps us get a higher rate and a lower cost per trip in the At-Sea Observer pool. So you can— we can also see that the cost per trip in the At-Sea Observer pool decreased by 9% just by virtue of the fact that we have more money to allocate and that money is allocated towards cheaper days.

The Fixed-Seat EM pool also benefited from this scenario too. So overall, the sample rates went up, you know, 2.5%, which is, is not a small amount, and the cost per trip also because we're restricting the pool to only those that are cost effective, that the cost per trip that we see decreased by 6.4%, which is also pretty awesome too. So just in short, by moving all these cost inefficient vessels out of the fixed gear EEM pool and reallocating those funds, we benefit both, you know, the at-sea observer and the fixed gear EEM components of our monitoring program. More trips at a fewer, lower cost per unit.

So when we presented this to the PCF MAC, we were initially planning to move to be applying this method to the 2028 ADP, but as we were discussing that, you know, that this is, you know, those inactive vessels, those that haven't fished, we also looked at how many of those vessels hadn't even submitted a VMP over the past 3 years. And so it was under the recommendation of the PCF MAC to just, you know, this year for this coming 2027 ADP was to move those vessels that haven't submitted a VMP in the last 3 years just to immediately move them out of the fixed gear EM pool. So that's something that we do intend to do, and I believe that there was 32 fixed gear EM vessels that fit that criteria for 2024 and '25 and 2026. So we'll be notifying these vessels shortly, that they will be removed from the fixed crew EM pool, and that to, you know, ask them to return their equipment, and we can potentially salvage and reuse that equipment for the existing, the remaining fixed crew EM vessels.

So, really, with this, the bulk of this analysis, when we're looking at which vessels that were active but cost ineffective, is that we would be applying this to the 2028 ADP. This gives us a chance to kind of work on a couple different things. First of all, that we want to make sure that when we're applying this less than 3 trips per year on average threshold that, you know, everybody's kind of, you know, notified of this new kind of standard that we're going to be using to try to make sure that vessels are maintaining cost efficiency as they participate in the fixed QEM pool. So, we're applying this fewer than 3 trips per year on average, or that's around 9 trips per year over the prior 3 years. And as a kind of an additional thing that we're doing this year for the 2027 ADP is that we're also being a little more clear about the standard we're using for when we allow vessels to join the pool.

When those vessels that are not currently in the Fix Your EM pool and they apply to join at odds, we do an evaluation to make sure that these vessels, you know, are cost effective, efficient enough, and that they aren't going to be creating data gaps. And checking to see if, you know, if they're a smaller vessel, they would get a higher priority probably on credit getting inside the pool than if it was a larger vessel. But we're using a 5-trip-per-year standard for vessels that want to join the pool. This is so that there's a higher threshold to join a pool because there is a, you know, that initial high investment when we are now wiring a vessel to join the pool. So having that higher standard to join and having a lower threshold to get booted out is what we're going to be intending to work with going forward.

So as we are, you know, thinking about applying this 3-year per trip threshold to remove vessels from the pool, those vessels, just like any other vessel that wants to join a fixed-queue EM pool, they have to have a demonstrated history of having— of being a cost-effective vessel and fishing at least 5 trips per year to join the pool. The current fixed-queue EM pool has, you know, an average of, you know, higher than 5, it's around 6 to 7 trips per year. That's what the average current participation level for the fixed-gear EM pool is.

I'll take any questions if there are regarding this analysis.

Sorry about that. Yes, we do have a question. Ms. Kimball. Thank you. Through the chair, Mr. Mayhew, on the 32 fixed-gear EM vessels that hadn't submitted a VMP in the past years, are those— do we assume those are all inactive vessels?

Good chair, thank you for the question, Ms. Campbell. That is true, yes. If they hadn't submitted a VMP, then they haven't fished, they wouldn't be allowed to fish. There are some vessels that submitted VMPs but did not fish, but at least submitting a VMP tells us that they had the intention to fish. That being said, you know, if that vessel submitted a VMP but didn't fish, they probably are not likely to be meeting the 3 trips per year threshold in the next year, so they probably would still be at risk of being removed in the future.

But just to kind of COVID our bases, because it's, it's pretty clear that if you're not submitting a VNP, there's no intention to fish, that's what we're planning on applying for this upcoming ADP. Thank you, and then I just wanted to clarify, I mean, this is the meeting in which the Council makes recommendations for the ADP. The way you were speaking about this, just assume that NIMS was going forward with these. Are you looking for Council concurrence on some of these changes, or is the agency just going forward? I think our plan is to move forward with this.

The things that we are considering maybe getting some input on is, as we are, you know, notifying vessels for the removal, we don't want to be issuing blanket waivers for vessels that potentially can't take an observer. We want to have, you know, we're kind of, we're still trying to workshop what a sort of appeal process might look like. There are probably some extenuating circumstances for some vessels, but how we go about doing that is something that we're going to be trying to figure out in the meantime. And so I think that as we are trying to give forward notice for these vessels that are below this threshold that we can develop that process. So I know there was some input from the PCF MAC and from the AP on this, so those kinds of things I think are, you know, I think that we talked about from those reports, and so those are things that I think the council can maybe have some input on.

For the record, this is Christian Gritzens again, um, and I'm going to go over another council request we had about evaluating low-effort fixed-gear vessels for no-selection eligibility.

So the council request was to consider revisions to the zero-selection pool, and that's the the current less than 40 feet, um, or using jig gear pool. And so we were tasked to consider revisions for cost efficiency purposes to potentially include fixed gear catcher vessels that have 1 to 2 annual trips and/or low quota or catch volume. So the agency evaluated a couple of things. Um, first, we only looked at catcher vessels that are currently in the at-sea observer pool. We did not look at EM because that was covered in the analysis you just heard.

So vessels that would be removed from EM would then be placed in the at-sea observer pool and then subject to these criteria.

We also looked at vessels that had no more than 2 trips in any year, and we used an analysis window of 2021 to 2025 to give us kind of a pretty broad range of effort going on in the fleet. We also only considered vessels that had at least 3 years of fishing history during that analysis window, and that was to ensure that We targeted vessels that have a demonstrated history, history in the fleet and a history of consistently low effort. So, you know, this does not investigate vessels new to the fleet or things like that.

We quantify the effects on the selection rates. We also looked at how it would change the deployment footprint, and we also assessed the number of trips we would expect to be monitored. So as I mentioned, we did not evaluate EM vessels. We also did not evaluate vessels with— or vessel-level quota, and that's because IFQ quota, which many of these boats are or carry, is allocated to quota holders, not to vessels. So we don't have a good metric of evaluating at the vessel level using quota.

So here's an overall picture of the fleet. This figure shows the mean annual trips for all vessels in the fleet over that analysis window, and kind of the way to read each of these bars is so that first, you know, tall bar in the Gulf of Alaska, that indicates vessels that had 2 or less trips per year, while the second bar is more than 2, up to 4 trips per year, and so on and so forth. What we see here is that annual fishing effort in the fleet is strongly concentrated at the low end of the distribution. So this is an inherently low effort fleet overall. A lot of these vessels don't fish a lot each year.

We also saw that about 18% of the vessels that were active during that analysis window met— would meet that criterion of less than 2 trips per year with 3 years of fishing history, and most of those vessels would be in the Gulf of Alaska. So this would really be a Gulf of Alaska only application.

I'd also like to mention that because these vessels make very few trips, very few of them are actually observed at the current selection rates. So it's about 31% in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands and less than 10% in the Gulf of Alaska. So if you fish 1% or 1 trip per year, you have about a 10% or 1 in 10 chance of taking an observer.

Similar to the last analysis looking at EM fixed gear, we also reallocated. So what is— what we're showing here is allocation at the status quo, so leaving vessels in the strata that they're assigned to, and then a proposed allocation. So that's taking those eligible vessels and moving them into zero selection and re-running the proximity allocation algorithm to see what rates we would get. So we have the rate, and then big N is the total number of trips we expect, little n is the total number of trips we expect to be monitored, and then that gray box on the right shows the difference between the proposed scenario and the status quo scenario. So As you can see here, there is almost no change to rates, and there is no change at all to the number of trips we would expect to monitor during the year with those trips moved into zero selection.

And this is because we operate under a fixed monitoring budget, so moving trips to no selection doesn't save us money. It just reallocates the funds rather than reducing those expenditures. So, you know, what we see here is, is no change in cost efficiency for as far as, you know, selection rates between each of the strata.

Thank you, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I just want to make sure I'm understanding the— in the gray as well. Like, I think we understood that it wouldn't save money, this— any, any of this approach. But I think what we thought might happen is we could move people into zero selection and essentially increase selection rates on who's left in the observed category.

But are you saying those vessels simply aren't, um, selected often enough in order to make a difference in the selection rates if we move them to no selection?

Through the chair, thank you, Ms. Kimball. Kind of, but really what it is is these vessels fish so little that they don't, they don't add much to the allocation, so the allocation doesn't really see them at all. So what we see here is by moving those vessels in 2025 out of the into zero selection, we only lost 34 trips. In the observer fixed-gear GOA stratum, but our rates only changed by, you know, 0.1%, which for most of the strata resulted in no more trips being monitored. I hope that answers your question.

Yes, thank you.

The other thing we looked at is the changes to the deployment footprint. So what this map depicts is all the different ports where the vessels that would be eligible under this criterion operate out of. So the size of the circle represents the number or the relative number of mean annual trips per port. So bigger circles mean there's more effort operating out of that port. The navy part of the pie represents trips by vessels that are not eligible, while the teal part of the pie represents trips by those vessels that would be deemed eligible under those— that criterion.

What we see here is that vessels operate from the same ports as vessels that remain within the at-sea observer pool, and that we would essentially be deploying two observers at the— to the same ports at the same rates because the rates didn't change. So, you know, this doesn't change expenditures on flying observers to remote ports or anything like that. And I will add too is we may not want that. Because if we cut out ports, we may cut out spatial components of the fleet that now become unmonitored. So that's a concern we may have.

Additionally, implementing this would incur a few administrative requirements. So the agency would need to review these vessel eligibility annually. You know, that's to make sure that vessels continue to meet that criterion. And then that new vessel is entering the fleet with enough fishing history, could be evaluated to see if they would meet it or not. Vessels that would be moved would also need to still declare their fishing in log or in ODS so we could track that eligibility over time.

So the agency's findings is that we didn't find any cost efficiencies from revising the zero selection pool to include these low-effort vessels. And it did not result in increased selection rates or more monitoring across the fleet. So with that, I'll take any questions.

Not seeing any. Thank you. And with that, I'll hand it back to Mr. Mayhew.

I'm going to talk a little bit about some of these upcoming updates to ODS that we have slated. So currently in development for this fall— sorry, not in development, this is actually— we implemented this one. But reminder emails were sent to and will be sent to ODS users whenever they have trips that are logged that are 2 weeks past their trip end date that have not been closed. And so as a reminder, when you log a trip, you declare what your embark and disembark dates are. You're, you know, we expect you to fish those trips, and then upon completion of those trips, you have to close that trip as completed.

And so there's occasionally times where vessels kind of just don't, don't close their trips, and so we don't know if those trips were actually used or not. And so we're trying to just have a little bit more timely data entry and to know whether vessels are sticking to their declared plans or not. And so just by sending out these reminders whenever we have these kind of languishing pending trips is that those vessels will get a little reminder email on a 2-week basis. And so vessels can update their trip information. We are going to be providing them with more information on which landing reports they can use to close their trips.

And this will just keep kind of making sure that everybody is managing their trips in a more timely manner.

This December, we're going to be also upgrading our system for how we are supplying landing report data to users that are going to be closing their trips, whether it's the call center or whether it's the vessel users. So typically, currently, our list of landing reports is only updated once a day. So this is going to be switched over to about 8 times per day update. This just makes it so any of those, you know, faster moving fisheries that will have our landing report information in a more timely manner so that when vessels want to close a trip so they can log a new one, this information will be available at a higher frequency. We're also going to be doing a little bit of matching between the ODS users' declared trip start and end dates and the landing reports and essentially doing kind of a date match between the two so that If you have multiple landing reports, that way you can highlight the ones that are very likely to be the ones that correspond with your planned trip.

If that's not the case, then we just ask you to edit your plan to match what you actually did, and then it should match up more closely with the landing report states. So this— we're just trying to make it a little bit easier for folks to manage their trips and have that information for them in a more timely manner. Also upcoming, and we haven't really it's kind of slated to get worked on but hasn't been really thought out as far as how we're going to solve this problem, is that we've been having more issues where a vessel, you know, maybe logs a trip and we aren't able to get an observer to that vessel in time because of weather, for instance, right? And so we do require that vessels give a 3-day notice when they log trips for us to be able to supply an observer to monitor their selected trip. And if we can't get an observer in those 3 days, whether it's due to weather or just lack of observer availability, we issue waivers on a trip-by-trip basis.

But there's instances with some of these vessels that get these waivers that they will wait maybe like 2 weeks before they actually take their trip. And in those 2 weeks, we could very likely be able to get an observer out to monitor that trip. And so just for the risk of not achieving the rates that we set out to, because whenever you issue waivers, it lowers your realized monitoring rate, and we don't want to be lower than what we plan, right? So we're considering ways that we can maybe put time limits on these waivers, that you need to use your waiver within a certain period of time, or else you either need to apply for another waiver or end up just, just calling the call center and having your observer come to your boat. So this is just something that we're, you know, thinking about, but it's something to try to make sure that we're not having these waivers kind of have an indefinite time span for when they're applicable.

Just to give a little bit of an update on kind of this look and feel, how it's going to change between our status quo and then this upgrade when we're closing TRIPS. Is that currently when you close a trip, you can either use the landing report ID, and so we do supply a list of report IDs and, you know, what kind of gear type was used, the management program codes, and the dates. And so you can use a, you know, you can use a checkbox list to select which landing reports correspond to your trip, or if we don't have that information, you can enter the landing port date and time. The problem with this latter method is that there's no real validation that can be run on it, and we have to pretty much after the fact do a little bit of matching anyway just based off of this information. It's just, it's just not as rigorous of a, of a data entry method.

And so we want to— what we're working on here is trying to improve our data quality. So with our upgrade, it's going to look pretty similar. On the left, we're going to have a list of report IDs we're going to be highlighting the ones that have corresponding dates. This will just make it easier for the user to know which one is corresponding to their trip. And if for any instance where we don't have any Lang reports to supply to the ODS users to close the trips, is that we can— we'll still be allowing the vessel to include the date and port for their trip.

We're not going to be needing the time because the time isn't really that useful, but we're allowing the user to optionally, if they do have it, to key in their landing report ID if they have it. This landing report ID is, as I said, is kind of like— this is what we want to have as far as being able to have a one-to-one connection between odds and landings. And so maybe if our system is down or there's some, you know, connectivity issues between the databases, that at least if the user has the landing report ID, they can enter that in. And it's a lot easier for us to run validations on the landing report ID to make sure, you know, those landing reports correspond to that vessel those dates match, that we can much more easily kind of be able to run, you know, quality control on these user-entered landing report IDs.

So this concludes, I guess, this portion on the ADP. I just want to give acknowledgments here. So a huge thank you to the observers, the observer providers, the captains and crew members, EM providers, video reviewers, and agency staff who make fishery-dependent data collection possible. Also, thank you to members of the FMAC, the PCFMAC, APN Council for the public input, feedback, and dedication to sustainable fisheries management. And thanks to the AFSC, AKRO, and PSMFC staff who have developed this draft 2027 ADP.

Okay, thank you very much, Mr. Mayhew. Not seeing any questions. Thank you. Good morning. We have one more section just the, on the CIE review.

Oh. Sorry about that. Go ahead, Jason. Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the council. Can you hear me okay?

Yes, we can. Good morning. Great. For the record, my name is Jason Genault, and I am the program manager for Analytical Services, which is part of the Fisheries Monitoring and Analysis Division. At the Alaska Fisheries Science Center.

And today I'm going to talk to you about the Center for Independent Experts, or CIE, review that the program underwent back in June of this year. Next slide, please.

As a reminder, a couple reminders here, the SSC recommended that an occasional CIE review be convened to review the ADP with emphasis on novel methods such as the proximity allocation method and other elements of the observer program as appropriate.

And that was from their June 2024 report that they presented to you all. Also, just as a reminder for those who may be unfamiliar with the process, a CIE review is meant to ensure the scientific quality by conducting rigorous review of scientific products by qualified impartial experts without conflicts of interest or outside influence and deliver a transparent publicly available peer review report to support fishery management decisions. Next slide, please. Thank you.

And I put that definition up there because typically a CIE review is done on stock assessment, right? When they change their models or they update the science, they want these external reviews. This was the first CIE review of the North Pacific Observer Program, and as far as I'm aware, it is the first CIE review that's exclusively focused on any U.S. observer program. As I said, most of the time these are focused on stock assessments. In some cases, observer data may come into those CIE reviews, but this is the first one that I'm aware of that's been solely focused on an observer program.

The review took place back in June in Seattle in person.

And the focus was to review the methods used in the ADP to deploy monitoring and used in the annual report to assess the outcomes of the ADP. And the review covered the methods used in the 2025 ADP and annual report. And I should just note here that those are the same methods we used in 2026 and the ones that, um, Mr. Gredson presented here for the draft 2027 ADP.

We had 3 reviewers from— one from Canada, one from France, and one from Norway. They all had expertise in, in the kinds of things we might expect: fishery science, surveys, statistics, and commercial fisheries monitoring. The executive summaries for the final re-reviewer reports are presented in Appendix E of the draft 2027 ADP.

This slide is basically a summary of everything else I'm going to tell you in the, in this presentation. Um, all the reviewers agreed that the science used in the ADP and the evaluation methods for the ADP used in the annual report are sound, justified, and best available science. No changes were recommended for the 2027 ADP, but there were some recommendations for future research exploring various aspects of the ADP and the annual report and to try to better understand the tradeoffs between, uh, EM and observers.

The final reviewer reports can be found at that URL there. Um, I should also point out that it's not just the reviewer reports but all of the meeting materials, including the documents that were presented to the reviewers, The presentations themselves, the terms of reference, schedule, list of participants, all of that can be found at that URL.

What I'm going to talk about for the next part— next, uh, rest of the talk really is that it's very high-level summary of what you can find on that website, right? I couldn't fit it all on the slide and I just wanted to keep this somewhat brief. So in term— in the terms of reference had 3 general categories. The first was to evaluate the justification scientific basis of the stratification framework and the proximity allocation method used in the ADP. The second set of terms of reference were to evaluate Chapter 3 of the annual report.

That's where we test the goals goals of, of the ADP to see if whether they were achieved or not. And that, that work really focused on the spatiotemporal analyses, or comparing what we predicted we would get in the ADP to what we actually got on the water. And then also in the annual report, we're always testing for observer effects because those can significantly bias the data. And so that was another subject of the of the review. And then the third set of terms of reference were simply asking for guidance on improvements and recommendations.

Generally speaking, and I, again, just remind folks, I'm just hitting the major themes here. For the specifics, please see the reports themselves. But in general, the three reviewers found that the stratification in the ADP is justified, appropriate, scientifically sound, and consistent with internationally best practices.

They found that the proximity allocation similarly justified, appropriate, scientifically sound, consistent with best practices. And I'll point out, um, I bolded here innovative because two of the three reviewers mentioned the innovative nature of the work, suggesting that we are on the cutting edge of the science here.

Next slide, thank you.

In terms of the annual report, those spatial-temporal comparisons where we're looking at what we predicted versus what we, what we got, they found those to be scientifically sound and robust and practical for assessing the proximity allocation method. And all 3 reviewers were particularly impressed with the odd system and how well it ensured sample trips are representative of fishing activity.

Similarly, they found that the assessment coverage— the assessment of the coverage goals are scientifically sound and appropriate.

In terms of the observer effects, the current methods they found to be sound, robust, and useful. They also reviewed the newer methods which were presented in the 2025 Annual Report Appendix B.

Previously. These methods they found to be promising and should be operationalized.

Next slide. In terms of their recommendations for the ADP, there— again, there were no recommendations for changes to the 2027 ADP. For future kinds of explorations, in terms of the stratification. There was some concern about whether simply stratifying by FMP was enough to catch the spatial variability in the catch. Um, so they asked for some, some more specific comparisons there, and then periodically review all of our stratification definitions, which is just good science, and we do that anyways.

In terms of proximity allocation, they recommended that we continue our efforts to develop robust methods for forecasting next year's fishing effort. Recall that the proximity allocation relies heavily on forecasting the next year's fishing effort, and so getting that right is quite important, and we do continue to try to develop those methods to be very robust.

In terms of the annual report, the spatiotemporal analyses, again, just asking us to periodically assess those temporal strata, make sure we're getting times and seasons that are representative of fishing. In terms of the coverage analyses, they suggested some new ways to perhaps display the results and provide some more nuanced spatial and temporal comparisons. And then the third point there I already mentioned, to try and operationalize those new methods we use to detect observer effects.

They did have two other recommendations that were kind of not directly part of the review, but they all sort of mentioned these. And the first was a monitoring data needs gap analysis. And here they were suggesting that we try to identify important sampling gaps and deficiencies and determine how the allocation strategy might perform if we were to bring those gaps in, and it would better link our monitoring methods with our end user requirements. And then the other recommendation that they all seem to have, which was a SWOT for monitoring approaches, that's a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis for the two approaches. Recall that we have two tools available to us currently.

We have EM and we have observers, and they both have benefits and, and some drawbacks, and so understanding those trade-offs could provide some insight into how better shape the ADP in the future.

So overall, all the reviewers indicated that the science used in both the EDP and the annual report is justified, best available, and reflective of best practices. And I, I just want to pause on this point for a moment. Um, the positive outcome of the CIU review is most certainly due to the hard work and dedication to the team that's put into these products over many years, and I'll name those folks in the next slide. But first, I'd like to also acknowledge that the positive outcome is also a result of all of you and the collaborative process that the council fosters and that the agency and industry and public engage in every time we present an ADP or an annual report in this forum. And that includes all of those who came before and who've contributed to this collaborative iterative process that Dr. Lucy talked about.

Over the years since the inception of the coverage— partial coverage program in 2013. So I hope that we all— and by we, I mean Council, industry, the public— can take pride in the fact that 3 internationally recognized experts took a critical look at the science we used in the program and deemed the North Pacific Observer Program a world-class monitoring and data collection program.

Program. In terms of our next steps, we're— I didn't mention this before, but we only recently received those reviewer, those final reviewer reports. I think it was less than a week before the PCF MAC, so we're still kind of digging into the details, coming up with a plan, trying to prioritize those things. Once we develop a plan, we'll report back to council how we plan on addressing these recommendations.

Next slide.

So as I mentioned, there were a number of scientists who've worked hard over the years to make this happen. Miss Jennifer Cahalan from the Science Center and Pacific States Dr. Craig Fonts at the Science Center, Mr. Phil Ganz at the regional office, Dr. Jason Gasper at the regional office, Mr. Christian Gredsen and Mr. Jeff Mayhew, Dr. Sean Lucy, Ms. Gwen Schnedeker at the Science Center, and Ms. Lisa Thompson at the Science Center. And two people I apologize for neglecting to put them on the slide who are also very integral in this and they've moved on to other things. Um, Miss Jennifer Mondragon from the regional office and Miss Jennifer Ferdinand from— who's at the Science Center now in a different position, she was the director previously— they both, their leadership, um, was integral in, in making this all happen.

I'd be remiss if I didn't thank the reviewers: Dr. Noel Cadigan from Canada, Mr. Joël Viganoux from France, and Dr. Dr. John Fulstad from Norway for taking the time to come to the United States, provide their expertise and insights. And Mark Chandler from the NOAA CIE office helped me navigate the administrative aspects of this project. And with that, Madam Chair, I'd be happy to take any questions. Thank you very much, Dr. Genot, and for sharing the findings of the CIE review. We would also like to extend our appreciation for everyone who has participated in creating such a robust observer program over the years and really appreciate the findings of this review.

We do have a couple, I think at least one question for you, and we might have to go back a slide or two. Apologies. Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Dr. Geno. And yes, my question is back on slide 52. And it's just really— I was tracking you on this first high-level bullet in terms of the monitoring data needs gap analysis, but I lost you on the third sub-bullet. Can you just describe, please, again, the recommendation to link the monitoring method with end-user results?

I just wasn't quite tracking that. Through the chair, yes, thank you for the question. Yeah, so here I— My understanding, and again, we're still sort of digging into the details, but I think what they were requesting was that we actually go to the end users and try to find out exactly what their needs are and whether we're meeting their needs. And, um, and if we're not, then try to incorporate that into our sampling design. To that, I would say we certainly have a good understanding of our two major users, um, for catch accounting, the regional office, right, and for in-season management and stock assessors for assessment reasons.

So I think we have a pretty good understanding of the major users of our data, but there may be other users that we might want to reach out to and try to find out if we can meet some of their needs in a better way. Does that answer your question?

Thank you. It does.

Um, thank you. And Ms. Kimball, then Mr. Ricci. Thank you, Dr. Genoa. I also want to extend appreciation for the, uh, undergoing the CIE review and just congratulations on the results. My—.

I have two questions. The first is on this same slide, and in the reviewer recommendation to determine how the allocation strategy might perform in relation to sampling gaps or deficiencies, I really thought that's the exercise that the Science Center undertook in determining to move to the proximity allocation method, but I might be thinking about what the reviewers are recommending in too narrow a form. Is there, is there something else you can provide about what they're intending there? Through the chair, thank you for the question. Um, I, I think I'd need to look more deeply into that a little bit.

I, my, my initial thought is that, um, they were, they were just concerned that we're not, they were not meeting everyone's requirements. And I think that, um, that may have just been a communication error on our part in some sense, but I would really want to go back and look at what specifically they asked before before I give a complete answer.

Okay. Sorry. No, no problem. And through the chair, my second question was on— well, I think it's on several slides, but slide 49. And we've had past discussions in the annual report about the bias metrics used in the program to ensure that sample trips, observed trips, are representative of unsampled, unobserved trips.

Did the reviewers because I didn't read this part, did the reviewers give any recommendations on different metrics than the ones that we're using? I just want to understand if that's still something that we're looking at at the Science Center. The only ones I can remember right now is like, are the trips of the same duration? Are the— do the trips have the same diversity of species? Those are the ones at the top of my head.

But we've been kind of looking for additional metrics, and I didn't know if that's something that the CIE reviewers touched on.

Through the chair, thank you for the question. Um, they didn't provide— that I recall, they didn't provide specific direction on new types of statistics, but what they did say was they felt those new methods that, um, we presented in the Appendix B of the annual report were very promising and that those should be operationalized, and those would I think supplement what we currently do.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. And Mr. Ritchie. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, gentlemen, for the presentation. I also have a question on the same slide, actually. Um, I hope it's not a dumb question, but it may be.

Um, it says monitoring data needs, it needs gap analysis there, and I'm wondering if that's something that uh, the Science Center would—. Is that something that you'll undertake without council direction, or is that something that needs council direction to, to happen? And just if you could explain that a little bit for me.

Thank you for the question, uh, through the chair.

Um, I don't know that it necessarily needs council direction, um, and at this point I'm not sure that how much or, or exactly what form that would take since we're still trying to understand exactly what the, what all the recommendations mean and how we might approach them. Um, hopefully that answers your question. It does. Thank you. Thank you.

Um, any further questions?

Thank you all for the report. Okay, so I think that takes us to our PCF MAC report.

Good morning again, um, Madam Chair, Sir Cleaver, Council staff. Um, while the presentation comes up, I'll just go ahead and get started on our PCF MAC report. The main thing that was on our agenda was the presentation that you received, or a version of it, on the draft ADP, the CIE review, and the, the two additional analyses, as well as some budget information. And the committee also provides an opportunity for other monitoring, monitoring-related updates. So we received a few of those from the public as well.

These are just the same rates that were highlighted in the ADP themselves for the vessels that are remaining in partial coverage, so that's not any new information for you, and these again will be updated, uh, in the final ADP in December.

The committee, after receiving the, uh, annual deployment plan presentation, the committee noted its appreciation for all the work that's gone into that, um, and the report from FMA, and supported the agency recommendations to retain the same sampling design that's been on the water for the past several years, described by Mr. Gretzens earlier.

The CIE review of the ADP, this again was a recommendation from the council and the SSC, and the committee accredited FMA with this successful successful review and noted that this type of review is a significant undertaking. And the committee noted that there is a high level of interest or public interest in this type of external peer review, and the committee encouraged broader dissemination of relevant information from this, from the results of this review. So specifically, the committee recommended that the Council Council explore any opportunity to better communicate the— communicate to the IPHC any relevant information on the monitoring program that occurs in the groundfish fisheries in the North Pacific.

And I think this link was in the, in the prior presentation, but this is again where you can find all of the associated resources from the CIE review.

For the fixed-gear, fixed-gear vessel minimum effort analysis— I'm having trouble with my words this morning, apologies— the committee overall supported this approach to improve cost-effectiveness but had concerns about vessels that are unable to carry an observer. And the PCF MAC supported the agency's recommendation for an annual evaluation of vessel participation in the fixed gear EM pool. And as part of that review, the committee had a few different recommendations. The first is that in 2027, so for the 2027 ADP, vessels who have not complied with requirements to update and submit vessel monitoring plans for EM for the past 3 years would be removed from the fixed gear EM pool. And beginning with the 2028 ADP, the committee recommended that vessels be removed from the fixed gear EM pool if they average under 3 trips per year over the prior 3 years.

These vessels would be placed in the observer pool and then must return their EM equipment to be used on vessels that have more fishing effort.

Also, beginning with the 2028 ADP, vessels requesting to rejoin the fixed gear YMPool would need at least 5 trips per year over the prior 3 years. That was another part of the committee's recommendation, and the committee recommended that there be a waiver process established for active vessels that fish fewer than 3 trips that are proposed to be removed from that fixed gear EM pool if they can prove that they don't have space for an observer.

The committee also clarified that their intent is really that there should be no obstacles to a vessel being able to join the fixed gear EM pool for the first time. Some of the discussion around this was related to prior trip history, um, and whether or not, uh, vessel is switching ownership. They didn't want any of that to be, um, to impact the, the vessel's ability to join the fixed gear EM pool.

Potential revisions to the no-selection pool has been an ongoing priority for both the PCF MAC and for the council, and the results of this evaluation indicated that moving these vessels would not improve cost savings for the program, as highlighted in the presentation you all just received, and wouldn't result in any meaningful cost efficiencies.

The PCF MAC appreciated that that evaluation occurred though and discussed kind of the, the other hand or the other side of this evaluation, that there are vessels that are under 40 feet currently in the no selection pool, so they're not required to have an observer and not required to have EM coverage, but there are some of those vessels that have substantial fishing activity. And so the committee recommended that the agency review fishing effort among those vessels and determine whether or not some have sufficient activity to then warrant consideration for including those vessels in partial coverage rather than in the no selection pool.

And committee members noted that the vessels unable to accommodate an observer due to size could apply to participate in the EM program, that that is, um, always an option.

We had a few other updates from members of the public during the PCF MAC meeting. Ms. Sarah Williamson provided a presentation on a project that she's conducting as part of her master's research at the APU FAST lab, and it's supported by NFWIP funding. The project uses machine learning and EM video review to try to improve estimation of fish lengths and to be able to identify species with a broader goal of trying to support more accurate catch accounting and then trying to integrate that information into stock assessments. Uh, she noted that this is particularly, uh, being used for data-limited stocks, and the technology was proven viable in longline EM imagery for detecting Pacific sleeper sharks and then estimating shark lengths. And the project is looking to expand into other fisheries or for other species, and one of the applications that was discussed at the meeting was whether or not this would be something that could be used to estimate length of sablefish discards in the future.

Ms. Williamson also emphasized that industry collaboration and feedback is really important for them to be able to try to develop a practical and useful tool, and so their team hopes to gather additional industry input about how the length data collection can feasibly integrate into the EM workflows.

The last update that we got was from Mr. Eric Torgerson. He provided an overview of a NIFWIF proposal that is focused on collecting real-time gear deployment and retrieval data through EM systems, and this is in the AFA Pollock fleet, and the proposed project would be transmitting looking at transmitting real-time sensor data and still images, and then using machine learning to try to identify, uh, when gear is deployed and when exactly it's retrieved.

I imagine that, um, that as those projects move forward, the committee may receive any future updates.

As far as scheduling the next monitoring committee meeting, So the FMAC typically occurs in May to review the annual report, and due to the council meeting schedule changes moving the June meeting to May, um, as a reminder, FMA will be providing a presentation on the annual report at that meeting, um, and at the council's May meeting, but the written annual report will be provided in B reports at the October's, uh, at the council's October meeting. So we won't be receiving a written report for the May FMAC. Or council meetings. The PCF MAC will plan to meet next September as usual to review the draft annual deployment plan, and the committee noted that they wanted the opportunity for the FMAC to be able to review the lead Level 2 analysis either prior to initial review or final action, depending on the timing of that and, and when it's feasible for for, for them to meet.

And that is the committee report. Happy to take any questions.

Thank you. Uh, Mr. Kerlin. Thanks, Madam Chair. Um, Ms. Kleaver, question on your slide 5. Um, this is the recommendation to explore opportunities to communicate, uh, monitoring conducted in the North Pacific to the Halibut Commission.

So the Canadian IPHC commissioners have repeatedly raised concern about coverage rates in the partial coverage fleet. So I gather that was kind of the impetus behind this. But I wonder if you could elaborate. Was there any further discussion from the committee about what this might look like in better communicating this to IPHC? Through the chair, Mr. Curland.

Yeah. So the discussion at the committee, it was originally brought up because there, I guess there have been times that that the discussion around monitoring has maybe been described inaccurately in terms of the, the program that we have on the water in our federal fisheries. And the committee members discussed whether or not it'd be feasible to try— for the council to try to get this on the commissioner's agenda or on the conference border processor agenda, that some kind of presentation from FMA on our monitoring program, and the agency staff that we had at the meeting noted that they do send regional— your regional office staff, but that they're mostly— they've mostly been fielding questions and have never been invited to provide a formal presentation to the IPHC.

And just trying to explore opportunities to maybe have a more formal and thorough presentation on the monitoring program. So, just to follow up, Madam Chair, um, was the idea that, um, the council should offer a more detailed briefing to the IPHC? Through the chair, I think that was kind of the gist of the conversation, was how to, how to put that out there and for the council to, um, not necessarily wait for, for an invite or just, just be fielding questions, but propose it to the IPHC. Okay, thank you. Thank you.

And Ms. Kimball? Thank you. Just, just to add to that, from the monitoring committee perspective, I, I think it was the CIE review, like, kind of at the level that we were provided here at our meeting, and also in context of the whole monitoring program The, the, what I was getting from PCF MAC members was some of those misperceptions are based on thinking that our program has been stagnant, and we've actually seen a lot of changes in the past just very several years, including putting all of the Pollock boats under trawl EM for 100% coverage. And so those are the kinds of changes that I, I was getting from committee members they were feeling weren't being communicated well, and the, and the improvements in the program. And then with that CIE review being positive for the portion that is still in partial coverage, they just wanted like a fresh look at here's what our monitoring program is doing, um, and I think so to reduce some confusion at the IPHC.

That's my two cents.

Okay, thank you. Any further questions or anything additional, uh, Ms. Kimball, you'd like to add as chair?

Thank you, Ms. Claver.

So that'll take us to our AP reports, um, and just any members of the public who would like to testify on C1, please sign up before the end of the AP report. Thank you. Ms. Riddell.

Good morning, Madam Chair, members of the council. I'll just wait a moment for the presentation to get on the screen, but for the record, my name is Chelsea Riddell, co-vice chair of the advisory panel, and I'm here to give the AP report on C1 Observer 2027 annual deployment plan.

The motion reads, the AP acknowledges the receipt of the 2027 Draft Annual Deployment Plan and the PCF MAC report, noting appreciation for staff's work on these items, particularly the successful CIE review and long-awaited cost-saving measures in fixed gear EM. The AP supports and encourages the council to adopt all of the recommendations from the PCF MAC. And that motion passed 18 to 0, and I can take Thank you, Ms. Riddell. Any questions on the AP report?

Not seeing any. Thank you so much.

And that takes us to public testimony. I do not see anyone signed up. Okay. Let's take a, a 10-minute, uh, stand down here, and we'll see if the council would like to take action on C1. So please come back at 9:45.

Thank you.

Welcome back, everyone. We have finished our staff presentations. We did not have public testimony on, or anyone signed up for public testimony on C1, but we are ready to consider action. So what are the wishes? Yes, Ms. Kimball.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I do have a motion.

Okay, we'll wait for that to come up on the screen.

This is on agenda item C1 for the 2027 Annual Deployment Plan. The motion reads: regulations requiring 100% and 200% observer coverage requirements are unchanged. The council supports the draft 2027 ADP for partial coverage fisheries. Observer coverage rates resulting from the selected design and final budget are expected in the final ADP in December 2026. The council also supports the following: removing vessels from the fixed gear electronic monitoring, or EM, pool in 2027 who have not complied with requirements to update and submit EM vessel monitoring plans for the past 3 years; a yearly evaluation by NMSP to remove vessels from the fixed gear EM pool if they average less than 3 trips trips per year over the prior 3 years.

These vessels will be placed in the at-sea observer pool and return their EM equipment to be used on active vessels. Vessels requesting to rejoin the fixed gear EM pool need at least 5 trips per year over the prior 3 years. The council requests NIMS continue to explore criteria for vessels joining for the first time. The council requests NIMS provide consideration for active vessels that are proposed to be removed from the fixed gear EM pool meaning they have greater than 0 but less than 3 trips, if they can prove they do not have bunk space for an observer. The council appreciates the analysis of moving additional fixed-gear vessels with few annual trips to the zero selection pool, i.e., no observer coverage requirements, and recognizes the conclusion there were no cost efficiency or monitoring gains identified.

CIE review. The council commends NOAA on the positive results of the Center for Independent Experts peer review of the annual Deployment Plan methodologies and annual monitoring report. The council supports further dissemination of the results to the SSC, IPHC, and other bodies where appropriate, and with a second, I will speak to it. Thank you for the second, Ms. Vanderhoeven. And Ms. Kimball.

Thank you, Ms. Vanderhoeven, for the second. I think this is fairly straightforward. I, I hope, you know, the lack of public testimony here and at the AP doesn't reflect the— I know that it doesn't reflect the level of work that goes into this annual process and the level of work that the Partial Coverage Fishery Monitoring advisory committee puts into review of this process. I do think we're a little bit more dialed in now on the proximity allocation method, and I think that's been noticed by the CIE review and those positive results. So there's a lot of previous years that we went into debating and changing the methodology in the annual deployment plan.

Now for a few years, we're, we're on the same strata and the same allocation method. And I think that's reflected in the maybe some more smoothness of this going through the PCF MAC. There were some additional analyses that I would recognize in the motion that, that NOAA put forward, and I appreciate doing that. Those were things the council has asked for, so I wanted to be very clear about that. I do think it's appropriate, as did the committee, to remove vessels who have not complied with their EMVMPs for the past 3 years.

I also think this yearly evaluation to remove vessels if they average less 3 trips per year, was shown in the analysis to be not cost effective, and we could get more bang for the buck in our monitoring fees if we move those vessels from the EM pool into the observer pool. I did put some caveats around that, that for the most part reflect the committee's recommendations. I did not ask for a formal waiver process for those vessels that have very few trips. We're proposing to move them out of EM because they are not cost effective in that pool, if they can prove they don't have bunk space for an observer, which I know has been a concern of the fixed-gear fleet and of the partial monitoring committee, I'm just asking NOAA and the Science Center to think a little bit more about that process. Maybe it's a case-by-case discussion at that point, but I did want to recognize that folks were put in the EM pool originally in part because some didn't have bunk space for observers.

So I don't— I want to recognize that that may not have changed for several vessels, I do want to recognize too the analysis of moving vessels into the zero selection pool that didn't have much activity. That really gains us nothing, so I'm not proposing that we go any further with that, but getting that analysis in the, in the very robust way that it's provided to us, that's something the council's been asking for, and, and I'm glad to finally see it. I think the last piece piece of the motion is really on the CIE review. I want to recognize, uh, the inordinate amount of work that goes into this process. And then, on it, in addition to go through a CIE review, the SSC— our SSC— were the ones that requested the CIE review.

And so I'm just hoping— not dictating, but hoping— at a future SSC agenda item, if they have 15 minutes, to get Dr. Juneau's presentation on the results of that review, since it was at their request that we find time to do that. There was also a request that we discussed, um, with Mr. Kerlin as well about any potential opportunity to provide those results to the IPHC. I think we don't dictate that schedule as well, but I think showing support for that kind of dissemination of these results is important. Um, I did not pick up one thing from the committee recommendations on looking at moving some vessels out of zero selection into the observer pool if they are less than 40 feet, but they do have more trips that might look like more activity. I see the merits of that analysis.

The committee supported that. I want to be really transparent that I, I recognize I didn't pick that up. I think it's additional work for, for at this point not enough gain, and I'm trying to be cognizant of the time for the Science Center staff. I do know they're going to spend additional staff looking staff time looking at the CIU review results and responding to some of those recommendations. And I was just making the case that that's the more important thing to do at this time.

So that's the full motion. I'd be glad to answer any questions.

Thank you for the motion, Miss Kimball. Are there any questions?

Yes, Mr. C. Thanks, Miss Kimball. Um, I support this motion. I did have just one question on The, the CIE reviewer recommendations, they've noted a couple of items in the, on the review, monitoring data needed, gaps analysis, and the SWOT. Are you assuming that, that will, those will be taken up with, with your last, with your language on further dissemination of the CIE review by the, by the SSC and and others at the last part of your motion there, or did you— or is there any need to include some incorporation of those recommendations from the CIES to next steps?

Thank you for the question. I, I did not include in the motion how the center is going to respond to all of the recommendations. I think there were some additional ones in addition to the ones that you mentioned. I just know that they are and that they committed to providing us some updates in how those recommendations were responded to and if there were any changes to the ADP as a result. So I didn't list those out.

That could certainly be amended, but my last sentence there on support was support for dissemination of the results that we received today. Thanks.

Any further questions or amendments?

Any comments on the motion? Ms. Baker. Thank you, Madam Chair. As always, Ms. Kimball covered it extremely well, but I, I just really also want to acknowledge and appreciate all of the work, all of the people—.

You can't even list them all— uh, that, that have gone into this process, not just this year but previously. And I We'll just leave it at that. I support the motion.

Thank you, Ms. Baker. Any other comments?

Thank you, Ms. Kimball, for all of, all of your continued work on the committee, as well as carrying forward all these motions throughout, throughout the year. So, um, with that, I'll see if there are Any objections?

Seeing none, that motion passes without objection.

That brings us into our C2 staff report. Um, just a notification to the public and council, the SSC report is posted. Um, if you would like to take a look at that, we will be receiving our SSC verbal report at 1 PM. Uh, so we'll go through our staff presentation on C2, um, and we'll break after that, come back after lunch and begin with our SSC report, then our AP report, and then take public testimony on C2. So we are ready.

Thanks.

Alright, figured that out. Good morning. For the record, this is Anita Kroska, Council staff, and I'm here to introduce agenda item C2, BSAI crab harvest specifications. Today you will be hearing about the final safe assessments and harvest specifications for a few stocks: Eastern Bering Sea snow crab, Bristol Bay red king crab, Tanner crab, St. Matthew Island blue king crab, and rollover specifications for Western Aleutian Islands red king crab. You will also hear some high-level overview of the crab-specific NOAA trawl survey results that are pertinent to the crab stocks and some overfishing status updates at the end of the presentation.

Today you'll hear the presentation from Katie Paloff from Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and she is joining us virtually. And with that, I'll hand it over to Katie.

Thank you, Anita. Good morning, members of the council. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Good morning.

Good morning. Great, thank you. So as Anita already said, I'm going to here today to give you the report of our crab plan team that we had in September. In addition to at this meeting, we set or recommend final specifications for a number of crab stocks. So with that, I'll just get started here.

Oh, too far. Sorry about that. This slide is one that we put in our presentations just to let everyone know where we are in our timing for crab stocks throughout the year. We're in this middle blue box here where we set annual specifications for Eastern Bering Sea snow and tanner as well as Bristol Bay red king crab. In addition, we have a number of stocks that we do on bi- or quad- or triannual basis, and one of those stocks here, St. Matthew's Island blue king crab, we'll see at this meeting.

It is on a biannual basis, currently done in even years.

This slide goes over the topics that we covered at our plan team meeting. There's a number of topics here, those are denoted in the blue font at the bottom that I will not cover in my oral report, but they're in our written report that we provide to, to the council, and I can field any questions on those if the council desires or has questions on those at the end of the presentation. But as Anita already said, I will go over a brief overview of the summer trawl survey results as it pertains to the crab stocks, and then jump into each of the crab stocks that we do final specifications for, and there'll be a brief kind of overview of those, of the fishery or season summary in each of those stocks. And then final, I'll have, finally I'll have a slide on those stocks that we don't assess on an annual basis, and we do evaluate those for overfishing updates, uh, just to make sure that overfishing is, is not occurring.

Uh, so before I jump into, uh, our agenda, I just wanted to, uh, make the council aware that, uh, this is ongoing, as you, you are— most of you are already aware that we currently have some vacancies on the plan team. Uh, most specifically, our largest vacancy is a co-chair position. I, when I presented to the SSC, I was calling myself a co-chair and they said, well, you're just a chair right now. So I am, uh, we're still looking for a co-chair, uh, and we're hoping that with backfilling Mike Litzhau's position in the Kodiak Lab, that that will happen at that time. So hopefully that, that is ongoing right now.

That's what I've been told. And then we do have a vacancy, our ADF&G management vacancy out of Dutch Harbor. We would like— the CPT would like to thank Ethan Nichols for his contributions to plan team. He moved on to a different position. So there's currently a vacancy right there on that.

That should get filled when we backfill that position and, and hopefully by our April 13th meeting. In addition, we, the council, did approve merging the crab plant team and scallop plant team. That's been approved and the proposed new name is the crab and scallop plant team. So just kind of keeping you aware of those couple things.

So with that, I'll jump into the survey results.

And these, these were put together. So while I am co-chairing on my own, I did get some assistance from the NOAA group. Specifically, Emily Reisner helped me put together these slides in addition to Erin Fiduah also helped me with some of the slides. And, and which, which I do appreciate because it takes, takes more than one person to do this all. Um, so these are Emily's slides, but just briefly go over the results of the summer survey.

And the Eastern Bering Sea survey consists of 349 stations, and they were all towed during the summer survey. The total harvestable biomass is gradually recovering from a low point in about in 2021, so you'll see that's the bar here. And in 2026, is quite a bit above last year's. A lot of that has to do with a large increase in Tanner crab, and you'll see that in the slides upcoming here.

So these slides are all similarly set up, and this is what we've seen the past few years from the survey group. So you'll see each one of these trend slides has a different component of the crab stock. So just for example, the top left is mature female, underneath that and mature male, and you'll see the, the trends over time, but in addition, the little box will highlight the trends, the difference between last year's survey and this year's survey. So you'll see for Bristol Bay red king crab, in general, most size and sex classes increased. Mature females were down slightly but considered relatively stable.

There was a quite a large increase in the immature size classes, which is the right two blocks here, That was due to one large tow at a station, so could potentially— there was some talk at CPT about the potential for that being a recruitment event for Bristol Bay red king crab, or it could be somewhat of an artifact of sampling. So there's some cautious optimism there for this stock into the future, but in general, both legal and mature males have been slowly increasing since the period of time where the fisheries closed, which was just after the 2020 point here in the graph where we didn't have a survey.

Tanner crab are managed both east and west of 166 longitude by the state, so these graphs, figures will show that, that delineation in how the survey data is summarized. And you can see here quite a large increase in males in both east East and the West, and the bottom boxes here reflect the industry preferred male size. Um, also we saw quite a few mature females in the West last year. That is down some, but still at historically high levels for the recent time period.

Um, this shows just immature crab. Oh, once again, it kind of had a pretty high peak last year. A lot of those, um, then molted and mated into sizes, mature or larger sizes, so we're definitely seeing this recruitment class come through for tanner crab, which is encouraging.

I threw, I left this figure in just to show where a lot of these tanner crab were found in the survey. These maps that are produced by the survey group kind of show the trends for the last 5 years, the last 4 years, and then this current year, and you can see where most of the tanner crab are being found in the survey here for the industry preferred males.

For snow crab, it's a little bit of a different story here. We saw decreases in small males, large males, and legal males. Mature females still continue to, to be high for this stock, but overall the decrease in males and specifically in the industry preferred males preferred male size is noted here. This, this was expected after the collapse. It would take some time for, for this stock to collapse, this collapse stop stock to recover, but it is a slow, a slow increase there that we're not seeing quite yet in the survey data.

One of the concerns that we've had for snow crab, and I think most of you are aware of, is that a lot of these crab are maturing at sizes that are below the size that are available to the, or available but also that the, that the industry would like to harvest. So this is the proportion of males that are maturing into a size class of 101 millimeters, which is the preferred industry size, and that has been pretty low the last few years. This year it was about 3.5%. So this is concerning because snow crab as well as Tanner crab, when they make this molt to maturity, they stop molting and growing. So that means that there's quite a bit of the mature biomass that is not readily available or desirable to the fishery.

Some of those are molting to sizes that are even below the legal size. So this has been a concern, and some of the issues around kind of the complexity in snow crab recommendations and managements the last few years.

Something that I imagine most of you have already heard about from last year, but it did continue into this year, is larger numbers of hybrid crab in the survey data. So these hybrid crab are those crab that result from mating between snow and tanner crab. We saw unprecedented numbers in all size and sex classes last year in the survey, and then those continued to be high this year. So they did drop down some, especially for the, the female proportions and small male proportions, but you can see these larger males and specifically the industry preferred males did increase from last year.

And that actually is a point here. If you look at the Tanner snow and hybrid crab altogether and their relative abundance, you'll see that this year the number of industry preferred snow crab, the percentage of industry preferred snow crab, is actually 1% lower than the available industry preferred hybrid crab.

And then this graph just shows you the overlap between spatially between where 4-inch male, which is the industry preferred size male hybrid crab, were found in the survey. 4-Inch male snow crab were found in the survey, and then the industry preferred size for Tanner crab were found in the survey. Just to kind of give some idea of the densities of these hybrid males, kind of more readily overlap with where we're finding the Tanner crab males. And I will say that, um, I think this is my last survey slide, so I'll pause to see if there's questions, but after the slide out, but I will say that the CPT did have some conversations about hybrids at our meeting. We primarily discussed a lot of them, we discussed some of them in the survey results and then some of them during our snow crab conversations, and so I will say that I do have a slide kind of on the fishery and hybrids, how they were incorporated into the fishery, the snow crab fishery last year that will be under, will be covered under the snow crab.

Part of the presentation, just to let you know that. The CPT did encourage additional biological information that could be taken on hybrids during the survey to be taken. This year they were able to collect weights on the hybrids to get a better weight-length relationship. We did a request that they collect data on kilohytes, so that basically means that these crab, snow, and tanners have a larger claw and we take a measurement of that large claw and compare it to their body size to determine if the kinocidius crabs have completed that molt to maturity, and to get an idea of when that molt is happening, we take measurements on a wide range of sizes so that we can have a good relationship between the immature and when the most of the crab are, are what size the crab are maturing. We don't currently have hybrid-specific data, for that point.

So we're basing hybrid, we don't really have a good way to classify hybrid crab as mature, we're just basing it on the information we have for the other stocks such as snow and tanner. In May, the CPT had a lengthy review of hybrid information, what available information is available to us both from the survey data streams and our catch data streams. At that time, we did not recommend that any of the data streams be included in any of our assessment models for Tanner or Snow. Instead, we recommended continuing to track the hybrid abundance in the survey report, which comes out at our fall meeting. And then in this meeting in September, we made a point of saying that we need more research on hybrids.

We need to understand more about their life history, distribution, movement, genetics. This is a high priority for the crab plan team. We also noted, in addition to recommended research avenues, it'll be useful to understand once we have this research information what policy and regulation pathways would allow for future harvest and management of kind of C.D.s hybrids. So currently, I will go into this a little bit more in snow crab, but for those of you that aren't aware, currently the way these fisheries are managed, the FMP recognizes two kind of C.D. Stocks, snow crab and tanner crab, and the way they are managed by ADF&G is that there is a legal definition of what a tanner crab is in regulation.

That is a crab that has two red eyes and an M-shaped mouth, and other kind of CDs that are landed, most of them are attributed to the snow crab IFQ and TAC and retained catch quotas just due to the, the legal definition of tanner crab and that most of them are Most of them do not have though that legal definition and therefore are lumped into snow crab. So these hybrid crab are being landed in our fisheries right now, but there is, they are not considered by regulation a separate species, and by biology, you know, are hybrid species, hybrid component of the two other species, so also not a separate species. So there's a lot that we really need to understand about them before we can move forward more officially, I think, with harvesting and understanding how they fit into our crab picture in the Bering Sea. But our recommendation here coming out of CPT was that we understand what pathways are available to us to make recommendations and to recommend research, just so that we're not having to play catch-up once we have more information as to what potentially we could do with these crops. So with that, I think I'll pause because that was my last survey slide to see if there's any questions.

Thank you, Ms. Palof. We do have one question. Ms. Baker. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Palof, for the presentation.

I do want to ask a question about your last point and appreciate you going into a little more detail on, on the CPT's discussion about hybrids, because we certainly have heard a lot about it, about this, as you say. I just, in terms of the sequencing of your last point, my takeaway, and what I think I heard you just say, is that when, you know, more information is available, this research on hybrids to maybe provide some more information on some of these key questions, it would be helpful for the CPT to be aware of the regulatory pathways, like you said. My question is, I wasn't sure coming into this meeting if that need to have information on the regulatory pathways is an urgent need that is holding the CPT up in some way, because that's where I see the Council coming in. But can you just give me your perspective on that? Because that's been a confusing point for me.

Yes, through the chair, Ms. Baker. Uh, I, I think that the way I would characterize it is that we, we do not have information. Nothing is holding up the CPT's recommendation. We do not have any information to potentially promote this component to, you know, its own species, which I think would, would need to be what would be made or have to have them recognized in the FMP. I, I think what our conversation centered around is A lot of the discussions on what we could and couldn't do with the hybrid survey information, how we incorporate them in management, is really the assumptions we make about the stocks that are in the FMP.

So there was a lot of conversations like, if we understood more, what would we be able to do? So nothing is holding up the CPT. I think we need more research before we can make recommendations. I think a lot of the conversation centered around, uh, you know, if our research takes a few years, we didn't want to then have to wait a few more years to be able to, to harvest these crab if they're— they continue to be at high levels. So I think that we were hoping that some of the conversation could be co-occurring so that as we get more research and we get to a point where we think we might want to do something different than what we are currently doing, uh, we're not than waiting more time, if that makes sense.

So I don't think it's a pressing need. It's more we wanted to make the council aware that currently the way they are being accommodated is within the snow crab fishery, and they can be accommodated within the snow crab fishery, specifically in the take— in the State of Alaska tax setting process. And I'll have a slide on how we did that last year, but currently you know, there's quite a few hybrid crab out there, and I think that you'll hear from industry members that they would like the opportunity to harvest those crab, but I think the CPT's takeaway was that's, that's hard for us to do in the current framework and with the current amount of information we have on their biology without potentially having detrimental effects on snow crab stock, just due to that the co- management of those at the current— in the current process. That was a little bit more than what you asked for, but hopefully I got there. Definitely.

Thank you, Ms. Palof. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. And Mr. Bowers. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Ms. Palof, for your presentation.

Um, the, the plan team you mentioned a desire for additional research and you listed, you know, several broad categories, but I'd like to ask you if you have any— did the plan team identify any more specific aspects of the biology or ecology of hybrid crab that might be prioritized for research topics? And then And I just, I'd like to thank you for acknowledging that the state tax setting process currently can accommodate additional hybrid harvests. I think that's a really important point to keep in mind. So thank you. Great.

Through the chair, yeah, I would say that what comes to mind as prioritization is kind of, I feel like some of the folks that are starting research on hybrids have already made a point of this, we really do need to understand one, good identification of hybrids. So right now is, if those of you that are familiar, there's multiple things that the biologists will look at both on the survey and our dockside and observer sampling to determine if crab are hybrid, but it's not a very black and white process. There's a lot of gray. So understanding more about identification is important, especially when it comes to components of management. So I would say, you know, work on identification and consistent identification, both on visual markers and also potentially on if there's a role for genetic markers there.

And then really understanding their reproductive potential. I think that is a lot of what our conversations at CPT have focused on because there's a lot of, you know, why can't we just lump them in with snow crab and some of the Concerns for that are we don't understand if one male or female hybrid crab is going to be as reproductively, have the reproductive potential as one male or female snow crab. You know, if they can be reproductively successful, if their eggs are growing to produce healthy and happy baby crab that are going to continue to recruit. So I think those are our kind of higher priority items. I think think that some of those— there's some pilot projects getting started.

There were some hybrid crab that were collected on the survey that are back in the Kodiak NIMS lab this fall. So I think there's some pilot work being done on that. I have knowledge of some genetic work that's currently being— a proposal that's currently going to go, I think, in front of MPRB in the next 3 to 6 months to start some of that genetic work. So I think that understanding the reproductive potential and identification, I think, are our higher priorities right now for further understanding how we deal with these hybrid crabs in our management realm. Thank you very much.

I appreciate that.

Thank you. I'm not seeing any other questions at this At this point, thank you. Okay, I'll move on. So I'll jump into the first of the stocks that we have final assessments for, and what I'll do with these stocks is I'll just kind of run through. I just have a few slides for each one, and then I'll pause at the end if there's any questions on these particular stocks.

So for Bristol Bay red king crab, this is one of the stocks that we have an ESP for, and so this is a brief summary here. Slides provided by Erin Fidewaugh on the ecosystem and socioeconomic considerations for this stock. I'm not going to necessarily read all these to you, I just would say some big picture. It was colder than it has been in Bristol Bay. The average bottom temperature in the summer was actually the 4th coldest in a 47-year survey time series.

This result did result in a delay of females with their molt-mate cycle, and that was something that we did have some conversations on at the CPT and how best to accommodate that in our modeling process. But in general, cooler waters indicate potentially more favorable conditions for Bristol Bay red king crab, which was of course a positive. I did put this in context when I, especially when I was chatting with the AP, is, you know, that's one cold year. These crab are out in the environment for many years. We've had some warm, a number of warmer years in that time period.

So while that's a positive sign, it's, it's still, you know, cautious optimism is like, you know, if we're going to continue to see cooler waters versus warmer waters for Bristol Bay specifically. In general, the, the fishery, the ABA, Alaska Marine Sea Crabbers, does a skipper survey for, for a number of our crab stocks, and that survey is able to We were able to incorporate that information to kind of get an idea of the fleet interpretation of, you know, what's going on on the waters, and 81% of those captains reported a greater than 10% increase in the perceived abundance of legal males compared to the previous season, which does correspond to our increase that we're seeing in the survey. The fishery CPE was pretty similar to the last season that it was open, and the total effort increased relative to the past season but remains below the post-rationalized average, which is not expected. As you all know, after the collapse of both, the collapse of snow crab and just kind of downturn of Bristol Bay around the same time, there was some consolidation and kind of reduction in our crab fleet. So there aren't quite as many folks participating as there have than in the past due to a lot of just overall status of crab in the Bering Sea.

Dr. Pilsop. Oh, sorry. Pilsop. Just on that previous slide. Yes.

The last two bullets on the socioeconomic considerations, and I could be just missing something here, but they seem to be a bit in contrast with the fishery CPE declining slightly. You spoke to it a little bit, And then the reported perceived abundance of, from the fishermen that, or the reported 10% increase in perceived abundance of legal males relative to the previous season. So it sounds, I mean, it looks like there was a pretty significant number of captains who believe that there was a perceived increase in legal male. But the fishery CPE was declining slightly. So maybe there's just something small or nuanced here that I'm missing, but it seems those two bullets seem to be a little bit in contrast.

Wondering if you could provide some more context. Yes, through the chair, yes. So I would say that the decline slightly is a little bit— it's hard with those qualifying words, right? So that the fishery CPE went, I think, from like 29.8 last year to 29, just 29, so it really didn't, it was pretty consistent with the previous year. I wouldn't expect a large change in CPE for this fishery, it's executed pretty quickly.

I think most of the fishery occurs within 2 to 3 weeks of the opening, so, you know, the crabbers are going to, you know, typical fishing grounds that they have gone to and usually not having a lot of time to prospect and look for maybe better CPEs. So this may be, we may just be at a point where like that was the CPE that was established. That's a similar CPE to what we saw the previous season. The TAC was up some, but not enough that it would suggest a different change in fishing behavior. So I think maybe the The misleading part of this, that bullet statement is the decline slightly.

It was pretty much very consistent to the previous.

Okay, thank you for that. Yeah, yeah, thank you for the question.

Okay, so Bristol Bay red king crab is managed as a, our Tier 3 stock in our, in our tier system for crab, and it has been in our GMAX, or generalized modeling framework, that we're using for crab since 2018. As we already said, the, the fishery was open this last year. The state harvest strategy has a threshold for mature female abundance, and that was met for this coming year. Some of the highlights here is this, is there this potential recruitment event? It was kind of this hotspot tow, and we'd like to look for confirmation in future years that those crab are going to continue through the population.

And so that's these two figures on the right, kind of represent the size distributions of of male and female crab that we see in the survey. So the size is on the x-axis and then the year is on the y-axis. The most recent year is on the bottom there in yellow, so you can kind of see that peak of a smaller crab, right, or right, a little bit less than 100 millimeters there that we saw in the survey. And the hope would have been that we would have seen them last year, and we didn't really see that many. So there's some cautious optimism of whether there potentially could be a recruitment event And that's really important for this stock because some of the lower levels of the population that we've seen and kind of slow but steady increase are due to the fact that we haven't seen a good recruitment event.

We've seen pretty low, but consistent, but low recruitment in this stock for the last 10 to 15 years. So some cautious optimism for the future for Bristol Bay. In general, the CPT and You'll hear the SSC report later, but they endorsed Model 26.0, which is just based on the base model that we've used the last few years, just a slight improvement in how it deals with some of the larger crab size compositions in that model. Both the models that were presented have a model that is, as you look at mature male biomass, which is the figure on the right here, slow increase in that mature male biomass over the last few years, which is what we're seeing. And with that increase, we are recommending, of course, an increased OFL and ABC.

Currently, this stock has a 20% buffer and has had a 20% buffer for ABC for the last 5 or so years. We did not recommend any large changes to that buffer. You know, there were some questions earlier about, you know, the ecosystem considerations and the fact that it was cooler in Bristol Bay being positive. It was, but as I said, you know, these crab have many, many years of the ecosystem being part of their growth and development, so one cool year doesn't negate the many years that potentially there is stress on these crab in that environment. So no large changes to kind of our concerns for Bristol Bay to lead to any reductions or increases in our buffer recommendations there.

So with that, as you can see here, the recommended OFL increased to 7.13 kilotons for next season. And with that, I'll pause, see if there's any questions.

Yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation on the Slide 19 on the hotspot toe, I just was curious how the stock assessment treats a hotspot toe or whether it treats it any differently.

Through the chair, great question. Currently it does not. So currently the data from the survey that's going into this model is a design-based estimate of the survey toes. So it does go into the model in the sense that your estimate of males at that size bin is more uncertain because of the hotspot toe. You know, if you consistently caught the same number of crab at every station and every size, your certainty would be really high.

When your certainty is low, the model, you input into there, you know, your variability in that estimate, and then the model can potentially choose to not fit it as well because it sees it as more variable. And I think you'll see that Actually, I don't have slides in there on that, but if you go back and look at the presentation that was given to the CPT, you'll see that the model is not quite fitting this last data point for the survey data as well. It's actually estimating it to be slightly lower than what the survey data point shows. And that's primarily due to that increased variability with those hotspot toes. So the model does accommodate for it, but potentially in the future, one of the things that we chatted about at CPT is and you'll hear about a little bit with St. Matthew's blue king crab is using model-based indices out of the, coming from the survey data, and those model-based indices, which if you're familiar with some of the groundfish stocks, use a platform called SCMTMB, those spatiotemporal models, they can kind of, they can accommodate in the data that's being put into the model a little bit more of the spatial variability that can occur in our survey.

So that's not currently being done for this stock, but that is something that we did chat about as potentially future recommendations to try to help deal a little bit more with, with some of these hotspot tows, which is, is pretty, pretty consistent for crab stocks. We consistently see them. They—. Crab stocks are pretty aggregated in their distribution, so it's not uncommon to see them for any of our stocks from year to year in the survey.

Thank you. And through the chair, my second question, and, and maybe it's in a different place, but I just didn't know if you had expectations or— for the super El Niño and its effect on Bristol Bay red king crab, is that I see that the ecosystem considerations are included in the ESP, but I didn't know if there's specific discussion on those potential effects. Thanks. Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, we did not have a specific discussion at CPT on those effects. And we did get a presentation from the ESR group from Yvette Sidon on kind of what that potentially could mean for Bristol Bay.

And it seems like at this point, not a lot of certainty as to if that would— those effects would even make their way all the way up to Bristol Bay. So we, we didn't really, we didn't really discuss that at the, at the CPT at this time. Thank you.

Thank you. I think we're ready to move on. Okay. Uh, so I will jump into Tanner crab. Uh, in general, there was a CIE review for Tanner crab in June of 2026, and the CPT did see some, um, initial reports on that, but we look forward to seeing more work on some of those results by the assessment author in our April meeting.

As I said, ADFNG manages this fishery in two areas, east and west of 166. Both fisheries were open this last year, and pretty much the entire TAC was caught in both of those areas. Total fishing mortality was less than the OFL, so overfishing did not occur. This stock is also in a Tier 3 assessment, The CPT entertained two different models, one that was kind of the base model in the current modeling framework, and then some progression to a GMAX model. In, in general, the big takeaway for Tanner crab, as you'll— in the top right figure shows, the purple trend there is male, the all the Tanner crab males that were caught in the survey, and just seeing real, really high levels of males, especially since 2000.

In the survey data, continued progression as you see in the bottom right figure of this year class moving through into size to larger size bins. So that's good news for the fishery right now and good news for, for the stock. And the CPT had some conversations about model development. We continued supporting getting this, this stock into GMAX. There was still some work that needed to be done.

So we recommended the, the model that is currently being used for specification, currently used last year for specifications for this year. That did result in an increase, of course, in the OFL due to the larger size of Tanner crab. This is another stock that we've had about a 20% buffer on the ABC for the last few years, and we continue to recommend that 20% buffer. There's some concerns over just the model and how it estimates large crab in addition to really having a good idea of the reproductive potential of our kinocetes crabs when it comes to mature male biomass, which is what MMB down there stands for, versus potentially, you know, large males be having more reproductive capabilities than smaller males. A lot of conversations that we've had regarding stoke Tanner Crab too.

So just, we have some concerns and they, they are all incorporated in that buffer, that 20% buffer. Nothing increased or decreased to have the CPT recommend any changes to that buffer. And that's all I have for Tanner Crab.

Thank you. I'm not seeing any questions. Okay, jump into Snow Crab.

Uh, snow crab once again is a stock that we do have an ESP for, so we have kind of some summaries of that here provided for you. In general, uh, because of the cooler nature of the Bering Sea, juvenile snow crab occupied temperatures were lower in 2026, or were near average, which is better than what they've been in the previous time. Um, the energetic condition of snow crab, juvenile snow crab, remains elevated, which is a good thing. We want them to have a good condition. That is an indicator that came out of the collapse in 2020, 2021.

We now track juvenile snow crab energetic condition to kind of get an idea of potentially if energetic condition drops, it would give us an indication that potentially there's some concerns for the stock. So that's something that we now track in in our ecosystem considerations. Some of the concerns for this stock is that while males can, at least especially large males, decreased, we saw this really large increase in mature female abundance, relatively, which creates a relatively high operational sex ratio. Approximately there's 85 mature females to every 1 large male, and large males are classed classified here as 95 millimeters or larger. Although there was no indication in the survey data that there was any concerns for reproductive potential, most of the mature females, a high, high percentage of those had clutches and had eggs that they were being produced.

That's something that we do track. Reproductive failure in crab stocks can sometimes be caught by looking at if females choose to produce egg clutches. The idea there is if they're potential for finding males is low, they wouldn't go through the energetic effort of producing eggs to, to mate.

Other things that we're tracking for, for snow crab are either below or near average, and then of course our concern for male crab and when they are maturing still remains something that we're tracking. With a lot of the, while the size at maturity remains near the average, the indicator has been trending down for at least the, over the years, which basically is our concern of the number of crab that are maturing at smaller sizes and therefore not available to the fishery. We also do have a couple of fishery-informed socioeconomic considerations in addition to the ABSC skipper survey here. Both fishery CPE and total effort in the fishery remained below average. The fishery shifted substantially to the southeast, but that was consistent with a lot of the skippers reporting that they needed to move due to the weather and sea ice.

So that, that is pretty indicative of the season, of the conditions on the ground this last season. However, about 50% of the skippers did report that they felt like there was a greater than 10% increase in a preferred abundance of males, and then just letting you know that 47% of skippers noted slightly more to a lot of hybrid crab than the previous season, which would be expected due to those higher amounts of hybrids that we saw in the survey data.

So I, I kept this slide in here for your information, and, and I alluded to it earlier when I was talking about how we can accommodate hybrid crab in the current management framework. So ADFG and their tax setting process, normally we don't brief you on tax setting, but it's like letting you know what occurred in the fishery this last year. ADFG in their tax setting process last year recommended an 8.3 million pound tax on snow crab and an additional 1 million pound hybrid component to that snow crab tax. So that actually resulted in a 9.3 million pound snow crab tax which was still well below the, the ABC that we recommended last year. What the reason in doing so, ADF&G encouraged targeting those crab in areas of high hybrid abundance that were found in the survey.

So there's, there's 3 figures kind of that you'll see on the right here. I know they're small, sorry about that. I was trying to give you lots of information, but the top one shows the Green boxes are the ADF&G stat areas where we, the survey saw a lot of hybrid crab, and we were encouraging folks to try to target those hybrid crab, hybrid crab, thinking that they potentially would be in that area of high abundance survey.

However, what we anecdotally found in our observer data, which is the middle box here, is the observer data, that we have from, from our fisheries. It shows that hybrid encounters really didn't occur within that box, but occurred more south and west of that box, and a lot of them occurred more in the directed Tanner crab fishery than in the snow crab fishery.

So the estimated hybrid catch in the fishery was higher than previous season, but most did not come out of that box. So this was kind of ADFNG's attempt to look at if there could be some spatial management for hybrids, and I think that the main takeaway is that potentially hybrid crab are not necessarily in the same area that the survey sees them by the time that the fishery is being executed, which makes that spatial, potential spatial management component harder to execute. So that, that was how they, they were accommodated, at least in this past season.

Overall, where we're at with snow crab is that we currently don't have a statistically stable Tier 3 assessment model. This is a struggle that we had last year also, and the SSC and CPT recommended using this fallback random effects smoothing model on the survey data. It's what we used to set specifications last year using our Tier 3 harvest control rules, and that's what we're recommending for this year also. This fallback model is something that the SSC and CPT have worked together to establish for all of our stocks, given the kind of some of the instability of crab stocks with particularly related to the snow crab collapse all 3 of our Tier 3 stocks now produce this kind of fallback model so that we have something to set specifications if we have instability in the more complex assessment models. So these— this recommendation uses morphometrically mature males.

Those are those males that we measure to be mature based on their, their claw size and their body size in the survey. That results in a status for the last completed fishing year of about 0.75, so that means that this currently, the stock is not overfished, overfishing is not occurring, but it's not rebuilt. It is under a rebuilding plan, as you, as you know, and in order for the rebuilding plan to be out of the rebuilding plan, the stock has to reach the MSY proxy, which would make that, that ratio there that's 0.75 right now would need to be above 1. Um, the resulting OFL and ABC are listed here. The ABC conversation on the ABC buffer, um, at CPT was quite, uh, lengthy, and we actually had recommended a 50% buffer.

Uh, there was a 40% buffer that was used last season. The SSC, as you'll see in their report, recommended, um, keeping the, the 40% buffer that was used in the previous season.

So we'll note that while the mature male biomass is, is trending up over the last 2 years as far as the green line on the right graph, the preferred male, so that's the size that the fishery is targeting, was the 4th lowest in a 44-year time series. And the reason this is concerning, as we all said, is that crab are maturing into smaller sizes. So the CPT just has some general concerns, and even though the SSC recommended falling back to the, the 40% buffer, I just wanted to, to make you aware that the concerns that we had were just that these terminally molting crab were really— less and less of them appear to be molting into the industry preferred size ranges, and that recruitment appears to be low in this stock. The sex, the skewed sex ratio is concerning. There's a lot of conversation about whether that potentially could lead to more hybrid crab in the future if there was only 85, one mature male crab to potentially 85 females, which is something we just don't know enough about to really predict at this point.

And then in general, the CPT still has concerns over how the future of the harvestable portion of the stock with, oh, if there's the potential to overharvest large males in the stock. So with the majority of crab molting to maturity underneath the kind of harvestable or desired size, they are protected as a stock and they can, you know, we believe that they're reproductively able to mate and within the, within the stock. However, there is some research out of Canada that we mentioned last year that shows that potentially a smaller crab may be— smaller mature crab may be reproductively less successful than larger ones. There's also research out of the Canadian snow crab stock that shows that having more large crab in the population actually produces more large crab, meaning crab that potentially have more competition by other large males will delay molting to maturity and continue to grow in order to be more reproductively successful. So because of that, the CPT definitely has concerns over, you know, there not being a lot, lot of large males out there.

However, as we already pointed out, the hybrid considerations, the large amount of hybrids out there, do complicate the current status of our snow crab stock, especially for large males. It's, it's not known well whether having large male hybrids out there is actually a positive or negative effect on the overall snow crab population. These are all questions that we still need to understand more to in our hybrid considerations. So with that, I'll pause because I imagine there might be a question.

Thank you. I'll see if there are any questions.

I'm not seeing any. Okay.

Okay, all right, so our final stock that we have a full safe report and specifications for is St. Matthew Island blue king crab. This is a Tier 4 assessment stock, just means that we have less information about the life, specific to the life history of this stock, and we borrow some of that information from other king crab stocks, so we set the specifications a little differently than we do in our Tier 3 stocks. The directed fishery has been closed since 2016-2017. It's currently in a rebuilding plan and has been since June of 2020. This is, like I said, a biannual assessment, so we do have more than one year of fishery data and survey data that gets incorporated into this assessment model when we bring it forward.

This is a stock that the survey data that goes into the model from the Eastern Bering Sea trawl survey has been affected in the last few years with the loss of the corner stations that were typically done in higher density around St. Matt's and the Cripps. So to accommodate for that, the author, uh, produced what's called a model-based index of the survey data, and that can accommodate different spatial distributions in different years of the survey. And that's what you'll see if you look at the right figure here that I showed. The black shows the design-based or survey data coming out of the traditional estimate, area swept estimate of the survey. And then the two shaded areas in green and blue there represent the estimates coming out of the model-based survey estimate.

So you can see that there's some differences specifically in the earlier part of the time series, but the CPT was happy with this and saw it as a consistent improvement to how we assess St. Matt's. And also helps with— this is one of the stocks where we do see a lot of hotspot tows from year to year due to the kind of where the survey samples around St. Matthew Island, and this model-based survey index can help mediate those. And that's kind of what you're seeing in some of those, like for example in 2010 where you see this large error bar on the survey estimate, the model-based index reduces that by saying, oh, that was, you know, that potentially was a hotspot toe that we don't always see, and gives it less weight. So we saw this as an improvement, and we're using it moving forward. And so that's Model 26.2.

However, this stock is slowly increasing as far as getting to a better shape than it has been in the past. For the first year since the rebuilding plan was put in place, the status determination for this last completed crab season, '25-'26, was 0.52, which means that technically the stock is, is not overfished and still in a rebuilding plan, as I said, because the rebuilding plan dictates the stock has to reach the BMSY proxy, so that ratio needs to be above 1, but it is a good positive indication that there could be some, there is small but growth in this stock over time. Currently, the ABC buffer for this stock is set at 25%. This is a little bit higher than our other stocks. Some of that is due to it being a Tier 4 stock and us not having as much specific life history information as some of our other stocks.

But then in general, this stock is currently under a rebuilding plan, which also has increased concern. And then ecosystem concerns, while the, like I said, the conditions for this year were cooler in the Bering Sea in general. This blue king crab are considered a more cold water of the king crab stocks. So the, over the past number of years, just in general warmer temperatures around St. Matthews Island have been thought to contribute to their lack of recovery. Similarly for Pribilof Island blue king crab, which talking about at this meeting.

But so that is still continues to be a concern in our buffer. So like I said, a lot of those ecosystem concerns, we are looking at how they change in the current year, but also looking at their cumulative effect that they've been the past few years on, on these crab stocks.

So I just only have one more slide, so I'll just keep going, and then if there's questions, I can, I can flip back over. So our other crab stocks, WFS assess overfishing status updates. In, in addition to that, for Western Aleutian Island red king crab, we requested to roll over the specifications for this coming season. It was due for a full SAFE this past year, but we— there was some capacity considerations, so there was a recommendation to roll it over, and a full SAFE will be completed in 2027. There's no changes to the specifications, they're just a rollover of the previous ones.

For this stock, there was actually no catch mortality this past season. The directed fisheries closed, and there was no bycatch mortality in any of the other fisheries prosecuted in that area. For the other stocks here, both Privilegied Island blue king crab and red king crab total fishing mortality, which consists of just bycatch mortality, was much less than the OFL. Therefore, overfishing did not occur. For Aleutian Island golden king crab, we assessed that stock in our spring meeting, but the fishery wasn't— the crab year was not completed, so we just do another evaluation of overfishing here, and overfishing did not occur.

And then for Privilegi and Golden King crab, there is a small directed fishery for that, but the total catch mortality was less than the OFL, but can't be reported here as a number just due to confidentiality. Only 2 vessels participated in that fishery, so no concerns for overfishing updates for any of our crab stocks. So I think with that, that's all I have to present to you today, but I can entertain any questions that you have on this or anything else that was in our written report.

Thank you very much for the report and for your chairmanship of the crab plan team. I'll see if there are any final questions.

Okay. I am not seeing any. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Thank you. Okay, I think that brings us to a breaking point, or at least in our agenda this morning.

So we were waiting on the SSC report to be shared at 1:00 PM. So let's— we will take a lengthy lunch and we'll come back at 1:00 PM, take up the totality of the SSC report, go into our AP report, and then we will take public testimony on C2 when we come back from lunch. Thank you. We'll see you at 1.

Welcome back, everyone. So I think we are beginning our afternoon with our SSC report. So we have our co-chairs in front of us, and we're ready to begin whenever you are.

Okay, good afternoon, council members. For the record, I'm Ian Stewart, and I have with me my co-chairs, Dr. Sherri Dressel and Dr. Jason Gasper.

And we will be presenting to you our draft SSC report. I would note that this meeting for us was almost entirely specifications process for crab and groundfish, and we have quite a few stocks to go through, so we'll step right into the presentation.

We began our meeting with an administrative discussion, and part of that was an update on the upcoming National SSC workshop that's scheduled for November 2027. It was noted that although it's still in planning, the organizers are seeking input on potential socioeconomic speakers and topics for the agenda, and the SSC indicated that we would think about some ideas and forward any suggestions to the planning committee. We also began our meeting by thanking Dr. Bob Foy for his contributions to the SSC over the last 6 years of his tenure. We're going to miss Bob.

We took up plan team nominations, and the SSC reviewed the nominations for Andrew Olson, Dr. Andrew Wetton, for the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands groundfish plan team, Mr. Aaron Lambert to the GOA plan team, and Dr. Lee Cronin-Fine for the crab plan team. We found all these nominees to be well, well qualified, and we recommend the council approve their nominations. We also wanted to recognize and thank Mr. Steve Whitney for his long-term service on Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Plan Team, and Dr. Sophia Wasserman for her contributions to the Gulf Plan Team. Both of them are stepping down this year, or have already.

So moving into the specifications then, we started our meeting with the crab specifications. We had a number of general crab items. We continue to support the expansion of technical expertise on the crab plan team, now including the scallop plan team. Noting that it's been a challenge for them for several years now to have full analytic expertise on that group. We also strongly support the addition of a second co-chair for that group to help address the overall capacity constraints.

They do a lot of work with not a lot of manpower right now.

The, the SSC continues to or highlights continued support for research to better understand both density-dependent and environmental effects on recruitment processes for crab. As you'll see, we have ongoing concerns about the overall status of crab stocks in the Bering Sea.

We, we noted that we've had discussions for several assessments about the potential for modification to that the tier approach for EBS snow crab and along with some recommendations from the Tanner crab CIE that was convened this last year, we continue to recommend that harvest control rules for crab be reevaluated at some point in the near future.

We had a fairly lengthy item on snow and Tanner crab hybrids. We saw from the survey summary that this year in 2026, the trends indicated a decline in many size categories of hybrids, but the exception was the largest hybrids of industry preferred size, which continued to increase by 12% beyond what were record levels last year. This increase has, of course, spurred lots of discussion at both the crab plant team and the SSC over the last year. The SSC notes that hybrid crab have historically been very low and therefore not really a topic of much interest and are not included as a stock in the FMP at present. We had a wide-ranging discussion about hybrid crab during our meeting, and we'll speak to a little bit more of that here.

Um, we noted that the question of whether hybrid crab require specific conservation and management appears to not have been fully evaluated at this time. We strongly support further efforts to collect data on hybrids, especially now when they are available in the survey sampling as capacity allows. And we had a number of questions and requested further clarification on how these hybrids are being treated in the catch streams that go into the assessment models, as well as the catch that accrues toward the ABC and OFL.

It was brought up during our public testimony in our meeting that there was a potential, um, or a suggestion for a workshop that might include managers, industry, and scientists. The SSC noted that should the council choose to move forward with such a workshop, that we would suggest several considerations related to biological data needs, data collection protocols and clarifications, and potentially including socioeconomic data and considerations. The SSC noted that we would be willing to participate in such a workshop, but we emphasized that our focus is clearly on the biological and analytic aspects of those questions, and that's what our role would be during that workshop.

Dr. Stewart, a question? Ms. Vanderhoeven. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Dr. Stewart. Maybe it's in the full minutes and I just haven't gotten through them yet.

It wasn't clear to me what would be the purpose of the workshop. What would be the goal?

Through the chair, uh, Ms. Vanderhoeven, thanks for the question. I think we had a pretty wide-ranging discussion about a number of different objectives for that workshop, and I'm not sure that we settled on a clear single objective. Other than just summarizing the information and where these hybrids fit into the system as it stands currently.

Um, Mr. Bowers. Thank you, Madam Chair. Dr. Stewart, could you expand a little bit on the request for clarification on the catch counting piece for hybrids? Um, just tell me a little bit more about the what went into that request. Thanks.

Through the Chair, Mr. Bowers, thanks for the question. So we, we had a pretty lengthy discussion trying to understand, we've made a recommendation in the past that the stock assessments for both Tanner and snow crab evaluate whether these, whether hybrids are included in both the survey data and the fishery data that's going into those models. And I think we sort of thought we knew how that treatment was going, and then upon further questions in this meeting, I think we learned that it was a little bit more complicated, and that there are certain data streams where these crab are easily separated and others where they're not. And it wasn't— it still wasn't entirely clear to us that we understood all of those various nuances. And so really, we were asking for just some clarification about where the— where hybrids were showing up, which data sets specifically included or didn't include hybrids.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

And Miss Kimball, thank you. Mine was back. I, I'm just a little bit confused because I didn't listen to this testimony that you received on a workshop, and maybe the main point is if the SSC is involved in any type of workshop, it's on the biological and scientific questions. Um, but my understanding was that Snow Crab was already going through at least one MSE process, and, and so I was confused by the mention of, of yet another workshop. Um, we've got a lot of disaster funding put in the Crab Foundation to deal with some of these questions, so I just didn't know if this was something outside that process or, or new.

Maybe you didn't get that level of specificity in the testimony.

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, I, I think we didn't, we didn't have a lot of context for this. This was a concept that was brought up during public testimony, and we, we discussed the fairly wide range of potential topics that might be covered in such a workshop. And we weren't promoting it or not, just noting that if the SSC were going to be involved, it would be just focused on what we generally focus on, which would be the biological and scientific considerations.

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, um, the public testimony that received was asking for a workshop specifically on hybrids, and so, um, we ended up in different places because right now with hybrids not in the FMP and there's not a specific directed fishery exclusive to hybrids, we were trying to figure out where the SSC rule fits in. And it certainly fits in where if hybrids are affecting assessment modeling for snow or Tanner with the different data streams. You know, it's a— it may be in a model, it might include hybrids in a catch, but not in a survey, or might be in a retained catch, but not in a total catch. Those things, snow and Tanner, are in the FMP. We're doing assessments for them.

And that's completely our role to understand how something may affect those. Where we got— where our discussion kind of was wide-ranging is sort of what is our role for hybrids specifically.

And anyway, so that was— but it was the issue of trying to have— it originally was proposed as a workshop for hybrids and possibly to find ways to allow more access to that resource. And we realized that something like that was not within the SSE's purview to recommend a workshop for, but there are aspects of how hybrids interact that definitely gets into our purview. Thank you both.

So along with the, the report on hybrids, we also heard trawl survey updates. Generally, it was fairly good news from the Bering Sea surveys with regard to crab this year. We commended the survey team and the assessment authors, as they always do, for having such a quick turnaround in being able to bring this information in from this season's sampling and get it included in these models, for our meeting on such a short timeframe. As I said, the survey results this year for Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands crab stocks were generally positive, with the primary exception being Eastern Bering Sea snow crab, particularly the largest size classes being down 28% over last year. Other crab stocks were generally stable or increasing.

The SSC did note, however, that although there were some positive signs in overall for crab, we continue to express general concern over the low stock status of many of the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands crabs. And so even though we did see some increases, many of these stocks remain at very low levels compared to historical levels.

Specific to the survey sampling protocols, we noted the questions about whether or not resampling would occur. This is primarily for Bristol Bay red king crab, and we supported efforts to go back and analyze previous data to better understand what, what the implications are for when the survey does and doesn't choose to do resampling for Bristol Bay red king crab.

Moving then into the, the individual stock assessments, uh, the first is EBS snow crab. Um, we note that this is a full stock assessment, and the male biomass continues to be low after after the crash that we saw in 2019 and 2020. This is a REMA/Tier 4 model. REMA is just basically a statistical way to smooth survey data, and that, that approach is something that is most like a Tier 4 crab assessment. We supported the use of that model this year.

This is the second year that such a model has been used snow crab, noting that that places the stock at 75% of BMSY. With this stock in Tier 4, it is not overfished, overfishing is not occurring, but it does remain under the rebuilding plan.

This model has previously, up until 2 years ago, been assessed as a Tier 3 stock, and we heard significant public testimony focused mostly on hybrids but also about the concern over continued issues with the Tier 3 model model and the complexity and the challenges we've had with that model, which have led us to apply this, this hybrid RIMA Tier 4 model in recent years. In terms of the risk table assessment for snow crab, all the levels were Level 1 except for population dynamics, and these considerations were elevated to a Level 2, and these are ongoing concerns about having low biomass for industry preferred size males, a highly skewed sex ratio toward females, and a long-term downward shift in the average size of males at maturity.

We recommended the, the, as I said, we recommended the RIMA Tier 4 approach and its associated OFL. We did not support the crab plan team recommended buffer of 50%, but instead recommended a buffer of 40%, which is the same buffer that was applied last year. The primary considerations were that the concern over the size of males at maturity really hasn't changed since last year, and the additional, uh, crab plantain concerns we felt were already generally accounted for in the buffer that we set last year, and that's why the SSC opted to stick with the 40% instead of increasing it to 50% this year.

We, because we've now used this model 2 years in a row, we recommended that the RIMA or Tier 4 model be renamed so that it follows our standard naming convention, as it is now the base case model for EBS snow crab. We definitely recommend continued efforts to simplify and stabilize the size-structured model, the Tier 3 model, and we heard from the crab plan team and the authors and I highly support the efforts to focus on continuing to develop that Tier 3 model and, and getting that back to something that we can use so that we're not using this Tier 4 approach for snow crab.

Okay, moving then to Tanner crab. This was a full assessment this year. It is done in Tier 3. The both the survey and the fishery data indicated that this 2023 cohort that we've seen moving into this stock continues to progress into larger size classes. We saw increases in mature females and large increases in males.

The current B over BMSY estimate is above 2, which places this stock strongly into Tier 3A. It is not overfished and overfishing did not occur in '25 or 2026. There were limited risk table considerations here, primarily due to the lack— the challenge in this model in fitting the NIMP survey index, which has been an ongoing challenge in the stock assessment.

The SSC recommended the existing model, which dates back several years, in agreement with the author and the crab plan team, the OFL that comes from that model, and a 20% buffer. The choice of a buffer here agreed with both the crab plan team and the author and is consistent with what's been applied in recent years. We have, have and continue to prioritize transitioning this model into GMAX, which is a standardized model that's applicable to all of our crab stocks. And this— there was extensive presentation about the efforts to move this model into GMAX this year, but it wasn't quite ready, and we, we're recommending to continue to prioritize that moving forward. There was also a CIE review, and we generally agreed with the recommendations from that review.

We've asked for several additional analyses, including a yield per recruit to better understand the yield curve for this stock, and some details about how the implementation of this assessment operates, the technical details about the starting conditions of the model.

Moving then to Bristol Bay red king crab, this was also a full stock assessment. We did see some increase in the estimated trends, but both male and females continue to be at relatively low levels with relatively low recruitment since the mid-2000s. 2000S. We supported the model in agreement with the author and plan team, which places this stock in Tier 3B, not overfished, and overfishing did not occur.

Uh, we, we had no, um, major concerns over this in the risk table or in the biology for this stock, and we were in agreement with a 20% buffer.

We had several technical recommendations for future modeling efforts, um, and several recommendations associated with the ESP, um, for Bristol Bay red king crab.

And there, there's more detail on these in the report, but I won't necessarily speak to all these as we go through for every stock.

For St. Matthew blue king crab, the stock biomass remains low. Mature male biomass is projected to decline moving into the future, and notably, even by 2020— by 2031, under recent recruitment, it is not likely to reach the minimum stock size threshold. The stock is in Tier 4. It's not overfished, and overfishing did not occur. It is under a rebuilding plan, and the the Dungeness crab-directed fishery has been closed since 2016-2017.

We had no public testimony and there was no risk table for this stock.

We supported the, the author and plan team's recommended model, and we also supported a 25% buffer, also in agreement with the crab plan team and the authors. That buffer was primarily due to uncertainty in the life history parameters, and the other, and other model parameters for this stock, the continued state of the stock at a very low level relative to BMSY, and also longer-term considerations about just the projection for warmer water conditions potentially affecting the productivity of this stock moving forward.

We had a number of recommendations for future Stock assessments, noting that the author did a considerable amount of work and reconciled a number of previous SSC comments, particularly related to the treatment of the trawl survey data for this stock. I won't go through all of these, these technical recommendations, but they're, again, they're in our report.

For Western Aleutian Islands red king crab, this is a Tier 5 stock, meaning it's managed just on the survey trend. We recommended rolling over the specifications, or the crab plan team recommended rolling over the specifications this year. We heard from them in June, the SSC agreed with that, and now in October we're able to get a pull, finish this process, noting that the directed fishery is closed, there was no bycatch, and so overfishing is not occurring for Western Aleutian Islands reds. We look forward to seeing an updated SAFE document in 2027.

We received overfishing status updates on 4 stocks which were not scheduled for stock assessment this year. This includes the list that you see in front of you here. The total catch mortality for all these stocks was below the OFL, so overfishing did not occur.

We had a few general comments about crab SAFE guidelines and risk tables. We appreciate ongoing efforts by the crab plan team and authors to streamline and standardize their approach to writing the SAFE documents. We appreciated the efforts that have been made toward creating draft risk tables, which would be— which would extend the risk table approach that we now have pretty well established for groundfish for all crab stock assessments. We did have some recommendations about how to restructure those tables a little bit, but we did note that, for example, the, the Tanner crab table was promising in its format, and we look forward to seeing a more standardization across all the crab stocks, and next time around. We're already finding these risk tables helpful in our discussions of buffers, and the goal, the longer-term goal, is to make sure that these risk tables have all the information that leads us to the buffers, that we're seeing being applied to these crab stocks.

That then shifts us to our groundfish harvest specifications. We had a number of general comments, and these will fall sort of above the, the Joint Groundfish Plan Team discussion. We were presented with and continue to highlight the continuing limitations with the Age and Growth Program capacity at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. We can't stress enough the importance of age data in the stock assessment models, and we have heard repeatedly that capacity is down, and we're starting to see stock assessments that are limited by the amount of age information that's available. We recognize that, that limited capacity is not just applicable to the Age and Growth Program, but also to the other analytic teams, particularly the ESPs, and that we recognize that this could be, could be now and in the future a bottleneck for those teams.

We continue, we continue to encourage efforts to address these capacity issues, and we commend the work that the teams have done to really try to streamline their workflow, to conduct additional training, and to provide information repositories that provide a more efficient avenue to get this— get information across among analysts and across agencies.

Question, Ms. Kimball. Thank you. Through the Chair, I just wanted to pursue the lack of capacity in the aging growth program a little bit more. I mean, I feel like we've seen that in your minutes previously, but it feels like it's highlighted more at this meeting. I was looking in the written report for examples of where that's hindering stock assessments.

I don't know if you have those top of mind or if, you know, that's come up in the groundfish specs for this meeting, or if you have just more general comments. But if you have specific examples of where that's been a limitation for a certain species, it's helpful to understand. Through the Chair, Ms. Kimball, yes, it actually, it came up specifically under sablefish. They noted that they didn't have age data at the end of that time series. And I don't know if there were other examples, even my co-chairs remember.

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball. I don't remember the species. I do remember that there were, for one, for one stock they were talking about, there were multiple years that didn't have ages yet. Um, and it's possible that they may have more information in the plant team minutes, um, which would be great, or a presentation when you get it. And I do actually recall now, on further reflection, Greenland turbot was another example that was presented where they were working on a single year of age data, and that's a stock assessment that could really benefit from having not just one year, but multiple years of age data included.

So to broadly introduce you to our groundfish harvest specifications process, this was a little bit different this time around because of the schedule last year and the government shutdown. We had a combination of tasks in our groundfish specifications. We did final specifications for 8 stocks in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands and 7 stocks in the— or complexes in the Gulf of Alaska. These included both harvest projections and full assessments or operational assessments that we had previously reviewed in October 2025, but not seen again in December of 2025. And we, we moved these up in order to better address our own reviewing capacity in this cycle.

So by getting some of these done in this meeting, it really will hopefully help us to get through our December agenda. We also reviewed, as we would normally do in October, we reviewed our recommended proposed models for operational stock assessments that we will see again in December, and those included sablefish as well as 4 individual stocks in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands and 3 stocks or stock complexes in the Gulf of Alaska. And we'll walk through each of these. I just wanted to give you the broad overview. We also, as we would normally do in October, we recommended approval of the broad preliminary 27-28 Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands and GOA groundfish preliminary specifications as provided to us by the groundfish teams.

So that's, again, that's standard for our October process.

The one thing that I wanted to add that you— sorry, this is Sherri Dressel through the chair. Plan team coordinators will definitely mention this, and you may already be aware, we did final specifications for the stocks that Dr. Stewart talked about. We also approved preliminary specifications across all stocks, and my understanding is that you will receive the preliminary specs at this meeting, but the final ones that we're talking about now you won't receive until December. Um, and what was the other thing? There was one other thing that I was going to mention that might be helpful.

Oh, one of the things that we have stressed is that through this process, even taking things in October like Dr. Stewart mentioned, we have used the two-step process of looking at models at one meeting, looking at final specifications in another. So the ones that we did finals for this October, we saw last, last October. The ones that we saw in December, we either reviewed this October or last October and this October. So some of the reports that you're going to get are maybe a bit long because there were a lot of changes to the models that we reviewed in two Octobers together.

Thanks, Sherri. Yeah, the take-home is despite all the challenges with schedule, we've done our standard two-part review process for all of these stocks, so we haven't missed any steps even though it's been challenging to do.

So we had some discussion about the way harvest projections are conducted and reported, and we support the author's, um, intents to move forward with a more standardized approach to that. Um, for operational assessments, uh, we have requested 5-year projections, and we noted that there were still some inconsistencies in how these 5-year projections were being provided, and we recommend that authors are consistent across assessments when we see these projections, uh, moving forward.

Again, as I mentioned earlier, we have some comments about the use of REMA models. REMA is just a smoothing— a way to smooth survey data, and we noted that this is a common way to do BRDs where we estimate the stock distribution for use in apportionment. We requested that when REMA models are used for BRDs, that there's a slightly broader suite of documentation provided just so that the SSC can better understand the specific model and how it's been parameterized and make sure that we're comfortable with the specifics of how that the process has been done. It's not a new process. We're just asking for a little better documentation of what's been done.

We did have some considerable time on our agenda set aside to discuss BRD flexibility. We wanted to strongly emphasize that this is our first take on this. It's the first time that we have tried to work our way through this new process of discussing flexibility in BRD related to the risk of exceeding a single BRD in a single year. So not multiple years if it's a stock that's not assessed every year, but just one BRD for one year.

We noted that this is, this is likely to evolve in the future. We may be capable of looking at bigger questions, but this is what we had time to discuss at this meeting.

We received some, some thoughts from the plan teams about potential ways to look at flexibility in BRDs, and we strongly supported the development of quantitative approaches. But we did note that there are factors beyond just, for example, the variance estimate associated with a survey point that would be informative in our discussion about flexibility of BRDs.

We asked, or we noted that the— there is a considerable amount of existing data in groundfish assessments already in the SAFE documents that can be used to create a summary of recent BRDs, trends in TACs, trends in total TAC, and if this information were assembled and compiled together, and we've asked this to happen for December, um, specifically for those stocks that were requested by the Council in October 2025, or if there are any additional stocks that are identified at this meeting, we've asked that that type of information be collated into one place so it's more easily accessible for further discussion of flexibility in BRDs.

We reiterate our comments from, I think, last June that in general, changes from BRDs should be a rare event, and the spatial distribution of the stock is still best represented by the estimates from fishery independent surveys, and that persistent or long-term deviations from that stock— underlying stock distribution could negatively impact the stock. We do have some more comments about BRDs, but those are under the GOA skate item. So we— I'll, I'll give you some more specifics about our discussion that was specific to GOA skates at that point.

Miss Kimball, thank you for this. I have a couple questions on this, um, because I think we're all still trying to get used to the BRDs, our previous sub-area ABCs, and it was on— I see the SSC's reasoning for trying to simplify the discussion at this meeting around, you know, what's our risk of exceeding a single BRD in a single year. Um, because we, we moved to BRDs, you know, for a purpose of trying to understand that those aren't actually ABCs. Um, there's nothing in the Magnuson Act as a subarea ABC. They're not genetically different stocks.

So there is a lot of flexibility in, in how you apportion those among areas. If we get back, what would the council expect to see in your discussion then in December on the level of flexibility? If it's around that criteria, I worry that, that it doesn't tell us too, too much, only because exceeding any single BRD in a single year, really, from what we learned about why we're even doing BRDs, isn't consequential. We shouldn't worry too much about that. So I guess I'm trying to understand what you feel like your— what your— how your advice will look in December around the specific stocks that we've identified.

Would it be, I guess, more qualitative? There is some risk around this, but the consequence of that risk is not high, or the consequence is high? What do you— have you framed out what that would look like?

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, these are good questions. We, we will have some further discussion under the SCATE item about how, how this played out, but I think for our initial discussion, um, we focused mainly on trying to identify what types of information and what format we would like to see that in, and we definitely did not get to the point where we felt comfortable even discussing what would— what a small deviation would represent. So we're, as I said, we are— this is the very first step in this process, and we would expect to make some progress. I don't know that we have the time on our December agenda to make substantial progress on those larger questions, although we certainly will at some point. I guess I'd hand off to my co-chairs if they have other comments.

Sure, um, this may be a little bit of a spoiler, but with SCATES Western Goa, there was a big change in percentage for the sub-area apportionment. Um, essentially it doubled in, what, for 2027 compared Nope, the other way around. In 2026 compared to 2027, what we're looking at. And so it was a really— it was proportionately a big change in one area. And this is sort of how we got to some of these, because in our discussion some concerns came up of, you know, that's doubling the amount of fish that would be taken out of an area.

But then we came back and said, you know what, we're doing BRDs for a single year, and it was a realization that, yep, that's right, even though it's a big change, it's a single year, therefore likely okay, just like, like you had mentioned. The other thing is that we were able to, um, in the, in the council motion, there were two sort of ideas on ways we might be able to give feedback. Well, it was qualitative and quantitative. And the quantitative one was whether to use— compare it to— could you use the apportionments from last year, this year, and then— or a small change. And so we were able to tackle the apportionments from last year to this year.

We were able to tackle the single year because that actually came up in it as a question in the groundfish Plan Team is how often do you do that? Do you need to be asked again? So we just clarified what we were looking at now, and then we didn't have time to evaluate the small change. So it was kind of— and then we tried to put them all together and answer the full question, which included small change, you know, which— so we'll see, you'll be able to see in the SCATES what type of information we gave you. The Plan Team definitely did give qualitative information, and then they suggested sort of a direction for quantitative.

But I don't expect that that's going to be done by December, but at least it was a start. It was a start on the process. But you'll be able to see sort of what we came up with, and, you know, at that point, my guess is you can give us some idea, you know, if your understanding is different, if it wasn't helpful if it was.

Um, do you want to answer, Dr. Gasper, or no? Okay, thank you for that, and thanks for trying to work through this with us. I think it was a— it's a change that we're all trying to adjust to. Um, so I appreciate the time that the SSC has spent in thinking about it. I, I do think just um, when we are doing our harvest specs motions in December, what, what would be useful is, is somewhat what's outlined in the previous motion's direction.

But if there was a change, could we use the last year's biological distribution and would we be okay? I'm just going to put it in layman's terms. Or for what the SSC recommends for the BRDs, if we made a small change, minimal change among areas, would we be okay? I mean, those are the kinds of— that is not how the SSC likes to answer questions, I recognize that. That's how the council, I feel like, is going to be thinking about it.

Is there any little bit of flexibility among, among those areas that we would not be concerned about some biological impact to the stock or any other conservation issue like local depletion? So I, I guess I just want to front load that, that that's still how I feel like I'm thinking about it, and other council members can weigh in.

Um, okay, now I'm just having a discussion. I apologize for that. But my question is also, we, we did put in specific stocks where we were interested in understanding the level of flexibility in October 2025. Does the SSC need those to be reiterated in, in this October, given that we had a government shutdown and we weren't able to do those assessments. So those all kind of went into the ether.

Do you need that direction again, or is the default that the SSC will continue to look at the stocks that we identified in October of 2025?

Through the Chair, yes, we, we have that list of stocks, and we've asked—. We—. That's definitely on our schedule, and we have asked the authors to provide the reformatted information for specifically for those stocks so that we're prepared to have those discussions in December.

Thank you for that latitude, Madam Chair, that going forward, given that you brought up the plan team's questions about whether if you're identifying a stock that where we might want some flexibility in the spatial apportionment and we do that one year, does that carry on into the future and every year the assessment author needs to consider that as a possibility in the SSC. Did you have a suggestion for that? I, I had assumed from the council's motion that every year we would need to direct which stocks we were interested in. Um, there may be some that come off the table that we're not interested in and new ones, and it's best to provide that direction annually. But if, if that's not helpful to the SSC, this would probably be a good time to hear that advice too.

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball. Um, I, uh, my interpretation or my thought was that the council was going to name the ones they wanted each October. We obviously had a weird year last year with the shutdown, um, but that was my thinking. And so Um, when asked by— when this came up as a question from the plan team, I have to say that I, I didn't answer. I figured that was something that we would forward to the council to answer, um, just because it wasn't, it wasn't written anywhere.

Um, so, but the other thing that I just wanted also to mention was that yes, the SSC understood that we did the flexibility and BRDs for skates, and then in December it would be the 3 that were in the motion. Um, and our understanding from council staff was not the ones that were in the newsletter. Um, and so we would go forward with those 4 unless we heard differently from you, the council, at this meeting.

Thank you. I think that, that covers what, what our task is at this meeting. I appreciate that. And my, my intent was the same as yours in terms of the council needs to do the work every year to identify the stocks that they think they might want some added flexibility in those sub-area apportionments and not just assume that those carry forward. Eventually we'd have all stocks in that list if we did it that way.

So I think that is the onus of the council to try to do that every year and and maybe we can forward that information back to the plan team and answer their questions. Thank you.

Okay, in addition, under our joint groundfish plan team item, we had an extensive discussion. We had received an update from the harvest control rule team summarizing the presentation that had been given to the groundfish plan teams. And, um, we appreciated the extensive coordination that's been required to carry out this work. We also really appreciated getting a detailed point-by-point update on where this team was with regard to responding to previous SSC comments. We found that to be very helpful.

Um, we generally support the Harvest Control Rule team's approach of focusing on communicating the big picture, the what's, what's robust about the current harvest control rules, and then trying to address individual— using examples of individual stocks, trying to address specific issues as part of their analyses. We noted that as the specific harvest control rules for selected stocks are undergoing testing, it might be timely to consider how they are integrated into the tier structure. So there's definitely an interaction between where the stock falls in the tier structure and the specific harvest control rule that's being applied and the performance for that particular stock. The, the, we recognize that the harvest control rules in the tier system are part of an integrated management system interacting and that this also includes the ecosystem cap. And so we just note these relationships between these different moving, potentially moving pieces.

We also continue to strongly support inclusion of crab stocks in this work, although we— they've been placed on a slightly different timeline. We did request that they should be included explicitly in the timelines for this work moving forward, so we can see, even if they're lagging behind groundfish, we can see where and how they are going to be picked up in this process. We recommended that for May, the SSC suggested including a description of how to move sort of an end-to-end example of how to move all the way from an MSE all the way to management under the current tier system using Sablefish as a case study so that we and others can understand how that process might play out all the way through the whole system.

Um, also suggest developing a discussion about how to reconcile different analyses that lead to different conclusions. In our initial workshop on harvest control rules, we saw several very interesting examples where different modeling approaches actually came to somewhat different conclusions about how stocks might unfold in the future, and we found that to be interesting, and we would like to see more discussion about how, when differences arise between modeling approaches, how do we understand that and how can that be used to inform a selection of the best performing harvest control rules? Because we don't want our inference to be based only on a single model. We want to draw themes that, that will be robust across different ways to model these questions.

We noted that the June paper organized the performance metrics into several broad categories. And we recommended adding an additional category, which would be evaluating the transparency and the simplicity of a proposed rule. So we would actually have a performance metric, which was how easy to understand is this harvest control rule, and we thought that would be helpful for people trying to get their head around this, what's going— what's inevitably going to be a large amount of results and fairly detailed amount of information to digest. We also recommended that all comparisons be made between these alternate, alternative harvest control rules and our current harvest control rule, which includes our risk table process. And we realize that this is going to present a significant challenge in terms of simulating quantitatively the risk table process, which is inherently somewhat qualitative.

But nonetheless, we, we thought this was an important thing to be thinking about in the modeling.

With respect to the different harvest control rule options, we suggested separating those harvest control rules which were really intended to get past climate shocks or surprises from those that were more climate adaptive to long-term trends. And note, we note these examples here of different alternative harvest controls that might be more or less applicable to each of those two different situations.

We suggested that among the existing objectives that the Council might want to identify a subset of those objectives which would be prioritized in order to communicate and evaluate the trade-offs. So not a change to the objectives, but just focusing on those that might be most useful to illustrate the trade-offs as we start to evaluate different harvest control rules. We also suggested adding an additional objective related to the time and effort required to potentially implement one of these more complex harvest control rules. Just thinking toward the future, there could be an explicit part of the scoring, if you will, looking forward of just how hard would it be to actually implement a particular control rule.

So those were our joint groundfish plan team items. Then we took up sablefish, which of course spans both the GOA and the Bering Sea plan teams. This is a Tier 3 stock assessment that we last saw in 2024. The assessment uses a new stock assessment program using RTMB, which is a modern programming language. It's a, it's a solid step forward from the languages that we've been using in the past.

And the SSC saw this a bridge to this new model in 2025, and we endorsed its use in 2025 to come forward for us in December 2025, which of course it didn't. So now that carries forward into this year and we continue to endorse its use. We recommended that the authors bring forward 4 different models for December this year. The first is the continuity model. So this is the model that we saw back in October of 2025.

The second is an updated and pretty substantially revised model, which uses a, a very simple carryover approach for unsurveyed areas. I'll speak a little more in a second to the challenges with the survey design. The third is a fleets as areas model, which deals very elegantly with gaps in data, but has to make a lot of strong assumptions to to do that. And the fourth is a model that was requested specifically by the SSC, which is a variation on the fleets-as-areas models, but allows a little more flexibility in the shape of selectivity in the Bering Sea for both fisheries and surveys.

So with regard to the survey design, the previous assessments used a pretty simple interpolation approach for missing survey data. The longline the survey would be conducted in the Gulf of Alaska every year and alternate between the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands in, in alternative years. And so that made it possible to interpolate either the Bering Sea or the Aleutian Islands because the Gulf was always there. With the change in survey design, now this, this previous approach of interpolating is no longer possible. So the authors proposed a carryover approach which is basically using the value, the most recent value available for any given area and just carrying it forward one year when it's not surveyed.

And then the fleets-as-areas model was developed to use the reduced data stream without trying to fill in these gaps. And so this is really, most of this model structuring was motivated by this big change in the longline survey design.

In the fleets as areas approach, the Gulf of Alaska, Bering Sea, and Aleutian Islands are treated as separate fleets or data streams in the stock assessment. This is commonly applied approach on the West Coast for stock assessments and elsewhere around the world. In June 2026, there was a CIE review, and they also supported the use of a fleets as areas approach. And this allows for the current surveys to, to be modeled in their current design But it still doesn't actually address the information gaps created by that new design, the sampling only the GOA or the Eastern Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands in alternate years. And the SSC had some concern that this— that moving to this approach would in effect reinforce this change in the survey design by making it possible to continue on with a similar model, even though there were these now very large gaps in the survey.

Survey design.

So the, the simple assumptions that are embedded in Afleets' areas approach were what led to the SSC request for an additional model version added to the 3 that were put forward by the author and the plan team. And this included allowing for, again, as I said before, more flexibility in the treatment of selectivity for the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands. We also, in addition, requested a sensitivity model run. So this would not be a model that we would be looking to, to potentially use for management, but one that we would use to try to understand what's changed in the stock assessment. And this model would use the value from natural mortality associated with one of the intermediate step models and apply that to the model that's being put forward, the Fleets Azarias model, the author preferred model, so that we could delineate between all the other changes that have occurred between those two models models and the effect of just natural mortality on that change.

So again, this wouldn't be a model for management, this would just be one to help us understand which changes were most important as we saw this evolution of models for the sablefish assessment.

Also, in the Joint Groundfish Plan Team report, we received a pretty extensive presentation on the ESPs and DSIM, DSM, and DSM is a very modern and fancy statistical way to include covariate information in our stock assessment. So if we know something about temperature or oceanography or copepods and we want to include that in a stock assessment to help us predict upcoming recruitment or growth or mortality, DSM is an extremely elegant way to do that. And because it is brand new and relatively complex, We support its use. It is very much a forward-looking technique, but we also support trying to standardize the way in which this is being applied to provide more documentation associated with its use, and we note that it— that there's going to have to be some dedicated analytical staff time beyond just the assessment authors in order to support this change. So this is a very positive development in, in the stock assessments, but it's going to have some overhead associated with it.

We also received an update on Pacific cod research, and this was provided to us by the authors, and it mainly focused on stock structure, particularly the movement of cod between the western Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, and the types of modeling that it would take to accommodate that spatial structure where we have a stock that's actually now moving between FMPs and between historical model, separate stock assessment models. And while there's a strong genetic signature for some substocks within this region, uh, we noted that, um, the movement rates potentially estimated from tagging information are also a critical source of information in this, trying to put together this picture of the, the linkages between these different areas. And the SSC supports the methods that were proposed to do this with the goal of creating a spatial assessment and evaluating, subsequently evaluating potentially alternative apportionment across seasons and between regions. This is fairly complex compared to this completely separate stock assessments that have been done to date.

We had a few other items. We, we did receive a detailed summary of the 2026 longline survey, and I've already spoken to the design changes there. We also heard quite a bit about the results. We received a summary of in-season management, which we don't always receive at the SSC, but I believe the Council generally hears. And we also supported the Joint Plan Team's recommendation to approve the halibut DMR Working Group proposed DMRs for this next specification cycle.

Moving then into the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands specific groundfish harvest specifications. We took up Boguslav Pollock. This is a final assessment, so we won't see this assessment again in December. This is a Tier 5. It's based on the acoustic survey, which was last conducted in 2024.

This assessment is generally conducted every 2 years. It was down slightly— the survey was down slightly in 2024 over the previous year. This—. We don't have a status available for this stock, but overfishing did not occur in 2025.

We recommended the, the approach in agreement with the authors and plan team, which matches what was last accepted for this stock assessment, and we agreed with both the OFL and the ABC, and we recommended no adjustment from the max ABC. There were no notable risk scores.

And I will, as we go through, we have quite a number of stock assessments here, and I will generally not highlight each of the technical recommendations that we made. These are primarily for the authors, but in a few cases I might note them where they might be of broader relevance.

We also received harvest projections for a number of different species, and we concurred with all of the recommendations from the author and plan team for the OFL ABCs and BRDs for those stocks. Again, these are final specifications. We won't take these up again in December.

For proposed model runs, these are models that we will see again in December. We saw ABS Pollock. This is a Tier 3 model last assessed in 2024, and we agreed with the, the plan team and the author to bring forward two models, one of which is an existing base model and the other is a transition to RCF. RSeattle, which is again, is another very forward-looking and recently developed platform that we're, I think we're going to see an increasing number of stock assessments in. We supported these two moving forward with these two models for December.

We had some questions about, or some recommendations about technical development that's now available in the RSeattle framework that wasn't previously available, and some other technical recommendations for the author to consider for the models that are brought forward in December.

We saw proposed model runs for yellowfin sole. This was previously a Tier 1 model, and in our discussions in 2025, we recommended that this, this assessment be made a Tier 3 model. We support the use of the Tier 3 reference points, and this is primarily due to due to the poorly informed relationship between spawning biomass and recruitment. And it's essentially a very similar rationale that we had when we moved EBS Pollock from Tier 1 to Tier 3. This is consistent with what we recommended in October '25 and also supported by the CIE review that was conducted earlier this year, or per— yeah, earlier this year.

We recommended bringing forward 3 models for this stock. And these agreed with the 3 recommendations from the authors and the plan team.

Again, we don't choose model— we don't choose a specific model in October, but the proposed models that we will see again in December. We had a few technical recommendations for the December meeting and also for future stock assessments.

Next, we saw the Greenland Turbot model. This is a Tier 3A, it's biennial, and it was last completed in 2024. We agreed with the two models to be brought forward for December with the authors and the groundfish plan team, and we also recommended replacing with— we agreed with two of the models and we recommended replacing one of the models with a different variation that actually has later start date. The challenge in this assessment has been to trying to get a stable model platform that, that's, that's reliable and can, can fit the data, and that's been quite challenging for this stock. So we continue to suggest minor variations to try and address that.

We also recommended bringing forward a Tier 5 model in December, mainly to help understand the biomass scaling and the interpretation of the more complex Tier 3 model.

We recommend using the RIMA or survey smoothing approach for spatial apportionment. And here we wanted to highlight the crucial importance of sampling slope stations in the trawl survey. We noted that these stations haven't been sampled since 2016. And as you'll see on one of my subsequent slides, the survey modernization is not projecting a full transition in the design until 2031. So we see this as a really big gap, particularly for this stock assessment where these fish are very deeply distributed, generally deeper than the, the bulk of the sampling effort for the EBS shelf survey.

We also saw proposed EBS Pacific Cod model runs. This is a Tier 3 stock assessment. The previous assessment was done last year. There were two models evaluated with slight changes to the treatment of either the plus group or whether to split male and female cod in the models. We agreed with the Groundfish Plan Team and the author to make the, make the change to the age data, but don't bother with the change to the treatment of males and females separately.

We did have some recommendations for future work on that stock.

We received a report on the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands trawl survey updates. And here is where you'll see we noted that the target date for the survey modernization is now 2031, and that the plan is for that to include sampling as deep as 400 meters and to test toes even deeper than that. But we note that this is particularly important for those deepwater species, and Greenland turbot is one of those. For the Aleutian Islands bottom trawl survey, we noted somewhat atypically this year, there were observations of localized hypoxia, and we supported the efforts to understand whether these hypoxic conditions may be affecting species distributions and/or survey catches. So this was somewhat new.

I'm not sure that we've seen this in the past.

We also received a report on the Eastern Bering Sea Acoustic Trawl Survey, and we noted the, the discussion of the overlap between the acoustic trawl survey and the acoustic vessels of opportunity, and this provides for an ability to compare. And the question here is really those fish that are very close to the bottom that may be partially estimated by acoustics, but also estimated by the bottom trawl activity, as well as the fact that the acoustic vessels of opportunity may cover a broader range and in-between transects from the acoustic trawl survey.

The— again, here the SSC commends the survey team for the quick turnaround on this information, getting it to us and to the authors in such a short timeframe. Um, Dr. Story, Ms. Kimball has a question. Thank you. And it's maybe more of a general question on the survey, um, notes and the modernization survey target date of 2031. And, uh, I think when we got a presentation from, um, Dr. Moss as well on some of the exciting new technology being tested side by side with the survey, current surveys.

Is the SSC already having discussions about what happens in that transition time? We, we may be doing side by side now, but at some time we're transitioning to this new survey design and what that's going to mean for stock assessments that have been relying on the kind of the same level of data for quite some time. It seems like there's going to be an abrupt break week there, and I didn't know if the SSC is, or plan team, maybe it's a plan team discussion, is already having some discussions or whether that's too uncertain.

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, yes, and I don't recall exactly which meeting. In the last couple years, we have had a considerable discussion about this. We were presented with several different sort of conceptual thought lines of overlap between stations, paired stations. Do we try to transition all at once, or do they do a little bit of both designs for a period of years to try and create some overlap. And I know the SSC did have some recommendations then, but I feel like the information was relatively preliminary.

We weren't necessarily reviewing specific design proposals, and I don't believe we've seen it again since then. I don't know if co-chairs recommend— remember anything else, but I think that's kind of where we left off. We had an initial discussion, but we've not reviewed, say, a detailed proposal for exactly how a series of comparisons would be carried out.

Thank you. I guess maybe we just need to make sure we build in some time to do that, just given the really significant potential decline in the sablefish catch based on just changing one survey design and changing to every other year in one area. I, I feel like there's really significant consequences coming and Maybe the SSC is weighed down by the possibility of having to try to deal with that, but it seems like if we could put a little thought into how we're going to deal with that well before 2031, that would be in our, our best interest. So I appreciate the initial comments and know that you don't have a project plan to review, but at some point this is going to be a big agenda item. Thank you.

Through the Chair, we, we We definitely, as we have had updates on this process, we recognize that this has been, the design planning for the survey modernization has been quite fluid. And as we've seen different design, different proposals unfold, dates have changed, designs have changed, resources have changed. And so, yeah, I think the SSC would be perfectly willing to take this up if it comes to a point where we can review some more specific details about how those comparisons and transitions might be made.

Okay, we'll now move into our Gulf of Alaska groundfish harvest specifications. We took up arrowtooth flounder. This is, again, this is one of the 3 species here, perhaps 4, one of the species here that is a full assessment. We will, we saw it now and we won't see it again in December. So this is a full assessment It's also based in the RSeattle platform, which is the one that the EBS Pollock assessment recently moved into.

We reviewed proposed models and were reviewed by the plan teams in September 2025 and by us in October '25. So that's the first part of our two-part review. This was the second part. This stock remains well above B35%. It's not overfished.

Overfishing did not occur. And we concurred with the plan team and authors' recommendations on OFL ABC, and there was no adjustment from MAX ABC.

Sorry, I just said the whole slide before I got there. There were no notable changes in the risk table, and like I said, we agreed with the specs for this stock.

We also agreed with the GOAL plan team and authors for the BRDs for this stock, the what were formerly Siberia ABCs, and we had several technical recommendations for the author moving forward.

We also reviewed the ESP for Arctooth flounder. And we had a number of recommendations here as well.

This assessment is one of two that we saw fairly extensive DSSEM analyses for. Again, DSSEM is just the way to bring together, to aggregate and analyze statistically a large number or a potentially large number of covariates to things like recruitment or mortality. This was done outside the stock assessment model for arrowtooth flounder. We found it very helpful, and we supported continued work on that.

We also saw the final assessment for RECSOL. This is Tier 3. It—. We saw this in October 2025. There was also a— I think there was a CIE review for this one as well, but we supported preferred model runs in October 2025.

The, this stock is also well above B40. It's not overfished, and overfishing did not occur.

The SSC recommended the, in agreement with the author and the plan team, Model 25.1, the OFL and the ABC that came from that. This was really just a minor update from the model that we reviewed in October 2025, adding a better treatment of aging error. There were a few elevated risk elements for this assessment. These, these are listed here, but these did not lead to a reduction from the max ABC.

Again, for Rexol, we agreed with the plan team and the author on the proposed BRDs. The author, somewhat atypically, the author presented a bridging analysis to a new model platform for this assessment, mainly because this— we won't see this one again for 4 years, and the analytic team wanted to get started on some modeling in the new platform, and we supported that. This is a development we're seeing a lot across assessments is moving to a new, more modern platform, and this is another good example of that. And we recommended using that new platform for the next operation. Operational assessment.

Next, we took up GOA skates. Again, this was a final assessment for us. This is a complex including big skate, longnose skate, and other skates. It's a Tier 5, meaning it's based on survey information smoothed with the REMA model and an assumed natural mortality rate in order to generate the harvest specifications.

We noted that GOA-wide, the survey biomass is increasing for all of these components, and generally the regional components are relatively stable or increasing. The exception was longnose skate in the western GOA.

We agreed with the plan team and authors' recommended OFLs and ABCs for the complex with no reduction from max ABC. We noted that all the risk table scores were level 1. Overfishing did not occur. And because it's Tier 5, we don't have a status determination. We agreed with the GOA plan team and author on the recommended BRDs following the method that's been used for this stock, and we continue to recommend a reevaluation of the natural mortality that's used for these species as it's been in place for quite some time.

We also supported a collaboration to bring forward an updated stock structure template.

With regard to flexibility for skate BRDs, to preface, as you know, in October 2025, the Council requested SSC advice regarding flexibility in a spatial apportionment for big and long-nosed skates. Specifically, the motion requested input on the previous set of BRDs or a small change from the current year's BRDs and whether that would have a biological impact. The SSC considered a wide range of information in our discussions about this, from the GOA Safe, from the GOA Groundfish Plant Team discussion, from a limited literature review. I won't read them all out, but you can see that the list of things that we considered when we had this discussion.

Although our discussion ranged across all of— there's, I believe, there's 6 individual BRDs for the the 3 skate stocks spread across these, these various areas, or the 2 big and longnose spread across 3 areas, we focused mainly our discussion on western goa longnose skate. We came to general agreement that there is flexibility in BRDs for skates. We had mixed concern about whether setting the longnose skate western goa subarea TAC equal to the 2026 BRD or greater or setting it greater, which would be greater than the 2027 Western Goa BRD, or setting it or changing from that by a small amount. We had pretty considerable discussion about whether that would cause a biological impact to the stock. We generally concurred with the plan team recommendation to exercise caution for Longnose Skate in the Western Goa.

We suggest that the risk of exceeding the 2027 BRD in the western Gulf for longnose skate is higher than in other regions for either longnose or for big skate. So essentially, this was the— we thought this was the most sensitive BRD of the 6 for these 2 skate species.

Considering all those factors together, we recommended that the risk of biological impact for these skate species species is low if the Council chooses to use the previous BRD 2026 or make a small deviation from the 2027 BRDs. As we noted earlier, we were not able to have the discussion to determine just what would constitute a small deviation at this time. We also suggested that if the Council does choose to deviate from the BRDs, that the risk of future flexibility in the BRDs would be reevaluated when we get new survey data next year in 2027, and that if there is a deviation from the BRDs, that the GOES Gates complex would be prioritized for an operational assessment in 2027. So we could have another look at this next year.

I'll pause there in case there are any questions on our skate discussions.

Yeah, go ahead.

Through the chair, you've heard us say a number of times, you know, we haven't defined small, and it sounds almost silly why you would need— I mean, we are bean counters and everything, but it's why would you really need to define it? And I think that part, part of our struggle was because, um, small to one person may not be small to another. But also it depends on if you're going to talk about, um, a small change in percent allocation. Well, the Western Goa for skates, it's going from 2% to 4% of the entire ABC. That's really small.

However, if you're looking at the biomass in the Western Goa, that means that you can harvest double what you did before. That's kind of big, depending on if you're looking at what you're looking at it relative to. And so I just want to— it just, you know, I have the advantage of listening to us talk in the way we normally talk, and I just— I guess I wanted to note that I think that there may be The reason we're looking at further working on that and defining it was twofold. One, to make sure that when we say small amount, you can understand what we mean by small amount. The other thing is that I remember from a number of years ago when Franz and I were co-chairs, I think that we may have told the council something like a small change, and I think we were asked to define what that meant.

And it was because we said it's important to be conservative, and the question was, well, how conservative? And we went back and forth, well, kind of conservative, sort of conservative, somewhat conservative, and it just, we weren't able to communicate it. So the reason we're looking at either quantitative approaches is really to have a way to express what we mean in that regard. And so that one of the things we ended up doing in this meeting was saying, yes, you can do a small change, but be careful and conservative. It's almost giving you the question that we started with.

So we're working with these. I just— I just wanted to clarify, I guess, why we were so focused on that and why we're still holding time for that in the future.

Thank you. And Miss Kimball. Thank you. And I, I can appreciate that, um, that council purposely didn't define what small was, and I know you still want to find a definition for that. I guess I'm trying to see if you agree.

This is my question, that we were really looking at this in part because sub-area ABCs, we're told, don't exist as a definition of Magnuson, but also for stocks in which really we were starting to see some significant changes really just based on survey design or model impacts, and so they were changing a lot from year to year, and particularly in some stocks that we aren't really great aren't great at surveying anyway, or that don't have a ton of great information. And so in all practicality, I feel like the main question was, sometimes we're seeing big jumps year to year that can directly affect fishing participants in ways that we really wouldn't think about just setting OFLs and ABCs. And so the main practical question was, if we just did what we did last year, or we, we take smaller steps to get to that new biological or survey distribution, are we okay in doing that? And so I'm just trying to provide a little bit of comfort, I guess, into the SSC's bean-counting, you know, mentality that you mentioned, that that's the practical application and problem I feel like that we were most trying to address. And I'm trying to make this into a question, but it's our only opportunity to really talk about this big issue, and I'm— so I apologize for taking so much time, but Can you see that that's really what we were looking for, or do you need some more definition in a motion from the council at this point?

Through the chair, and Chair may want to respond as well, I think this is— we definitely had some discussion that focused on those questions, and one of the recommendations we made was to create a table that actually shows the last 10 years of BRP TRDs for a stock, as well as the catch associated with those, the TAC and the catch, so that we can exactly evaluate this question of how much of these really jumped around. And that information in tandem with the variance associated with the survey estimate, we definitely support those as promising avenues for getting at this question. I'll go out on a limb and say I think that we probably have enough guidance at the moment knowing that we're not going to get a specific, you know, we're not likely to get a specific recommendation of what small is, um, to, to at least to proceed down the path that we've started on. And hopefully with an iteration or two of this process, we can come to a point where the SSC is producing the right kind of information for the Council.

Thank you. I don't know if others wanted to weigh in, but thank you. And I do feel like the council can work, like, within the parameters of what you provided for skates. So if that's any level of feedback on this first try, that's helpful.

We took up a series of harvest projections for the Gulf of Alaska, and we had no changes from the plant team author and plant team recommendations of OFLs, ABCs, or BRDs.

We also saw proposed model runs for GOAPOLIC. This is a Tier 3 assessment. It was last done in 2024. We, again, here we saw a model transition. This was from a separately coded model into the RSeattle platform.

We supported this transition and we highlight that this is, this platform provides for a lot of new features moving forward in the stock assessment. We recommended bringing forward in December the new base model, which is implemented in this platform, and one extension to that model which applies the DSEM approach, which I've mentioned several times now, but it does so inside the stock assessment. So they're using these, this suite of oceanographic and other information to help predict recruitment inside the stock assessment. This comes from a publication that's already out, and we, we wanted to see this model again in Nepal. We support using, for the short term, the average recruitment for the projections, but we did note that this, this new approach can provide for potentially more sophisticated projections of recruitment at least in the short term, into the future.

And we, we had some recommendations about looking at that in more detail. But for this year, we recommended just using the average recruitment, which is consistent with what's been done in this stock in previous years. The big uncertainty in this assessment continues to be a mismatch between the model fit and the NPS bottom trawl survey estimates. And we recommended making this the highest priority and trying to understand why that we have continued to see this growing discrepancy between the trend in the bottom trawl survey and what's predicted from this stock assessment. The author and the plan team noted that there's several potential factors, including changes in vertical availability, and also the exclusion or inclusion of data from the far western end of this stock definition around the Alaska Peninsula.

We— and we supported both of those avenues for investigation.

We did note on a technical level that if we move forward with more of these assessments, or this one or others using this DSAM approach, that we don't want to be double counting ecosystem risks. If those are already included in the DSAM analysis, which is part of the assessment, we don't want to include those separately in the risk table analysis.

We saw proposed models for goethornyheads. This is longspine and shortspine. Spine thornyheads. These are again using the simple RIMA approach to smooth survey information. These are assessed on a 2-year cycle.

There were some challenges here because the redesign of the GOA trawl survey in 2025 with different depth strata made it difficult to reconcile the previous indices that had been used in this assessment with the new information from the 2025 trawl survey. So the authors proposed a new way to to stratify the depth information, and we— this was supported by the plan team. We recommended that we see two different models with variations of this treatment of depth strata brought forward in December, one using the previous approach and one using this new approach with the two recompiled depth strata. Again, this was a change necessitated from the change in the survey design itself that was implemented in 2025, and most applicable to the deepwater species.

We also saw proposed model runs for commercial shelf rockfish. This is a Tier 5 assessment based primarily on yelloweye rockfish. This is— it's Tier 6 for the other commercial shelf rockfish stocks stocks and areas. We last saw this assessment in 2024. This uses a smoothing approach, the, the RIMA approach to Alaska Department of Fish and Game ROV data as well as IPHC longline data.

We recommended that the authors bring forward a couple different models for comparison in December. The base model that was used in the previous stock assessment the model that was brought forward by the authors and plan teams using a more sophisticated and updated approach to the spatial modeling of data for yelloweye rockfish and a variation that tries to get a better estimate of the variance associated with that index. We highlight here that one of the challenges again here is loss of data. The ROV survey hasn't been conducted since 2023, And in the last couple years, there's been reduced IPHC sampling in the area that's applicable to the stock assessment. And so again, these authors are challenged by reduced data streams in recent years.

And much of the work that was done this year was to try to accommodate that.

And that concludes our presentation of our meeting.

Thank you very much for the report. See if there are any— Mr. Ritchie has a question. Thank you, Madam Chair. I don't have a question. I just wanted to call out appreciation for the SSC and the hard work and attention that you gave to sablefish in this meeting and the sablefish modeling.

I just wanted to thank you for that.

Thank you. Thank you. And Mr. C. Thank you. And on sablefish, is it okay if I went back and asked a question on sablefish? I didn't have my thoughts together before we moved, moved on.

I do also want to appreciate, did appreciate the extensive conversation you had on sablefish, but two questions I had. One, there was a lot of concern raised from public comment about the reduction to the ABC from a shift of models. Was there conversation at the SSC about the level of urgency from on moving from a biological standpoint on moving to a different model at this point, given the discussion on a change to an FAA or other model at Sample Fish?

Through the Chair, Mr. C, I would say there was some discussion along that line. The author was very clear, and the plan team as well were very clear to note that the change the ABC was not due to a change in the stock trend or status, that this— that the bulk of that change was due to the change in the model specifications and not, for example, a rapid trend in survey information. I don't think we got— at this meeting, our job was to make sure that the proposed models we would need to see in December were brought forward, and I don't think we really got to the point of assessing the urgency of, or balancing between the models. We identified what we wanted to see in December, but not much more than that. Okay, and if I had one other question, there was also some concern raised about data, logbook data not being applied into the Sailfish model, and was there any discussion about how or if to incorporate that data in the future, or ways to maybe be able to incorporate that going forward?

So we did have some discussion of that. We have a recommendation that that be considered in this assessment. We didn't get into the logistical details of what that would entail to bring that in. We did note that, and we've seen this from the assessment authors in past years, with the rapid shift from longline fishing to pot fishing in that fishery, Creating a long-term index may be quite challenging, but we also, well, we've noted in the last several years that we've now had several years of primarily pot fishing for sablefish, and so I think that was, that was definitely part of our discussion, but we didn't, we didn't get into the logistical details of how those data might be actually brought into the stream for the fish assessment. Thanks.

Thanks. Any last questions?

Thank you again for the report and all of your hard work this meeting. Thank you. Thank you.

That takes us to our AP report, and any members of the public wishing to testify on C2, please sign up before the end of the AP report. Thank Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the council. For the record, my name is Chelsea Riddell, Co-Vice Chair of the Advisory Panel, and I'm here to give the AP report on C2 Bering Sea Aleutian Island crab harvest specs.

The motion reads, the AP recommends the council adopt the 2026 Crab Safe Report as well as the 2026-2027 OFL and ABC as recommended by the SSC for Bristol Bay red king crab, Eastern Bering Sea tanner crab, Eastern Bering Sea snow crab, and the 2026-2027 and 2027-2028 2027-2028, OFL and ABC as recommended by the SSC for St. Matt's Island blue king crab, and lastly, the rollover of OFL and ABC for Western Aleutian Islands red king crab for the year 2026-2027. And the main motion passed 17 to 0, and I can take any questions. Thank you, Ms. Rodel. Any questions on the EP report?

Thank you.

So that brings us to public testimony. I think we have 5 people signed up, if my screen is correct. Okay, we'll begin with Scott Goodman, followed by Jamie Gohan and Corey Lesher. And I think Scott is joining us online.

Can you unmute yourself, Scott?

One moment, please.

Can we see him online, Kayla? Okay. Yep, I'm here. Can you hear me? Yes, good afternoon.

Thank you. Um, let's see here.

Okay, let's— I, um, submitted a letter to the SSC also with my comment. I don't know if you guys have the abilities to pull that up. My comments are relatively brief and they're focused on hybrids.

Yes, we can see the attachment. Thank you. Okay, great. For the record, I'm Scott Goodman. I'm the Executive Director to the Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation.

So thank you to the Council for just a few brief comments in this opportunity to chime in on some crab specs for this year. Generally speaking, this is going to be a good crab year. So I think the industry at large is thankful to see some upswings, and notably in the Tanner crab, with, you know, the largest fishery in recent history occurring here in the coming weeks and months here. So everybody's happy to see some positive news here as a change and My comments really are focused on the hybrid biomass, and I think the SSC heard quite a bit of feedback, and they did a very nice job, a great job of summarizing some of the comments. The letter that we submitted to the SSC with some focus on hybrids was really what I wanted to draw attention to and basically to just note that the industry, I think, is very interested to lead or help to lead a workshop that would focus on some options for hybrids.

So I think everyone is acknowledging that the snow crab male preferred biomass is still not appearing to turn the corner and show us a strong sign of recovery. It's kind of hovering. It went down this year, even after just a small tack from last year and a kind of a sequence of very conservative tacks, including the 2-0 no seasons from a couple years back. So I think the hybrid biomass is a standout, and at 50+ million pounds of preferred size biomass, it actually represents like a 50% increase over last year when you when you look at the biomass, I think the SSC noted in their presentation just recently here that it's about 11 or 12% abundance increase, which is accurate, but these animals have increased in body size, so they're closer to Bairdi. I'm noting that because at this point, it's kind of a high enough biomass of preferred size commercial crab that it's important to consider on how to potentially access part of it.

I think everybody agrees there's quite a few unknowns about are these crabs presenting something that's a benefit to either snow crab or Tanner crab, or are they presenting something that's a negative competitor within the ecosystem? So really, I just wanted to let the council know that through the SSC dialogue and further dialogue that has been informal, I think it, it's really our interest to try to help lead what would be a meeting. We've called it a workshop. It might just be a sequence of some short meetings to help define a path forward to get to being able to access hybrid crab. What I would hope we would have is a, is a sequence of some solved issues.

There's clearly some biological unknowns and some regulatory challenges and some program issues, and then just some process things that are all kind of part of the normal path each year for crab. But what I think everybody would like to avoid is that we don't end up at a spot next year this time where we're seeing that the hybrid biomass has exceeded both Bairdi and Snow Crab and that there's not a way to consider accessing it. So I did not intentionally submit the BSFRF letter to the council. I usually just do so to the SSC, but if you haven't had a chance to look at that letter, I would just draw some attention to the second figure, the one that shows the hybrid biomass, and you can kind of see what I'm mentioning here, that 52 million pounds is the second largest this year of the commercial biomass for Kynoscyse males. And the last couple pages are, are just some bullets that our science team laid out to try and help with a little clarity.

It's good for anybody who's thinking about these details to, to look through those if you haven't. So I would draw some attention to that. In terms of a workshop or a meeting, I think this— my best guess or advice here would be that the, the Crab Foundation's board will take this up at their next meeting and talk through, and then the— with some dialogue amongst their science advisors, they'll try to come up with a little bit of a plan. And I think that will likely include some informal dialogue with our partners, both at ADFNG and NOAA, And then if it's warranted, we could bring that forward to the CPT or SSC or council here in the very near future, knowing that there's a January workshop which is pretty full already for, uh, CRAB items. But then the next council meeting would be where we could come forward and share the ideas, share the plan a bit.

Hopefully it would be a pointed plan, and then if there's a way for further advice to come from the SSC and/or council at that time, that would be great. But that's basically what I wanted to report on here directly to the council, just to— if you hadn't really seen it on paper, that one figure that's in our letter is really quite clear on what's going on out there. It's pretty striking. Nobody's really saying let's go get them because of the potential threat to snow crab. We're just trying to figure out a path forward so that we don't end up next year with something that's still too uncertain.

And I can take any questions. Thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you very much for your testimony. I'll see if there are any questions.

No. Oh, excuse me. Yes, Mr. Muller. Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Goodman, thank you for your your testimony here.

You partially answered my question, um, in your closing remarks here, but on the second page you reference, um, your organization, uh, Foundation, assisting, um, in this effort, whatever it might look like relative to a workshop. So I would just like to make a comment. It'd be—. You talk about meeting with your board and kind of outlining what that might look like from your perspective. So this council member will be interested in seeing what that looks like future when you guys have developed that.

So thank you, appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony, Mr. Goodman. So next up is Jamie Goen followed by, um, and Corey Lesher followed by Shannon Carroll.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the council, and I want to say a special congratulations to Mr. See and Mr. Bowers on your appointments. I'm Jamie Goehn, and with me is Corey Lesher from Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers. We represent the harvesters of king, snow, and bearded eye crab. We appreciate the SSC and crab plan team, and especially Katie Paloff for their work on the crab specifications and want to extend a special thank you to ADFNG and the Commissioner for their flexibility this season by allowing dual targeting in our fishery. I'll note that we submitted a written comment letter with detailed comments.

I encourage you to take a look at that if you haven't already. We'll focus our comments here on Chaenocetes hybrids with an ask to explore a pathway to access harvest of hybrids by next season and to consider categorizing them by size. So a bigger hybrid is a Bairdi and a smaller hybrid would be an Opilio.

Hybrids deserve immediate and focused attention with more harvestable male hybrids than Opilio this year. And for a little bit of scale of what we're dealing with, Mr. Goodman already mentioned there's 52 million hybrids out there. If you took last year's prices, that's $260 million worth of crab in the water that we could be accessing. Now granted, we would likely only access a portion of that, but even at 10%, that's about $30 million worth of crab. Still a lot of money.

Consistent with the President's Executive Order on seafood competitiveness, we should have access to hybrids. There's available for harvest, we have markets that want this crab, and it helps with domestic seafood production. I heard Ms. Kimball yesterday make comments in speaking to her motion on an evaluation about about lost opportunity to harvest based on changing or lack of survey. And I think this hybrid issue falls in a similar category with hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 2 years. So next, how do we solve this season for— or how do we solve this problem for next season?

I'll turn it over to Cory.

Thank you, Jamie. Good afternoon, members of the council. I'd also like to welcome Mr. Bowers and Mr. See to council. We look forward to working with you guys.

Um, I think Scott and Jamie summed it up, and so I'll just provide a couple of comments here in regards to hybrids. Really, the bottom line is that there's a tremendous abundance of harvestable male hybrid kinocetes crab. I appreciate the discussions that the crab plan team had last year, or I guess earlier this year at their May meeting, and again in September, and the discussion that followed at the SSC. And I would note that ADF&G has also offered tools to help the industry harvest hybrids, both last year with the hybrid retention zone and as well as allowing for dual targeting in the Bear Dye fishery this year. So we really appreciate the tools that have already been provided and just the acknowledgement of kind of this, what we're calling the kinasedis challenge this year.

It's the second year in a row that we're having these record numbers of harvestable male hybrids. And we're trying to find solutions, as Scott mentioned, for the industry to access this biomass of crab. And so, you know, I'll just reiterate that I think there's already ongoing thought going into this, and I appreciate Mr. Goodman taking the lead to try to organize kind of an industry-led workshop with some of our research partners, but more importantly, having fishermen and harvesters and processors at that meeting to kind of move the ball forward and brainstorm together. There's interest to have that workshop this winter.

Scott not mention the end of AMSS in January as a potential idea, but really so that we can come back to this council in February and, and hopefully with the crab plan team again before their, their April meeting. So the idea of the workshop, I think, is great while we also consider what this council can do or the crab plan discussions can carry forward. So I think that's all I have for hybrids. I have a few more comments on the rest of the crab specs, but I would look to Jamie to see if she has anything else to say.

Just real quick, this came up in the SSC, and I just wanted to address it here, but ABSC has been working on skipper surveys that we provide to the stock assessment authors as well as the ESP authors, and we appreciate the opportunity to incorporate some of our fishermen's observations into the stock assessment process. We really value their knowledge and their time spent out on the water. I guess what I want to bring up And it was a question that came up in the SSCs, the way that those answers, or I guess responses, are being reported in the ESP are not out of how many vessels participated. That's a clarification. I think the report that you guys saw today, for example, showed 82% of skippers said, you know, X, Y, or Z.

That was 82% of the skippers that participated in the survey, and we'll work with the ESP authors to make sure that they, they're reporting how many skippers participate versus how many were in the fishery. And, and we have, we have really high numbers of return on our surveys, but I just wanted to clarify that, that it's not representative of, of the whole fishery if we don't have 100% participation. So, and I'm happy to answer Any questions on any of those topics? Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for that clarification.

Appreciate it, Mr. Lesher, and thank you for your testimony. Um, yes, Mr. Bowers. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Miss Cohen and Mr. Lesher, for your test— or your testimony today. Um, my question is about the skipper surveys. Was there anything anything in the skipper survey responses that regarding their observations of hybrid crab that might inform some of these questions that we've been hearing about today?

Through the Chair, Mr. Bowers, yes, thank you for that question. Absolutely, we saw this signal of hybrids prior to our last fishing season, so we included questions, I think, both on the snow crab and the Tanner crab skipper surveys.

That's part of the skipper surveys is we have the ability to incorporate new questions each year while we maintain static questions, but I'd have to go back and look. Yes, we did have those questions, and my understanding is that most of the fishermen were reporting seeing an increase in the number of hybrids, which is, you know, of course what we've seen in the trawl survey results as well. Thank you. Thank you. I also have a question about the skipper survey.

If something came up relative to the rate— the significant outsized ratio of females to males in the fishery, and whether whether or not there are any significant changes in the amount of sorting that had to take place last year, or any outreach that you anticipate having to do with the fleet this year in regards to that.

Madam Chair, thank you for the question. I think you're referring to snow crab skipper survey. We do ask a question every year for both snow crab and Bairdi of our skippers perceived abundance of females, which is kind of a silly question to have on, on our snow crab skipper survey because we simply don't encounter very many. Females are typically a lot smaller than, than the males that we're targeting and aren't retained in, in the pots. However, we, we continue to ask that question about encountering females and also sorting, whether it's dirty shell, old shell males, or sublegals.

I don't know that off the top of my head. I don't have my computer with me, but I'd be happy to look at that and provide some clarifying answers if that's helpful. Thank you for that. It's definitely striking to notation this, this particular year as far as the, the ratio. So thank you for that.

Let's see, are there any other questions? Yes, Ms. Kimball.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for your testimony. My, my question was on the, your letter and the ask to task the crab plan team with developing harvest limits for hybrids. And, and I guess I was just trying to think through what I think the intent is, is like the fastest pathway we can to access this significant component of the resource. And so I was picturing the crab plan team then coming up with some of the same questions that I saw in the Foundation's letter, like, would have to go through those.

I'm— I just want to sort through where you think the, the quickest pathway is. Is it going through these small workshops or small group meetings that were mentioned by the Foundation, or is it sitting with the crab plan team?

Through the chair, thank you, Miss Kimball, for the question. And you caught that our testimony here shifted from what was in our letter. So we think the fastest way is working through these— this workshop concept or a series of meetings, as Mr. Goodman mentioned. And then we come back in February to the council if we think there's—.

We—. There needs to be council direction to the crab plan team or SSC after that. Thank you for that clarification.

I'm not seeing any other questions. Thank you so much.

Shannon Carroll is next, followed by Doug Wells and Edward Paulson.

Good afternoon. For the record, I'm Shannon Carroll speaking on behalf of Trident Seafoods. We're one of the largest stakeholders in the Bering Sea crab fisheries, and I wanted to testify on a couple of things. First, I just wanted to express my excitement around the really good news on Tanner crab. We're very excited to see that huge, huge increase and to have a really large crab biomass to be working on this year.

Um, not much of a surprise, but I also wanted to talk about hybrids. First, I, I wanted to thank the CPT, the agency and particularly the department on all the work that they've put in so far, but also the department's specific prioritization on the protection of the large snow crab. We think that's obviously the priority in making sure that that biomass stays healthy, but we also want to underscore the importance of being able to access that crab. It's really critical for all the stakeholders, but we see it as a critical part of hopefully reopening our plant up in St. Paul. Um, I support the, the concept and the, um, that Scott laid out.

I'd prefer it was called the work plan over a workshop because I think I really want to just emphasize how much work and prioritization we have to put into this and not, um, and, and just be very, I think, targeted and efficient with how we address the questions. But I really wanted to underscore the— one of the bullets in the CPT minutes that was more presented today, which is that the recommendation that the management actions have to really begin happening concurrently with the science. And so I think there needs to be really strong coordination between the science bodies, the agencies, and industry to solve some of these questions. But we have to start looking into what the management implications are pretty quickly. I think there's some short-term questions and then some longer term, because once you start pulling the thread at the implications of, of some of this, you, you begin implicating some of the community protections and other core components of the program.

I think they're all solvable and we can, we can work through them, but we don't want to get to the point where we, from from a conservation standpoint can be accessing the crab, but the management hasn't caught up and we're not able to do so.

Lastly, I just want to also point out that we're really willing to help as far as coming up with adaptive management techniques or schemes to access that crab more quickly. I think that in a rationalized fishery, we could be, we could probably be doing more to have some in-season flexibility. I see the processors playing a big role in trying to help the department and the management bodies get information quickly, and just wanted to reiterate that we're really willing to do that. So with that, I'll just see if there's any questions. Thank you.

Thank you very much for your testimony. Are there any questions? Yes, Miss Kimball. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony.

I, I've now lost the foundation letter, but they had a a series of regulatory considerations in that attachment of what would be discussed in those workshops. Is that the piece that you're asking the council to pay attention to, or is this even subsequent to those discussions? I'm trying to find where the council's role is and when we would need to pay attention.

Yeah, so I, um, through the chair, Ms. Kimball, I, I think that that's, that's a good start, and I'm not asking the council to specifically, certainly not initiate anything now. I just think it's really critical that we're all understanding that point from the CPT, which is that we have to be moving in step with the research, and so I think staying coordinated with the status of where the research is and what direction it's leaning and being able to begin reacting quickly. I think the timeline laid out by Scott where they're hoping to come back in February, um, is, is pretty appropriate. So I think you probably have a better understanding of what that would be in February, which isn't too far away.

Thank you for your testimony. So Doug Wells is up next, followed by Oyston Lone.

Is Doug online? Can you unmute yourself, Doug?

He's on the— so, star 6.

Okay, how about now? Can you hear me? Yes, good afternoon. Okay, yeah, hi, good afternoon. Doug Wells here.

Edward asked me to stand in for him today. He's traveling and couldn't be here to provide testimony. So, I think what I'm going to do is just read his testimony in its entirety.

So, all right, here we go. Madam Chair, members of the Council, my name is Edward Paulson. I'm a part owner in two vessels that fish crab in the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands. I'd like to provide some comments regarding crab specifications, particularly regarding the Apilio hybrid and Bairdi issues.

First, I recommend simplifying the Apilio stock assessment model so that it is mainly scaling the summer survey based on selectivity. The current model is overly complex and has diverged from the survey regularly over the last 7 years due to changes we have seen with this stock. A model that relies more heavily on survey data would provide an informative OFL and ABC and allow the CPT and SSC time to be freed up for more important tasks. Second, I would urge the Council to encourage National Marine Fisheries and ADFNG to collaborate with industry through the Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation, to help find solutions to the current issues we are experiencing with the proliferation of hybrids and historically low male Apileo size and maturity. The Cynocetes complex consisting of Apileo, Bairdi, and hybrids has had massive shifts over the last 5 years with the explosion of the Western Bairdi and a larger biomass of hybrids than Apelio.

Hybrids are likely to persist with a spatial overlap and record level of female Apelio.

Apelio size of maturity has been an issue for some time now. In the summer, we have learned that 96% of mature males are terminally molting at sizes lower than the industry preferred. These two issues overlap as we need to lower the size limit of Apilio to spread removals across a larger portion of mature male animals while also incorporating hybrids into Apilio abundance estimates, with the important caveat that we must also protect the remaining larger size true Apilio. This is a complex task, and I requested the council to urge ADFNG, NMFS, and industry to collaborate to find a resolution to these issues before the next season. Finally, I request the Council at least ask the question of the crab plan team and SSC regarding the utility of continuing to pursue a Tier 3 snow crab model, which is clearly not informative and may never be.

Um, that— I conclude my comments.

Thank you very much for your testimony.

Um, guessing we won't take questions on that since it probably won't be very efficient for you to contact Edward. So, um, yeah, it would be difficult for sure. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Happy to help.

Thanks. Appreciate your time. Um, Oyston Loan is our last testifier.

Oyston, can you please unmute yourself? How about now? You get me now? Yes, good afternoon. Oh yeah, okay, great.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and council members. My name is Oyston Lone. I'm a crab captain and vessel owner. I'd like to see the industry get credit to harvest hybrids in the upcoming season. With the tremendous increase in these crab stocks, we are now in the second year of record hybrid, hybrid crab abundance and markets that want these crab.

We need to find a solution before next season. As we look for solutions, I'd like to see hybrids categorized by size, where large hybrid and are Bairdi and small ones are Apilio. It's more practical on the back deck of a boat when thousands of crab are being sorted in extreme weather just to handle those hybrids by size. It would reduce handling mortality, sorting time, and pot lifts, improve efficiency, and better align with the operations for harvesters and processors and markets. And really appreciate ADF&G's allowing dual targeting of Bairdi opilio hybrids this season.

That should help improve efficiency as well. Happy to take any questions. Thank you. Thank you very much for your testimony. Are there any questions?

Okay, I'm not seeing any. Thanks for joining us.

So that concludes our public testimony on C2. I think this is a probably a good place to take our afternoon break. Let's come back at, um, 3:17, and we'll take action on C2. Thank you.

Welcome back, everyone.

So we have finished our staff presentations, SSC report and AP report, as well as testimony on C2. Ask what the wishes of the council are.

Mr. Bowers. Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a motion on C2. Let's wait for that to come up.

So the motion on C2 reads as follows: the council accepts the Crab Safe report and adopts the following OFLs and ABCs. ABCs recommended by the SSC. For Eastern Bering Sea snow crab, OFL 21.22 kilotons, ABC 12.73 kilotons for the years 2026-2027. Bristol Bay red king crab, OFL 7.13 kilotons, ABC 5.70 kilotons for the years 2026-2027. 2027.

Eastern Bering Sea Tanner crab, 67.39 kilotons. ABC, 53.91 kilotons for the years 2026-2027. St. Matthew Blue King crab, OFL, 182 metric tons. ABC, 136 metric tons for the years 2026-2027. 2027 Through 2027-2028.

And for Western Aleutian Islands red king crab, OFL 56 metric tons, ABC 14 metric tons for the years 2026 and 2027. And on the, the issue we heard so much about in public testimony, the SSC and the crab plan team support hybrid Chionoecetes crab, the council encourages collaboration between researchers, managers, harvesters, and processors to identify opportunities for increased Tanner-Snow hybrid crab harvest without negative impacts to the Chionoecetes opilio or Chionoecetes beardii stocks. And with a second, I'll speak to the motion.

Thank you for the second, Mr. Pamplin. And Mr. Bowers, Thank you, Madam Chair. First, I wanted to recognize that overfishing did not occur for any of the aforementioned stocks last year and that none of these stocks were overfished in 2025-2026. The Bering Sea snow crab and Pribilof Islands blue king crab stocks continue to be managed under rebuilding plans. I recognize there are many uncertainties regarding how to efficiently and sustainably harvest harvest the kinasedis hybrid crab resource.

We heard in public testimony that collaboration between researchers, managers, harvesters, and processors could be useful to inform potential research questions and identify ways to establish economically viable and sustainable directed fishing opportunities for hybrid Tanner crab, and I support that approach. We heard in public testimony that these discussions on hybrids could begins soon, and it is my hope we will hear a progress report from stakeholders at the February council meeting. I note that the state completed the tax setting process after the SSC made its OFL and ABC recommendations, and the tax were announced earlier this week. And lastly, the council would like to— I would like to thank, and I hope other council members would like to thank, the assessment authors for their work, as well as the crab plan team and the SSC for their careful consideration of the best available science. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bowers. Uh, are there any questions on the motion?

Any comments on the motion?

Yes, Ms. Baker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I thank you, Mr. Bowers, for the motion. I will support it. I just— and I appreciate you describing what you envisioned for the collaboration between researchers, harvesters, processors, managers. I just—.

I think what the approach you've laid out in terms of maybe some some smaller focused meetings relative to what we were originally hearing about with a report back from potential pathways forward to the council in February 2027 makes sense to me. I guess just, I know it's a little out there, but I just would caution the council to remember we just heard in this agenda item earlier from our SSC that our crab plan team, for example, is already overworked based on the capacity that they have. And just be mindful as we're moving forward with the incredibly important hybrid issue. I understand that, but again, just the trade-offs associated with engaging federal resources in this process where I think there might be some flexibility working with state regulatory pathways, other potential approaches that I, I hope people will keep their minds open to. Thank you, Mr. Bowers, for the motion.

Thank you for that, Ms. Baker. Any other comments? Okay, seeing none, um, thank you for the motion, Mr. Bowers. And I think we need a roll call. Ms. Evans.

Members of the council, uh, this is taking the roll call vote on motion under C2 to adopt CRAB specifications. Uh, Miss Baker? Yes. Mr. Bowers? Yes.

Miss Kimball? Yes. Mr. Curland? Yes. Mr. McIntosh?

Yes. Mr. Muller? Yes. Mr. Pamplin? Yes.

Mr. Ritchie? Yes. Mr. C? Yes. Miss Vanderhoeven?

Yes. Miss Drabnica? Yes. That motion passes 11-0. Okay, any further actions on C2?

Okay, seeing none, that brings us to our, um, staff presentation on C3. So we plan to begin the presentation, but likely will break at a logical breaking point here and finish the presentation off in the morning. We are a little ahead of schedule, so thank you.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the Council. For the record, Sarah Weber, Council Council staff. With me is Diana Strim. We're the coordinators for the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, and Gulf of Alaska groundfish plan teams. And on the slide here, we just wanted to thank all of our plan team co-chairs who don't typically attend the, the October AP and Council meetings, but we appreciated all their help in getting all these, all these materials to the SSC, AP, and Council.

The action for you today is to first receive what will be a very high-level summary of the Groundfish Planting Reports, since you've already had your SSC report, which detailed most of the things, everything that is in our presentation for the most part. And the second part of this agenda item is for the Council to recommend your harvest specifications for proposed making, which really just provides the public with notice that the Council will take action on final harvest specifications in December when you have all the updated information in front of you with which to recommend final catch limits. And those in— at the proposed rulemaking stage as well as the final rulemaking stage, the Council recommends OFLs, ABCs, tax, as well as PSC limits and apportionments for 2027 and 2028. And this is typically a rollover of the existing specifications that were published in the final rule earlier this year. Usually those are from the council's recommendations in December, but I'll point out later in the presentation where we have a couple of exceptions just due to the, um, this weird schedule that we've had over the last year.

The existing '27— 2027 specifications from the March final rule will be effective beginning January 1st, 2027, and then those would be replaced by the final rule next March based on the recommendations that you provide in December.

I think the SSC provided you with an overview of how our assessment plans and the schedule has changed this year as a result of the shutdown. And the SSC essentially, and the plan teams, reviewed the proposed models that are for the stocks on the left here at the meeting this week and the plan team's recent meeting. And then all of these stocks on the right, the plan team and SSC reviewed the final SAFE chapters for those at our recent meetings and provided those to you, or the recommendations for those in your SSC report. But you will not be providing TAC recommendations on those at this meeting. We will kind of save those in our back pocket for December for you all to inform your TAC recommendations.

These are our plan team members. From our recent plan team meeting and want to thank them for all their time and contributions. And I believe the SSC noted that this was our last meeting with Steve Whitney and Sophia Wasserman, so thanks to them for all their contributions over the years to the, to the teams. And we're happy to hear that we will also have some new plan team members to help us out according to the SSC report.

For our future meeting dates, we've settled on our November dates for this year and next year. Um, this year's meeting will be in person. Um, next year's November meeting will be in person, and our September 2027 meeting is likely to be virtual, but we're still trying to figure out the dates and, um, how to how to plan that in between the council meeting, uh, with the, with the crab plan team meeting also occurring around the same time. So we hope to know, uh, by your December meeting what the final dates for next September are.

This is just a summary of the items that we took up at the joint plan team meeting. We have all the links to the presentations, uh, in the, in the headings in the minutes, or those can all be found on the, uh, plan team agenda.

I don't think we plan to cover a lot of the survey slides that, that we had. We just had a few of them for you since the SSC has kind of covered all of these, but just wanted to note again for you that that longline survey changed starting in 2025. So now we have the Gulf being surveyed every other year, Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands being surveyed every other year. So this year was a Bering Sea Aleutian Islands survey, and we had some preliminary survey data from these other— for these other stocks and a few others at the plan team, but you'll get final survey information from our assessment authors in December.

And the SSC report included your— the description of the changes to the sablefish assessment, or the proposed changes to that, so I won't go through that, just noting that we'll have more updated information again as a result of the November plan team meeting later on this year.

And I did want to speak a little bit just to sablefish apportionment, and it's a good time to, to just discuss kind of some of our apportionment information. Given the change in the sablefish survey design, the previous methods that, that we had been using were no longer applicable, so the author proposed specific updated apportionment methods and, and described how the combination of those, the updated model and the apportionment methods, could result in substantial changes to the BRDs from previous years. And at the plan team meetings, we had, uh, we had some discussions about this, but the main piece that I wanted to bring to the attention was— to the attention of the council is, um, that we're just flagging this information as we've talked about in the past with our, our spatial apportionment process, um, because the author did note that alternative short-term apportionment approaches were unlikely to have major detrimental biological impacts. And so at the guidance of the council, alternative spatial apportionment approaches, approaches could be explored, but it is something that we would be looking for council direction on.

And the plan team noted that their recommendations for birds will be provided in November.

These are just the plan team recommendations for sablefish. They recommended bringing 3 models forward. The SSC had one additional model that they'd like to see brought forward, and the plan team did have a recommendation to avoid further reductions in survey coverage for the Long Line Survey and further reductions in age data collection. At least maintaining current levels of age data collection would be really important to be able to provide that information to inform the stock assessments.

We also had a presentation, uh, providing the recommendations from the Halibut DMR Working Group, and the team adopted the DMRs based on those recommendations. There weren't any huge changes this year, no changes to the methodologies used. The one change that they noted was was removing the Gulf Nonpelagic Trawl Rockfish Program operational group, and that was put— combined with the Nonpelagic Trawl CV group just due to the low number of halibut assessments that they were getting within that operational group.

Moving on to the Bering Sea Aleutian Islands Groundfish Plan Team report. As Sarah noted, I just want to note the, the chairs of the plan teams, Steve Barbeau and Clay Shotwell, as well as the vice chair Cindy Trebizio, and they were immensely helpful throughout the SSC as well as throughout the whole plan team and helping with getting all of this together.

Just to give you a brief overview of your actions here, again, you'll hear an abbreviated version of the Bering Sea Plan Team report. Your action is to adopt the proposed specifications for the Bering Sea. That includes 2027-2028 proposed OFL, ABC, and TAC based on the 2026— it's actually 2026-2027, that they're, they're exactly the same, the specifications for 2026 and 2027. So on some tables you'll see that it says based on the 2026. You can also base it on 2027 because they were the same given harvest specifications from last December.

These also include the alchemackerel seasonal and spatial tag allocations, including the jig fishery, which I'll talk about at the end of this, flatfish flexibility tables, and then your PSE and fishery apportionments for halibut, herring, and crab. I will note, and I noted in the tables as well, that crab and herring estimates have been updated in those tables for your proposed specifications. Halibut, we have posted to your agenda the NIMS trial survey letter, but we do not usually get the IPHC setline survey letter until just before the December meeting. So that's why the halibut number for the Amendment 80 fleet is not yet updated and is based on last year's estimate. And then it is a regulatory thing, so it's nothing that you take action on, but just for your notice, the Chinook Three River Index letter from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is posted to your e-agenda, and remains below the 250,000 threshold so that you, the pollock fleet in the Bering Sea, will be operating under the lower cap in 2027.

As with the joint plan team, here's your presentation summary from our entire groundfish plan team. I will only be going over very briefly an overview of the 3 surveys that we took up at this meeting and then the proposed specifications. As well as just one slide on some general discussions that the team had at the end that might be of interest to you.

Starting with the, the Bering Sea bottom trawl survey, you heard some of this from the SSC already, so I will not go into great detail. I would note that the Northern Bering Sea was not conducted in 2026. They will be doing both Eastern Bering Sea and Northern Bering Sea in 2027. The primary reason for not doing the northern Bering Sea in this schedule is because of the works associated with the bottom trawl survey modernization. We did have information to us, as well as you heard from Dr. Moss, as well as the SSC chairs, that the survey modernization effort currently in the Bering Sea under current resources is not expected to be completed until 2031.

Biomass for most stocks were stable or increasing. Skates were decreasing. And then there was an updated, based on some net matur— maturation changes, updated some of the calculations for 2024 and 2025, but changes were on the order of 3 to 4%. We also received an update—. It's not advancing.

We also received an update on the Aleutian Islands bottom trawl survey. The 2026 survey completed 373 of their 444 attempted tows. They collected almost 90,000 lengths and 6,000 otoliths. They did have some new hardware and software for their effort data collection. In general, surface temperatures were cooler than average, but bottom temperatures increased to near average with distinct warming and localized hypoxia observed in the western you heard that in your SSC report as well.

In general, the biomass trends for flatfish were below the mean, for rockfish were above the mean, and for gaddids it was mixed with sablefish above and skates at low biomass levels. And again, as with the SSC, the teams discussed some of these issues with the new dissolved oxygen information and some species ID issues.

And then finally, we received the summer acoustic survey and the vessel of opportunity survey that's used to perform that AVO index. The preliminary estimate from the trawl survey was about 3.6 million tons and 13 billion pollock. They did see more juvenile pollock than the recent survey years, with the age 2 pollock being the largest since the 2012 year class. Their spatial patterns were similar, uh, as with 2026. They don't actually tow exactly in the same, same tows, but they are in close proximity.

And we just wanted to, as the SSC did, make a note to thank their incredible effort in pulling both this and all the survey information together in a very short period of time to provide those updates to the plan team.

And finally, we had some team general discussions, some cross-cutting issues. You've already heard a lot from the SSC on the issues with age and growth. Specific to the conversations we had in September, it was related to the sablefish stock assessment as well as the Greenland turbot stock assessment. There is a long list of other assessments for which age data was notably lacking from 2026, as well as backlog of ages that have not been read due to staffing issues and resource issues with the Age and Growth Lab. One thing that you'll hear about in December, the Bering Sea Alaska skate assessment has not had any ages read since 2015.

That's not likely until they have new staff that is appropriately trained on the identification methods. That is unlikely to change, so that will be something you'll likely hear about coming back from the, that assessment that you'll see in December. We also had discussion of improved communication, both on major assessments as well as our CIE communication. There were some suggestions that we do— we work with the Science Center in order to provide more information in advance on when CIEs are occurring. We also discussed how better to provide information to team members and the public on new methodologies that are being used.

Prior to having to read it in a stock assessment that we receive about a week prior to when we take action on it. So one of the things that we did at the Bering Sea team, and the link to it is in your minutes, but we had a discussion of and began a webpage, a public webpage on a centralized information resource webpage. So the intent of it is to provide— you'll hear more in December, you heard a little bit today from the SSC on this new SPORC methodology that's being used in assessments, the REMA methodology used to smooth survey results, other new methodologies that are coming forward. And from the standpoint of the assessment reviewers, it makes it challenging to hear about it the first time when you're reading the assessment. So we've started a webpage with resources so that team members as well as the general public, anyone can go to that.

And if you want to read up on the methodology prior to getting the assessment that's using that methodology, we're using that webpage as a central resource. So we just began building it at the very end of the Bering Sea Plan Team meeting. We're still working on making that go live, but our intention is that when we, we put our e-agenda up for the November Plan Team meeting, it'll include a link even prior to us being— you know, we usually have the e-agenda up with the schedule prior to us having the assessments to post. To it. So at that point, we would be making this link live so that it was available on the assessment— on the e-agenda for the November team meeting, so that if people wanted to look and read more about some of those resources.

We're also reaching out to the crab plan team and the crab assessment authors to use that same page to post things such as GMAX background and other assessment resources, more technical information, but we wanted to have a centralized place for people to be able to get to, to look at that.

And then finally, the documentation summary that you'll see in December. We have quite a number of documents because of the, um, the backlog that we're trying to make up from, from last year. So we have 5 operational full, and just to remind you that an operational full assessment is one in which multiple models are being are being compared, and a recommended model will be selected by the author, the plan team, and the SSC. So those are the models that you heard from the SSC today that they reviewed over this week for modeling recommendations going into the November assessment. So that we have 5 of those.

We have 7 operational updates. An operational update is using the last full assessment model that was approved, so not coming up with different model configurations, but updating the data with the available new data, updating the most recently used full assessment model. So there won't be model changes, but there are very likely to be assessment changes as a result of updated data. Harvest projections were what the SSC reviewed at this meeting. You will hear back from us at the December meeting on the OFL and ABC recommendations stemming from the plan team, but it's not something that you're taking up at this meeting for proposed specifications.

And then we have 3 catch reports that are just simply catch over ABC, just to keep track on years where there's no assessments. We intend to have 3 ESPs. As you heard from the SSC, the ESP teams are working really hard, but they are also a little understaffed for capacity, so they are still trying to get out an ESP for Bering Sea Pacific cod stock. That would be an updated draft ESP for the Bering Sea pollock stock and a draft ESP for the Greenland turbot stock. And then we will also have an ecosystem report on both Bering Sea Aleutian Islands and Gulf of Alaska forage fish.

In terms of your proposed actions, I already went through this slide at the beginning, so I'll just walk really quickly through the tables that you're going to be going through when you get to your motions. Again, our proposed specifications, these are based on the 2026 or 2027 OFL ABCs, and then we have restructured the tables to include the new terminology for the BRD recommendations.

Table 3, these are all attached to your agenda under supplemental tables. Table 3 then is the Akimakrel seasonal and spatial allowances. I'm pointing to this because in 2026-27, in your final specifications, because there's been no activity in the Akimakrel jig fisheries since 1994, we were still setting aside some of the, the TAC in the Bering Sea Eastern Aleutian Islands for Akimakrel for them up through last year, and starting in your specifications for 2026, you set that to zero. So that's something that you do in final specifications and note that in proposed specifications. Your flat flexibility then is just determining the ABC surplus and the ABC reserves.

And so those tables are posted based on last year's specifications. Table 8 then, I already noted that your Crab biomass estimates have been updated because we have the final assessments for those stocks. Halibut is still based on last year because that IPHC letter is not yet available. Herring, we do have that letter posted to your e-agenda, so we have included the updated herring estimate for proposed specifications. Normally we use the previous years because we haven't gotten the letter until December, but this year ADFNG submitted that letter early and we are able to include it proposed specifications.

Similarly, the fishery categories for herring using the updated— this is something that you have the latitude to change those fishery category, change the amount allocated by fishery category. Right now, this is just using the updated estimate and doing proportional based on how you allocated that last year.

Table 10 is again your halibut, your red king crab, snow crab and Bairdi estimates.

Table 11 is your non-trial halibut PSC, and then finally Table 12, it's the updated DMRs, are included in proposed specifications because we've already recommended them. You already saw what the changes were from the previous year in the joint presentation, and this is the last table that you also moved during proposed specifications. And with that, thank you, and we're happy to take any questions on the Bering Sea portion of this.

Thank you. Ms. Kimball has a question. Thank you. I don't know if you could just— thank you for going through those. I'm trying to pull up the actual groundfish Bland Team report for the Bering Sea Aleutian Islands, but is there any context you can just provide until I can find that around the survey bottom trawl survey increase in pollock, over 50% increase in both population and biomass compared to the previous year's survey.

What was the discussion around that?

I think I need to also go back to the, to the report. I don't remember us having extensive discussion on it. It was, it was brand new results that we were seeing for the very first time. During the plan team meeting. So we were, uh, Dwayne Stevenson walked us through, um, a really high-level overview of those results.

We didn't, um, narrow in very much. Um, we did have additional slides, as always, in the, uh, report. He goes through a subset of the stocks and provides a snapshot of biomass and trends. And I'll look and see if there's anything specific that we noted, but I don't remember that being anything that we had extensive discussion on. And we could do that on the side too.

I know there's— we should expect some volatility in that survey. So, but I just didn't know if this was a notable increase or not, or, and whether any of it was connected to, you know, us having substantially colder bottom temperatures in 2026 or anything. But I can do that on the side if it's not at your fingertips, Dr. Stroum. Yeah, we did, we did actually, obviously we had the stock assessment author there. So we did talk about that volatility in the recent bottom trawl survey index and whether it could reflect horizontal or vertical availability.

They're, they're working now to look at the vertical availability. The acoustic survey folks mentioned that as well when they gave their report. Dr. Ianelli did note that the uncertainty that's associated with horizontal and vertical availability is is represented as process error in the assessment model. So I suspect that we'll probably have more discussion of that in conjunction with the final assessment when it's presented in November.

Thank you. And Mr. Bowers. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for your report, Dr. Stram and, uh, Ms. Cleaver. My question's on sablefish. Um, in B reports, we heard from Mr. Kerlin several considerations related to the expedited timing on small sablefish discard, and I was wondering if that information was available to the plan team, joint plan team, when they discussed sablefish, and if they had any discussion on that.

Thank you.

Through the Chair, Mr. Bowers, I wasn't here for the B reports conversation, but I think I can probably still address address the question. We did not talk about implementation for small sablefish at the plan team, but right now we are planning, if, you know, everything continues to go according to timeline, we are planning to have a discussion about it at our November plan team meeting and have the plan team provide recommendations to the SSC for discard mortality rates for sablefish so that the SSC can then provide their recommendations, um, as we do for Halibut DMRs in, uh, in this process. Thank you, that's exactly what I was looking for.

Madam Chair, would you like us to continue with the Gulf Land Team report?

I think that makes sense. There seems to be fewer slides. Yep. Thank you.

On this slide, just noting Jim Ianelli and Chris Lunsford are my plant team co-chairs. We're hopeful that they'll be able to be here with us in December to present all of the stock assessment results. At our SSCAP and council meetings.

From Diana's presentation, you're probably in the joint presentation already familiar with your action under proposed harvest specifications, but specific to the Gulf, we account for Pacific cod, pollock, and octopus state waters fisheries, so I'll walk through those tables. At the end of, of my few slides that I have here.

These are the topics that we took up at our recent plan team meeting. The, um, stocks that I've highlighted in bold here are those which the plan team and the SSC provided final recommendations on at this meeting. And again, you'll be receiving a presentation, um, with our December presentation. On those stocks.

For the documents that you'll have by your December meeting for Gulf of Alaska groundfish, we have several full assessments that had proposed models that were reviewed at this meeting. We have 3 more operational update assessments and all the harvest projections were reviewed at this meeting. And then we will have a few catch reports and the full Gulf of Alaska ecosystem status report. So you'll have all of that information in December with your final— to inform your final tax setting process.

I think the SSC report spoke to this, but having the kind of the diagram on the screen here, Again, we didn't have any Gulf of Alaska bottom trawl survey this year, and these are the results from the winter pollock pre-spawning acoustic trawl surveys. There were several areas that were surveyed in February, and the biomass trends relative to previous years varied among which area was surveyed. They did run into severe weather and vessel icing during the March survey in the Shelikof, Sherekhof, and Marmot areas. So there were 11 transects in the southern Shelikof Strait that were unsurveyed, and the team will be looking at revisiting that missing Shelikof data over the next month or two and, and methods for trying to estimate biomass within that unsurveyed area. And so we'll be receiving that information at the November plan team meeting when we have the rest of the model fits for, for consideration.

And on timing of this survey, we usually always report out on that. No female pollock longer than 40 centimeters were found in spawning or spent condition, and so that just tells us that the survey timing remained appropriate.

Mostly as an update for the council, and I know you've, you walked through this during the SSC report, but in November we do plan to be reviewing spatial apportionments, BRDs, for the stocks that the council asked for in its motion last year. We reviewed that for Gulf skates already at this meeting. We're working with the Science Center to make sure that we have existing information that that could help inform these discussions included within the assessment documentation, uh, in November. And my understanding of the, the council's spatial apportionment process that, that you all had a motion on last October in a separate motion from this one is that we're really trying to bring forward the, the existing information, not asking authors to do additional work between now and November. Unless it's requested separately by the SSC.

So it'd just be good to have confirmation that that's how the council intended for us to interpret that as well. And it's also helpful in terms of tracking to have the stocks that the council is interested in deviating from tax, or deviating tax from the BRDs. So this, I guess what we're calling BRD flexibility, have those stocks listed in the motions, um, just so that we can track it and, and refer to that in the future. And it's helpful for us to also have some rationale on the record, um, for why the council would like the plan teams and SSC to be providing advice on those stocks, because it really helps to inform our discussions, um, on potential biological impacts. And, um, we, we noted that a little bit during our, our SCATES conversation at the plan team meeting.

Um, this is probably also, also the, the time since it's been a year since we really looked at these spatial apportionment motions. Um, the council's overall intent from that motion, not the one on the screen, um, I think we have the other one actually attached under the SSC agenda for groundfish harvest specs as reference for, for this meeting. Um, the, the intent from the council's speaking to their motion is for the council to continue to apportioning tax to mirror the, the BRDs, the BRDs, similar to your past practice. Um, and I don't believe it was written anywhere, but the council had noted at the time that the flexibility for tax to deviate from the BRDs was intended for the long-lived, poorly surveyed, stocks that have either limited information on stock structure or, or a lack of stock structure that's evident in, in the documentation from the assessments. And as, as staff, we're just trying to make sure we pull this process together and remain consistent with, with what we're hearing between the council motions and the SSC discussions with the council.

So if the council needs needs to continue to provide any clarifications or direction to us as staff, please feel free to do so and make sure we're headed in the right direction with that.

This is— these are our proposed harvest specifications from the plan team meeting, and we had had a little bit of trouble with the numbers in the SSC, so these are updated tables. These are the numbers that match the numbers from the final rule earlier this March. The council will need to recommend proposed tax that account for the state waters fisheries. This includes pollock tax that account for the G— the state Prince William Sound fisheries. That The, the Prince William Sound GHL is 2.5% of the Western Central and West Yakutat Pollock ABC, and that's reflected in this table.

And the octopus fishery TAC is a 32 metric ton reduction from the ABC to account for the state octopus fisheries, so that's also reflected here in this table. I have the, the Pacific cod adjustment details in the, in the next slide, but I also wanted to just highlight that the only stocks where the numbers for 2027 are not the same as those for 2026 are Pacific cod, because we got the new assessment or an updated assessment in January. So though here you see the numbers for 2027 from that assessment, And for deepwater flatfish, we had that one harvest projection last year, so we had projections available for 2027 and 2028. So those are the only stocks where you should see different numbers between 2026 and those recommended for 2027.

Ms. Kimball. Thank you. Through the Chair, I just want to confirm because we did receive a Pacific cod assessment on a different schedule earlier in the year, but we would still expect in December of this year to get a different updated number for the OFL and ABC for Pacific cod for 2027 harvest limits. Is that correct? Through the Chair, Ms. Kimball, yes, we will be receiving an update assessment for Gulf Pacific cod in, in December.

Thank you.

And speaking of Pacific cod, here are the adjustments. These are in Table 2, and these are part of the set of tables that's listed on your e-agenda. So these are just the adjustments for the state GHLs, and these are anywhere from a 25% to a 35% adjustment.

The council will also recommend gear and target fishery apportionments of PSC limits for halibut, and these are based on the recommendations for the regional tax from the Gulf of Alaska groundfish fisheries. This table is for trawl gear and hook and line gear, and then the next few tables, this one is for the PSC limits being apportioned between the shallow water and deep water species fisheries, and we have the table that is for other hook and line fisheries being split between catcher processors and catcher vessels. And then the last table that we have is the— these are the updated halibut DMRs, which we showed earlier in the joint presentation as well. These are just for the Gulf of Alaska. And I believe that that is the Gulf Planting Report.

Dr. Shim. Madam Chair, I just wanted to note, I failed to note it when we were talking about the Bering Sea proposed specifications, but those specifications do also include the reduction in sablefish for the state waters fishery as well as reduction in Bering Sea Cod and AI Cod, noting that for AI Cod, it's still using the 31%, which was reduced from 34% the previous year based on whether or not the fishery achieves their GHL. At this point right now, we won't— we don't know. We have to assume that they will achieve their GHL. They have not yet, so when we come back in December, it may be with an additional reduction from the state if they do not in fact achieve GHL and the Aleutian Islands.

But I wanted to note that that's all in your proposed specifications table too. Okay, thank you. And Miss Kimball. Thank you, through the chair. Uh, just on the last, um, piece, Miss Cleaver, and more on, um, how we spatially apportion ABC when we eventually set TAC.

And I've got a short list going of kind of the outstanding questions. And I, I guess I'm— we had a discussion more with the SSC when the chairs were up at the table. I mean, are you looking for a more explicit motion than the council previously passed on spatial apportionment, or are you just looking for some discussion on those points to provide clarification for this year's process? Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, the discussion with the SSC was actually really helpful, um, and we got a few answers to the questions that the, the plan team had actually been asking, so I didn't end up including them here. But, um, I think as long as when we're presenting information, you don't hear anything that you find inaccurate— if you do, um, let us know— but just being clear about the guidance on which stocks and the rationale for those stocks would be most helpful.

I think the, the motion on process right now is, um, is definitely sufficient to, to guide our work in trying to coordinate with the plan teams and the SSC.

The only thing I think I could identify that we didn't address, and so I'm seeing if you agree, um, thus far at this meeting, is whether to only provide existing information and not do a separate individual analysis in order to support doing sub-area apportionments. And so I, I feel like we spoke to that, then will we, will we have covered all of the outstanding questions from the plan team? Because I think it is important to try to respond to them. Through the chair, yes. My, my understanding for the existing information, um, I guess idea is that if the plan teams and the SSC feel that they need more information in order to provide the council with what you all need, to set your tax, then that would be a circumstance under which the author would bring more information forward.

If there's specific information that the Council wants in front of you other than kind of the general stock structure information and anything that's already existing, if there are stock structure templates, then that— then additional information wouldn't be asked for at least between October and November. And, and if it is, we can.