NPFMC: Joint Protocol Meeting Presentations

Welcome everyone. I'll call this meeting to order. Welcome everyone. I'll call this meeting to order.

A joint protocol committee is convening at the request of the Board of Fisheries in order to provide an opportunity for information exchange about the impacts of bottom contact from trawl fisheries, the council's current management requirements, and measures under consideration. This information is intended to inform any future considerations of proposals that may come before the board. Before we begin, I'd like to offer a land acknowledgment.

We want to take this opportunity to respectfully acknowledge that the Council and the Board of Fisheries regularly meets and its staff office— —and honor the culture, resilience, and tradition of the Dena'ina people. Thank you.

So, like, to see whether or not there are any additions or comments on the agenda that's posted to our e-agenda.

Members, okay, so we have 5 parts. We are planning on largely conducting presentations this morning until noon and plan to take public testimony after we come back from lunch. If for some reason we end presentations early, we might start public testimony, but we will continue at 1:00 for those of you who prefer to start at, at the agenda time on our on our agenda. And sign-up also is through agenda, right? Okay, great.

So I'd like to thank the— before we go into introductions, thank the Board of Fisheries for the invitation to share information on how the council manages for habitat impacts and our standards and legal requirements for doing so, as well as an overview of our ongoing related actions at the council. We recognize that trawl fisheries and their potential habitat impacts have received considerable attention at both the state and federal levels.

Including through proposals brought before the board. Today's presentations are intended to provide some additional context on the fisheries, the measurement framework, and the processes that inform our discussions at the federal level. There's a long history and a number of regulatory requirements that guide fisheries management through the federal process, along with extensive scientific review and independent oversight that inform managed structure. So in consultation with the board leadership, our staff have worked to keep today's presentations relatively high level. That said, there's a considerable amount of complexity that goes behind these issues, so I would welcome questions and dialogue amongst the Committee members throughout the presentations, particularly given the importance of this topic.

We also look forward to hearing public testimony at the end of presentations. As a reminder, although this Committee does not meet frequently, its role is to serve as a forum for information sharing. It does not consider or deliberate on proposals or make management decisions. Decisions. So with that in mind, we would encourage public testimony that is consistent with the committee's purpose, specifically comments that provide additional information, background, or context related to the topics we learned today, rather than comments advocating for or against specific proposals.

We appreciate the opportunity to share this information with the Board and hope—. And hopeful—. And we're hopeful that it'll be informative for future discussions. I'd also like to thank our staff and others who have put considerable work into putting presentations together today. And just emphasize that information that we'll hear doesn't constitute new analyses.

It's really drawing out information that the council has received for the last several years. So with that in mind, begin introductions around the room. Just quickly, my name is Angel Drobnica, and I'm currently chairing the North Pacific Shrimp Management Council. I live in Juneau and also participate participated in some state water commercial fisheries and work for one of the TDQ organizations. Mr. Carpenter.

Thank you, Madam Co-Chair. My name is Tom Carpenter. I reside in Cordova. I currently serve on the Alaska Board of Fisheries as Vice Chair. I'm also the Chairman of the Joint Protocol Committee for the Board of Fisheries.

A little background on myself, I'm retired. I've served on the board for the last 5 years, currently have 2 years left on my current term. Maybe just a little background, a slight introduction to why this meeting was convened. Last spring, there were a suite of proposals that came before the Board of Fisheries in March. And, you know, typically trawl proposals come occasionally before the board, but not typically.

And when we started to look at these proposals, it was a pretty clear understanding, at least from myself, that the board may not be as informed as it should be in regards to some of the nuances surrounding trawl fisheries. So I had a session with the Commissioner, and with the understanding that this Joint Protocol Committee was a possible venue for both the Council and the Board to get together, to have the staff from the federal side present some information to better inform at least myself and the rest of the Board in regards to potential decisions that we could make that would have impacts not only to state fisheries but federal fisheries regarding things like areas of state waters to be closed, definitions specifically on pelagic and pelagic performance standards, some of the technology that's involved in regard to bottom sensors, things like that. So brought this motion before the board at our meeting to convene this. The council agreed, and so that's generally the reason that we're sitting here today to better inform at least the Board of Fisheries and how we can move forward with issues that come before us in the future. So thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Carpenter. We'll go to Mr. Moller next.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, co-chairs. John Moller. I'm originally from Alaska. I am a small boat commercial fisherman that now resides in Southeast Alaska, Juneau.

And I am an Alaska sitting North Pacific Council member.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Marit Carlson-Van Dort. I am the current chair of the Alaska Board of Fisheries, raised between Chignik and Juneau. I spent 35 years in Juneau. I currently reside in Anchorage, and my day job is I lead Alaska Native Village Corporation for the village of Chignik Bay.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. And Nicole? Good morning, Nicole Kimball. I sit as a public Alaska member on the North Pacific Council.

I was born in Ketchikan, I was raised in Anchorage, and I work currently for an association of shoreside processors.

Good morning, my name is Mike Wood. Um, let's see, this is my, be my fourth year on Alaska Board of Fisheries. I kind of hit the committee lottery with this one, um, Habitat Joint Protocol Committee and the Process Committee. So here I am. My regular day job is just a contract carpenter, fix everything kind of guy, and fisherman.

And I'm really happy to be part of this process. Thanks. Thank you. And we have our executive directors with us as well. Ms. Evans.

Good morning, members of the board, or the committee.

My name is Diana Evans. I'm the Executive Director for North Pacific Fishery Management Council. We are based in Anchorage, so I live here and have been with the council for, well, a couple of decades now. Thank you.

And my name is Art Nelson. I'm Executive Director for the Board of Fisheries and also based here in Anchorage. Thank you. Thank you. So I think we are ready to start our presentation unless, Nels Evens, you have anything to add.

Yes, Mr. Moller. Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. Before we get started, and I, I miss this, um, when is— when are you going to stop taking, uh, signups for public testimony? Is it after the presentations? We'll stop taking signups, um, probably after Yeah, probably after lunch.

We have— we had public testimony scheduled for 1:00, so we just want to provide an opportunity for those who are planning on testifying after lunch to have that opportunity if they had it scheduled. So thanks.

Good morning, committee members. My name is Sarah. I'm council staff based out of here— based here in Anchorage. I'm just going to first walk through what we have planned for you this morning for presentations. There's 5 parts to these presentations.

The scope of the information that we're providing was developed based off of proposals received by the board in March with some follow-up with the co-chairs on what might be helpful context. 3 Of the proposals that you received were related to pelagic trawl gear operating in state waters, and there was one specific to all trawl gear in the Aleutians Islands west of 170 west longitude. So there's 5 parts here. For the first part of the presentation, Karla Bush with ADF&G and I will be providing some context on the fisheries and vessels that could be affected within this scope. Next, I'll present some high-level background on management measures that are used to minimize adverse impacts from commercial fishing, in particular fishing with trawl gear.

We're going to focus on that, and in particular in this part 2 section, I'll highlight some context around the Aleutian Island Habitat Conservation Area, as well as current use and requirements of salmon excluders. For part 3 of the presentations, we have Dr. Jodi Prittle with NMFS to talk about federal requirements and process for assessing essential fish habitat, and Dr. Brad Harris with the APU FAST Lab to talk about fishing effects model as an input to that federal fishing effects review process. Under Part 4 of the presentation, State of the Technology, we have Dr. Brad Harris to provide additional information on current and ongoing developments to improve the fishing effects model through the Gear Innovation Initiative, and Dr. Noel Yoakum and Shannon Carroll with Trident Seafoods, they're participating in research with an exempted fishing permit This is similar to a commissioner's permit through the, through state fisheries. It's an authorization issued by NOAA that allows for experimental fishing practices or gear design that would otherwise be prohibited under regulations. So they have some context on their FEP work to minimize bottom contact through changes in gear design, as well as context on bottom contact sensor technology.

And then finally, in Part 5, I'll present the Council's ongoing actions related to trawl gear bottom contact and impact.

So this next slide is just a reference slide of some of our commonly used acronyms. There's a lot on there, but you can access that and circle back to it if you need to through the e-agenda.

Okay, so the first part of the presentation we have for you, this information's intended to help the committee understand how much fishing with trawl gear occurs in state waters and federal waters and where, with some general characterization of the fisheries and participants.

So these are just some terms quickly to get us all on the same page. There's 3 types of groundfish trawl gear fisheries that occur off Alaska. For federal fisheries, this is 3 to 200 nautical miles, guided by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council process. Harvest is deducted from the federal TAC, the total allowable catch, and then there's two state-managed types of fisheries. There's parallel fisheries in state waters, 0 to 3 nautical miles.

These are concurrent with adjacent federal fisheries and generally adopt federal regulations and management measures as guided by the Board of Fisheries process. Harvest is deducted from the federal TAC, and then state-managed fisheries In state waters, 0 to 3 nautical miles, guided by the Board of Fish process, harvest is deducted from the state guideline harvest level. So the State of Alaska management authority applies to both parallel fisheries and state-managed fisheries, and we'll make this distinction as we walk through the different fisheries here.

Okay, so based on the proposals that the board received and discussed in March, we're presenting a high-level overview of trawl fisheries that occur in state waters. So for pelagic trawl, we're talking about pollock fisheries mostly. So in the Gulf, there are federal pollock fisheries in the Central and Western Gulf that overlap into state waters. That's where the parallel fisheries occur, and then we'll talk about the state-managed pollock fishery in Prince William Sound. I'm also just noting here, for the Bering Sea and Aleutians Island, pelagic trawl gear is used in the pollock fishery in the Bering Sea, This is the American Fisheries Act or AFA vessels and Community Quota Development pollock that's typically harvested on AFA catcher processors.

We're not planning to go into detail on the management structure of the fishery here. We looked in, in 2025 there were 2 inshore CVs that had some activity in state waters. In the last 5 years it was an average of 5 vessels, so we can answer questions about this fishery if you want, but we're not planning to present a detailed management structure of that fishery.

Also, there's rarely pelagic trawl fishing that occurs in Aleutian Islands. There was one proposal that you received to close the Aleutian Islands west of 170 west longitude to all trawling. So for this subarea, we've expanded some of the descriptions to non-pelagic trawl vessels This includes the state-managed Aleutians Island Subdistrict Pacific cod fisheries. That's a number of gear types, but it includes trawl gear and also what we call the Mimmi 80 vessels and trawl limited access vessels that have had some activity in this area. So we'll talk about that fleet as well.

Okay, so again, focusing first on Gulf of Alaska pelagic trawl, essentially targeting pollock here. This includes federal Gulf pollock fisheries that overlap into state waters and the Prince William Sound pollock fishery.

So this map is to orientate you. This was produced by NIMS In-Season Management. This is Gulf pollock trawl catch from the 2025, from 2025, from federal or parallel fisheries. There are no pelagic trawl vessels that fish exclusively in state waters. Any vessel that fishes in state waters also fishes in federally managed trawl fisheries, so therefore they have a federal fisheries permit.

State waters that have pelagic trawl harvest primarily includes, and we've circled these areas on the map, so the state Prince William Sound, Pawlik fishery. There's Pawlik fishing in areas of the western Gulf and in the Alaska Peninsula that are in state waters. And pollock fishing in some areas around Kodiak. Oh, and for reference, here on this map you can see the NIMS stat areas, so, or NIMS regulatory areas. So 610 is the western Gulf, 620 and 630 is the central Gulf.

That's mostly where we're focusing.

And just a note, this is Karla Bush with Alaska Department of Fish and Game for the record. A note on monitoring for the Gulf pollock fisheries. Because these vessels, as Sara mentioned, all participate in federal waters, they must have a Federal Fisheries Permit, or FFP, and those federal monitoring requirements are tied to having that FFP. So, which means that the same monitoring requirements apply during the federal fisheries, whether they're fishing in the federal waters or state waters. In the Gulf of Alaska, the pollock fisheries operate with 100% electronic monitoring, so cameras on the boats, and then the 100% of the salmon accounting occurs at the processing plants with shore-based observers.

They also collect genetics from the salmon samples and biological samples of the salmon and other fish. If a vessel doesn't opt into the EM program, the electronic monitoring program, it must take a human observer on selected trips through the partial coverage program. Currently, of the 45 catcher vessels that operate in the pollock fishery in the Gulf, only one has not opted into the EM program. These vessels have the same monitoring requirements, as I stated, whether they're in state or federal waters, and all groundfish catcher processors in federal fisheries have either one observer, which is 100% coverage, or 200%, which is two observers, But we're not going to focus on CPEs here in the Gulf because they don't participate in the Directed Gulf Pollack Fishery. This is just a, a high overview slide, some recent information from observer deployments in 2025.

These are the percent of retained catch that is monitored by area and gear type for all the fisheries. So in the Bering Sea, across all trawl fisheries, 100% of the retained catch occurs on trips that are monitored. Fixed gear trips in the Bering Sea, 89% of the retained catch is on trips with either EM or a human observer. In the Gulf of Alaska, for retained catch, 86% of all the retained catch caught in trawl fisheries occurs on trips that are monitored, and 14% of the fixed gear trips in the Gulf are on monitored trips.

Next. So again, for state waters, we're talking about vessels fishing for pollock in the central and western Gulf. This fleet is hard to generalize because it's very diverse, but to give you some context here, in 2025, 33 catcher vessels fished in the Gulf parallel state waters at some point during the season. The 5-year average was 41 vessels. This represents the majority of Gulf pollock vessels.

The majority of vessel owners participating in this fishery are from Kodiak and Sandpoint. There's sort of, there's a western Gulf fleet, there's a Kodiak fleet, there's vessels from Newport, Oregon that have a Kodiak connection, there's some vessels associated with Seattle, but the majority of vessel owners in the fleet are associated with Alaska communities. The vessels deliver into Alaska communities primarily Kodiak, Sandpoint, and Akutan. These vessels are diversified by size, target species, and gear type. Some fish Pacific cod, rockfish, flatfish species, and salmon.

Some provide tendering services in the salmon season. Some of the vessels fish in the Bering Sea. They range in size from 58 to 112 feet. In 2025, 10 of the vessels in state waters were 58 feet, and 32 of the 33 were under 100 feet. There's considerable variation in reliance on state waters within this fleet, but an average of 10% of the gross revenue from active vessels comes from state waters.

This table was provided by ADFNG for the March 2026 board meeting, and it shows average harvest of pollock in state and federal waters between 2021 and 2025. Over this time period, an average of 7% of the central Gulf pollock harvested in state waters and 25% of the western Gulf pollock was harvested in state waters. Between this time period, there were 4 vessels in the central Gulf and 7 in the western Gulf that harvested more than 50% of their pollock in state waters.

Here's some more maps to orientate you. Oh, we have a question. Ms. Marinan, a question. Nicole Kimball. Thank you, Ms. Marinan.

There are some— I appreciate bringing forward this table that was provided for the board. There are some pretty significant differences between the Western Gulf and Central Gulf Fleet in terms of reliance on state waters and also size of vessels. Is that coming through this presentation, or are you relying on public comment for those kinds of differences?

Through the chairs, I think Some of that may come out in our maps. I was going to highlight some of the stat area reliance in this, the Western Gulf Fleet. I guess that is something I think important to highlight, and this table alludes to it, is that there is, with the Western Gulf Fleet, there is more activity in state waters, and there's some stat areas in particular that have higher harvest.

Does that answer your question? Yes, and that's fine if that's not drawn out in particular. I think it's the size, scope of the size of vessels that you mentioned in the fleet profiles. I mean, what we've received in the past is that in the Western Gulf, at least, that state water reliance is really dominated by the smallest vessels, the less than 58-foot fleet that deliver into St. Paul Island and other communities. So if that's not coming out, I'll just highlight that and we can see if that's addressed in public comment.

It's a real difference between these two fleets. Sure, through the chairs, I think there is kind of distinct characteristics between the sort of Western Gulf Fleet and the Kodiak Fleet. You know, when we pull data, we usually look at vessel ownership, which doesn't always create the clean lines the way that the fleet understands those delineations, but I think from speaking with fishermen, there is kind of a distinct Western Gulf fleet versus a Kodiak fleet. There can be some overlap for Kodiak vessels that sometimes fish in the Western Gulf, but that Western Gulf fleet, it sounds like those are mostly 58-foot boats. They do a variety of things and are somewhat distinct from the Kodiak fleet.

Mr. Wood.

Thank you. This is my first of many elementary questions. But are they fishing state waters predominantly because they are smaller vessels or for safety reasons, or is it because that's where the fish are aggregating in larger numbers at different times a year so that they can harvest them more cleanly? Or what, what are the reasons for the state waters? For the Alaska fishermen.

Through the Chair, Mr. Wood, yes, I think many of those reasons. Some of them might come out more in testimony, but just jumping ahead one slide to the Western Gulf Region here, you can see on the left map, those are the stat areas that in-state waters that have had activity, and it's my understanding that those are often prosecuted for safety reasons close to shore, close to processing plants compared to fishing further out in the Western Gulf.

Oh, and in avoiding the Steller sea lion closures, which are in the figure on the right.

I guess just to finish this slide, so there's one stat area here that you can see in the figure on the left that's a darker color, That stat area is of particular importance to the Western Gulf Fleet. There's an average of 3,000 tons of pollock that's harvested each year in that one state water stat area, so there is some higher reliance, I would say, in the Western Gulf area on some of those state waters areas.

Yeah, and then so going back to Kodiak area, so the Central Gulf, this slide shows on the left, the map shows total pollock harvest in state waters by statistical area during the parallel fishery from 2021 to 2025. And then for reference on the right, those are the Steller sea lion closures around the Kodiak Archipelago.

So you can see some of the activity in those stat areas have to do with where the Steller sea lion closures are. Looking for protected areas that are still open to pelagic trawl fishing.

Okay, so I went through this slide.

And I'm going to continue on now with the Prince William Sound fishery, just a high, high-level overview. This map is just to orient you to the Prince William Sound management area. As you know, it's divided into 3 sections so they can spread effort for management purposes.

The state-managed Pacific, the Prince William Sound pollock fishery managed by the state, it's essentially a subset of the catcher vessels that participate in the federal Gulf pollock fisheries. In order to promote an orderly fishery and adhere to strict bycatch limits for salmon, rockfish, and other species, the department coordinates with the fleet to limit the number of vessels that are actively fishing at any one time. In 2025, there were 11 vessels that participated, which is slightly lower than the 5-year average of 14 vessels. These vessels range in size from 58 feet to 121 feet and average about 90 feet. In most years, 100% of the harvest is delivered to Kodiak.

Occasionally, some deliveries do occur in Seward. Operational costs for this fishery are generally higher due to the increased distances from the processor and fuel costs. And this fishery fills an important seasonal gap for some vessels during the, the Aleutians and Pollock fishery.

Just a high-level note here on shore-based processors, during the previous 5 years, 2021 to 2025, trawl deliveries that went to Kodiak and Sandpoint processors represent about anywhere from a quarter to a third of the total ex-vessel value for all species that are delivered to those plants. In Alaska and Akutan, more than 50% of the total ex-vessel value from the previous 5 years was from trawl deliveries. So in this area in particular, you can see processors are, are, are— there are very few of them, and the distances to these processors are pretty far. The high-volume trawl fisheries help stabilize the processing operations throughout the year, which can support the processing of other fisheries such as cod, crab, halibut, and salmon. I'll note that prior to 2023, deliveries also occurred in King Cove.

Now we're switching focus to the Aleutian Islands. This includes the statewide fishery for Pacific cod in the Aleutian Islands Subdistrict, as well as federal non-pelagic trawl fisheries that also occur in the state parallel waters, which includes the Amendment 80. So these are the catcher processor non-pelagic trawl fleet and trawl limited access fisheries.

For the Aleutian Islands state managed fishery in the, in the Aleutian Islands Subdistrict, in 2025 there were 2 active trawl vessels. It just happened that in 2025, there were only 2 vessels active in the whole fishery, and, and those were those 2 trawl vessels. 14 Unique trawl vessels have participated in this fishery over the past 10 years. The fishery is also open to pot, longline, and jig vessels. 5 Of those 14 trawl vessels were homeported in Alaska.

The remaining 9 were homeported in Oregon and Washington. Trawl vessels range in size from 58 feet to 99 feet. There's a maximum limit in this fishery of, of no more than 100 feet. 5 Of those vessels were 58 feet and 9 were in the 85 to 99 foot range. The vessel size restrictions vary throughout the season.

When it first opens, it's open to trawl vessels less than 60 feet, and then after March 15th at the Commissioner's discretion. If the GHL is not going to be, if we don't predict that the GHL will be harvested by the end of the year, we can relax those length restrictions for trawl vessels to no more than 100 feet. All the vessels that participate also participate in the federally managed pelagic and/or non-pelagic trawl fisheries, and these vessels are diversified. Some do Bering Sea pollock, Some do Gulf Pollack. There are some Amendment 80 boats, ones that do Community Development Quota, some that participate in the Pacific Cod Trawl Cooperative Program in the Bering Sea, the Rockfish Program in the Gulf, or Gulf Pollack.

Question, Ms. Kimball? Yes, thanks, Ms. Bush. Is that an anomaly, 2 trawl vessels in 2025, or are we seeing participation go down? You said 14 over 10 years, but Kodiak is such a good market right now. I'm just wondering what, what's the reason for that low participation?

It is very far from any kind of shore-side processor, but can you give me a little more background on that? Yeah, thanks for the question through the chair. It is primarily tied, I think, to the availability of processors. The plant in Kodiak has been closed for a number of years. And so in order to Yeah, in order to prosecute that fishery, it's helpful to have a floater nearby.

It's a long way to Dutch Harbor, and the quality of cod can degrade pretty fast. So the limited participation that we've seen in recent years is, is tied to whether or not there's some platform in the area that, that can take those cod deliveries.

Mr. Moller. Yeah, Ms. Kim will ask my question. Thank you, Madam Chair.

This map here is similar to the ones you saw in the Gulf, focused on that state-managed Pacific cod fishery and where harvest has occurred. This map shows where harvest has occurred over the previous 10 years. We had to go back a little bit further because of the limited participation. These are areas primarily around ADAC, a little bit to the east as far as Atka, and then a little bit west of ADAC where most of the harvest in the state water fishery occurs. The map on the right there shows, shows a myriad of fishing closures and openers.

In red are the Steller sea lion, Pacific cod restrictions during the state GHL fishery. If you focus on the green areas, the green areas are the portions of the Aleutians Islands that are open to Pacific cod trawl. So where those green areas overlap the state water boundary, those are the areas open during the state-managed subdistrict fishery for Pacific cod.

Monitoring requirements for the federal fisheries, so Sara's going to talk a little bit about the fisheries that occur in the parallel waters during the federal seasons. The Amendment 80, which are those non-pelagic trawl catcher processors, they all carry a minimum of 2 observers, which we refer to as 200% coverage, plus cameras for monitoring compliance with with discards. The trawl limited access fishery, these are catcher vessels delivering unsorted catch to motherships. So they take the, the trawl cod end and that whole bag is transferred to the mothership and then sampled aboard the mothership, which has 100% observer coverage. And that's for both sampling the cod and accounting of bycatch on the mothership.

These vessels again have the same monitoring requirements whether they're in state or federal waters because they have that federal fisheries permit.

In considering the scope of vessels fishing with trawl gear west of 170 degrees west longitude, this would include some non-pelagic trawl vessels fishing primarily for POP, Pacific Ocean Perch, and akamakrel, We classify these vessels as Amendment 80 or trawl limited access, TLAS, vessels. In 2025, there were 5 of these vessels that had some activity in parallel waters. These are larger catcher processor vessels and some larger catcher vessels whose harvest is processed at sea. The, the vessels are connected to vessel owners in Washington and Maine.

These areas contribute to a small portion of the vessel's overall catch and gross revenue. However, the areas that are open to these vessels in both state and federal waters are fairly restricted in this area, so these additional nearshore areas preserve some operational flexibility. Much of the Aleutians Islands is closed to fishing with non-pelagic trawl, and I'll provide a map on this and the closures in the next part of the presentation. And, but there's also specific closures related to targeting prey species for steller sea lions, so that includes pollock, Pacific cod, and akamakrel. There's some distinct closures for those.

Species, but some discrete areas in both state and federal waters remain open.

And then this slide shows for you non-pelagic trawl catch in state waters west of 170 degrees west longitude. You can see from this figure, which was also presented to the board, I believe, in table form in March, but the primary species targeted are Athamackerel and POP, The percent of catch in state waters for these 3 species was greatest in 2022 at 1.2% of the total catch. And that's the end of our Part 1 presentation, and we're happy to have questions or discussion at this point.

Thank you both. Are there any other questions on the fleet profiles?

Yes, Miss Kimball. Thank you, Miss Marrinan. That, that last slide that you showed, that's a combination. That's the total catch from both the catcher processors and the catcher vessels combined. Okay, thank you.

Yes.

Thank you both.

So I think we're ready to move on. Oh. Mr. Moller?

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. Should have asked the question earlier, but the lack of participation in the state water peacock fishery in the Aleutians, in part, I think you cited because of lack of processor in the vicinity, what happens to that state water resource that is unharvested Does it roll over somewhere, or what's—.

Through the Chair, Mr. Moller, if the GHL is not harvested, any unharvested GHL just stays in the water. There's no mechanism to roll that back to the federal fishery, especially in the Bering Sea, because there's an overall 2 million metric ton limit to all groundfish harvest. And yeah, no mechanism to roll that over. This— the department does relax the management measures to both in the Aleutians Islands, so we can do it in the Gulf and in the Dutch Harbor Subdistrict. We can relax those vessel length restrictions.

We can remove the super exclusivity of those registration areas, so we can open it to vessels that have participated in other state-managed PCOD fisheries. We can relax pot limits if, if those exist. So there's a number of tools the department has to try to promote getting those GHLs harvested, but if, if they don't, then that cod stays in the water.

Thank you. And we just received a very brief summary of the CIE review. This is kind of going back to your third or fourth slide on the monitoring. In the North Pacific and observer coverage. So we received a summary of the CIA review of the annual deployment plan for the observer program.

And I understand that was a pretty unique review for such a program and wondering if— I'm not sure if you're prepared to speak to it, wondering if you could give a— just, I think it would be interesting for the committee to hear the findings of that or Perhaps Ms. Kimball can assist with that as well. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for the question through the chair. Yeah, if there's anything I missed, Nicole, please speak up. But the observer program did just go through a review for the Center of Independent Experts, the CIE.

It's the first that I know about of any of the federal observer programs that have gone through this independent review. They reviewed both the The, the report that the Council receives every year on the statistics of the program, how was the deployment in relation to the plan. The purpose is to get a representative sample of all the fisheries so that the National Marine Fisheries Service can track both retained and discarded catch. And the CIE review concluded that the statistics that were reported and tracked were appropriate, that the program is providing a representative sample of the data, and the deployment scheme, yeah, is appropriate for the types of gear or for the types of information where we're asking it to provide. And, um, yeah, it was a thumbs up review, I guess.

Thank you. I guess I would just add, because it was a pretty significant effort, um, we were glad NOAA took on that challenge of doing a Center for Independent Experts review. And I guess I would just, um, remind folks that based on that slide that that Sara showed on, like, most of the coverage, most of the fisheries or the harvest is in full coverage. So the CIE review was just on the portion that's in partial coverage. And the whole point was, are we getting representative sampling for those that aren't required to have 100% observer or EM coverage?

Are we getting representative sampling from that sampling that we do in that partial coverage component? Is it representative of boats that aren't fishing? And so how are we deploying observers in a way that is statistically valid, basically, to say all the things that we're saying about harvest rates, discards, all of the things that we're collecting on fisheries. So it was a very successful review that it's not— Carl is right, that's never been done for any observer program in the country. We clearly have a higher level observer program than— more observer days than anyone anywhere in the country, so it was valid to do it on our region.

If anyone's interested, that full report is out. It was 3 independent experts, scientists from other countries, to review the program. So it was a big deal. I'm glad you brought attention to it. Thanks.

Thank you both for that. Okay, I think we're ready to move on to the second presentation. Okay, so part 2 is about some management measures. This information is intended to help the committee understand management tools that exist and ways they've been used, with particular attention to Aleutians Island area closures and current fluter use and requirements.

So this first slide, this is very high level. It's a little hard to see on the screen, but it's to set the stage for some tools we're going to talk about in more detail. So for both state and federal regulations, there is reliance on a suite of management tools to achieve conservation goals and mitigate adverse impacts from commercial fishing and fishing gear. Examples are 3 broad categories of tools here. Area closures, bycatch limits, and gear requirements.

In council actions, the council articulates a purpose and need statement with specific objectives of an action. So whether it's bycatch reduction or protecting sensitive habitat or unobserved crab mortality, it can be more than one, but the tools that are considered are intended to flow directly from the stated objectives. So as analysts, we're then evaluating impacts relative to that stated language. From a council member role, when recommending measures to achieve that objective, they must also consider and be in alignment with applicable laws. So national standards of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, managing to optimal yield, reducing bycatch to the extent practicable, considering the importance of fishery resources to communities.

And there is variations of all these tools that are sometimes considered in order to address these legal obligations. Area closures have been used often under a range of different objectives. There's variations such as specificity to the types of gear used, certain sensitive times of the year for a species. Area closures can also be triggered by in-season bycatch accounting, and federal regulations have also built on opportunities to use dynamic area-based closures based on in-season catch and bycatch information. So we're going to talk about some of these examples.

Also, bycatch limits is another category of management measures, and there's variations on that, and gear requirements, which can mean a lot of things. For purposes here, we're going to focus on requirements and use of salmon excluders.

So this map shows all kinds of area closures. Again, there's a lot of variations and types of area closures. There are about 200 conservation areas that have been established to conserve marine resources and biodiversity and protect vulnerable habitats and ecosystems. Of these closed areas, about 61% or over 2— over 650,000 nautical miles squared of federal waters in the North Pacific are closed to bottom trawling year-round. A total of over 145,000 nautical miles squared are closed year-round to bottom tending gears.

Additional areas are closed for, for directed fishing for important prey species of Steller sea lions to minimize potential competition with the fishing fleet for prey. And this is a very high-level map, but I just wanted to also point you to a resource that's on the e-agenda. There's the North Pacific Conservation Areas Summary, which provides you a snapshot of all these area closures and, and others. And some of the history behind them. So I think that's a really good resource.

I forgot to mention, presenters posted different resources on our e-agenda that we might be referencing throughout our presentations. But I think that's a good one for some history behind each of these closure areas.

I was asked to provide some context for one closure area in particular. This is the Aleutian Island Habitat Conservation Area. It encompasses nearly the entire Aleutian Islands sub-area except for specific areas that have supported the highest groundfish catches in the past. This was implemented in 2006 to prevent the expansion of non-pelagic trawling into relatively undisturbed habitats while allowing most major fishing areas to remain open. So it, it essentially froze the footprint of trawl fishing in this area, and the shapes of those openers were based off of Fisheries Observer data, fishing industry catch data, the average duration and distance during a single deployment of non-plagic trawl gear, and the need for clear boundaries to be delineated using straight lines and orientated to lat-long when possible.

This broad area includes habitat that's not designated as EFH, essential fish habitat. However, incomplete information suggested a more precautionary measure could be important to the managed species. And this is one of the areas that's included in that North Pacific Conservation Area summary document that I linked, so there's some more information on this area there.

And this closure, in addition to several others, applied to the non-pelagic trawl vessels fishing for P.O.P. And akamakrel in the Aleutians Islands.

Yes, Ms. Carlson-Van Dort. Thank you. Maybe this question is for Karla. Can you— and you referenced the sort of the historical document, you know, around the closure areas. My question is, do you have any background available to us now about the history of the state waters closures?

I'm assuming to non-pelagic trawl, although in the slide it's just listed as state waters, no trawling. Can you be more specific about that?

Yeah, I think if— thank you for the question through the Chair, Ms. Van Dort. If you— there was a figure in one of the last slides in the previous presentation that showed those areas open to Pacific cod fishing withdrawal during the state— well, during the state and federal, but where those green areas overlapped. Are the areas that are open. There are some Steller sea lion closure areas that are larger during the federal fishery than during the state GHL fishery. I'm thinking of one area near Kodiak in particular, but as far as non-pelagic trawl closures in the Aleutians Islands, they are just in the areas where, where in that previous slide we don't have the green area, or in this slide where the white areas— well, the red areas in this slide are closed in both state and federal waters, and then the white areas are open in state and federal waters unless otherwise closed for Steller sea lions.

Thanks, and this is— you were ahead of me because I was fixated on the slide 4. So my question was primary to what was on the slide before, which would have been slide—. This one. Yeah, that one.

Yeah, through the chair, uh, Ms. Van Dort, there are a number of, uh, state water non-pelagic trawl closures in the Gulf and portions of the Bering Sea Aleutians Islands in this blue zone, which is zoomed in on the next slide, there aren't specific non-pelagic trial closures in state regulations that I'm aware of, but I would have to review to follow up. Thanks. So the context of the question is, you know, to the proposals that we received at the statewide March meeting where they're contemplating, you know, considering the definitions of pelagic and non-pelagic and the be existing closures in state waters to non-flagged. And that's referenced on this slide with all of the red around state of Alaska shorelines, correct? Through the chair, Ms. Van Dort.

Correct. And you don't see those red areas the further west you get. You see them predominantly in the Gulf. But I want to pull you out of that because those proposals didn't contemplate just the western Gulf entirely.

Through the chair, Ms. Van Dort, correct, those were focused on all state waters. Exactly. So that's my question is what is the history behind the non-pelagic closures in state waters if you have that? Why does that exist? And so not just specific to an area, I'm talking about all that red that's notated on this, on the slide.

Through the chair, Marit Carlson-Van Dort. There may be others who have more background on that history, but the, in general, the purpose of those non-pelagic trawl closures were, you know, I don't know off the top of my head when they were created, but it was to limit the amount of non-pelagic trawling in those areas because for habitat and other impacts too. Minimize those impacts. Thanks.

Okay, so I was asked to talk a bit about the use and requirements around salmon excluders. This is a modification to a trawl net, typically pelagic, but they're also sometimes used in non-pelagic nets. That allows salmon to escape while retaining target catch. So in the Bering Sea pelagic trawl fisheries, it's required for the fleet throughout the year in contracts that are required in regulations and approved by NIMS. The council receives annual reports, they must be submitted describing use compliance and highlighting any contingencies in use.

Regulations don't dictate specific design or specifications. For Gulf pelagic trawl fisheries, excluders have been widely adopted by most of the Central Gulf Fleet delivering to Kodiak. There's less overall use by the Western Gulf Fleet. The largest hurdle cited by these operators was in, in identifying effective designs for smaller, low-horsepower vessels. As we kind of alluded to before, that fleet is 58-foot vessels, so different characteristics than the, generally than the Kodiak fleet, and certainly than the Bering Sea pollock fleet.

There's no federal requirements or specifications for excluder use in the Gulf.

I have a question, Mr. Moller.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for the presentation here. I'm focusing on the regulation part on the Bering Sea pollock trawl fishery.

And not knowing, you know, the longer-term history relative to that discussion, is there a reason— is there a reason there hasn't been regulation written relative to excluders?

Through the Chair, Mr. Moller, so in the Bureaucracy, there are regulations for use as part of incentive plan agreements, which are contract within private agreements signed by participating members. All the Bering Sea POLRC fleet are party to these contracts. So there are regulations that dictate they're required through that mechanism. Those regulations don't have specifications associated with them as to what those excluders need to look like. I am going to talk through in one of my other slides about some of the trade-offs.

I'm not sure if that's what the Council was considering and not putting further specifications in, but I think there are some trade-offs to consider in thinking about detailed specifications and regulations as to what these designs should be.

Is there a high degree— I mean, I imagine just size, but is there a high degree of configurability, specificity, or change in configuration of the gear amongst the, you know, the various vessel sizes? Through the chair, Ms. Carlson-Van Dort, I think that goes next and filters next into my next slide. I think there is, I think there are some general designs that have been used repeatedly, but I think there's a lot of customizations to those designs. So this is a diagram. Oh, did you want to say something?

Yeah. Through the chair, I would just add, as Sarah mentioned, the use of excluders is part of those incentive plan agreements. It's very hard to change federal regulation. It's a multi-year process. And so there's a lot more flexibility having that through the IPAs.

They can change those fairly quickly compared to the federal regulations. And so the federal regulations are meant to sort of stay at a, a higher level where we want to allow for innovation and things to modify through time. And that was one of the decisions to have, or why that's specifically in those incentive plan agreements and not hardwired into the federal regulation, because we want to keep that innovation happening and that flexibility.

Yes, and Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I just want to clarify though, because I think we're talking about two different things. The federal regulations do require that you have a salmon excluder to be part of this fleet. We just don't dictate what that salmon excluder specifications are because of Ms. Carlson-Van Dort's question about different configurations working better for different vessels.

OK, thank you.

Yes, Mr. Wood. Alright, another one of those questions. So the salmon excluders are there too because the larger vessels are moving fast enough that that would allow salmon to basically outswim the net by going through an excluder, right? So the purpose of the smaller vessels that aren't going as fast and not having them is because basically the mouth of the net is going so slow they can just swim out the mouth of the net, they can outrun it.

Through the chair, Mr. Wood, I think partly yes to your question there. I think what you're describing is the reason for different types of designs because these vessels widely vary in horsepower and towing speeds. And I think the intention of this design, you can kind of see in the diagram here, is to capitalize on the difference between how salmon and pollock react in the net. So salmon tend to be stronger swimmers. I think they're taking advantage of the salmon's desire to find a back eddy and using the design to help the salmon swim out.

And because these vessels are so different, different designs have worked better for different vessels. So the excluder is generally located in the back of the trawl net, forward of the cod end. This diagram shows two different general types that I think have been used commonly, the flapper design and the over-under design, and both styles rely on the differences in the swimming behavior between the target catch and the bycatch species.

As we discussed, I think these are highly customizable. I've heard of different things that people add within these kinds of designs, or where it's placed in the net can be different. But I also think I have heard and read through the EFPs that how the vessel operates really matters too, the water currents. But I think two of the big factors that I've heard for the differences in what works for a vessel is horsepower and towing speed. So it's not necessarily that they swim out, but just, and CPU-E too, if they're encountering large quantities of pollock, it might be harder to allow the salmon the opportunity to use the excluder.

So I think they're working through those details to find the right design for the situation for that boat.

So yeah, I think there's some general designs, but they are not necessarily off the shelf, and how they're installed and used is different by vessels. Oh, thank you, Miss Carlson-Van Dort. Thanks.

Through the chair, yes, that is my understanding, is that the vessels in the Bering Sea tend to be higher horsepower. There's some that are more of a similar size and caliber, so they've found a design that works well for them, and they're, they're used throughout the fleet. In the Gulf, the fleet is much more diverse. You've got these 58-foot vessels, you have vessels that are larger than that, One of the exempted fishing permits tested this over-under design on a smaller catcher vessel that operates in the Bering Sea, but it's still larger than the 58-foot vessels in, in the Western Gulf, and found a design that worked well for that vessel. But my understanding from some of the comments from the fleet was that there's still some questions about finding an effective design for that 58-foot fleet that can work for lower horsepower, potentially slower towing speeds.

Sorry. Thanks. See, red to me means off.

Thank you. So I think you'd made reference earlier to the incentive plans that are in the Gulf. Does something similar exist, or is there something that's being developed in the— I'm sorry, in the Bering Sea? Is there something that's being developed in the Gulf similar to sort of incentivize some of this innovation? What's going on?

What's, what's, what's this carrot? What's the stick? Through the chair, I think that's a good question. It's my understanding that vessels that participate in cooperative programs are mostly using these excluders now. So if they're part of the Gulf, Central Gulf of Alaska Rockfish Program, or if they participate in the whiting fishery, some of these cooperatives have internal agreements to use excluders.

The Gulf pollock fishery isn't rationalized. There isn't a cooperative that exists across the full fleet. So I think some of those cooperative tools help the fleet internally make those kinds of commitments.

Do you have anything to add? So there are no incentives right now.

Well, through the chair, I guess there are bycatch limits, so the vessels are still working to reduce their bycatch so they don't hit the limits and close down the fisheries. It's, it's, yeah, it's a different structure than within the Bering Sea. Thank you. And Ms. Kimball. Thank you.

And I mean, just to add to that, if that's possible, I think that some of the testimony that we had heard previously related to this too was So the— so who's in state waters in the Western Gulf is mainly the less than 58-foot fleet. And part of the concern was if they're using an excluder that actually makes their efficiency that much worse, so they're catching a lot less of their target catch by using the excluder, then they're just out on the water longer trying to meet their target catch, and then they have more salmon as bycatch. And so they have to find an efficient excluder, not just an excluder, in order to not have that conundrum. That I just wanted to say, that's part of what we heard previously. But I think, I mean, Ms. Marrinan is certainly correct that there's no rationalization program, but the incentive is still, especially for Kodiak, which is primarily using excluders, is to stay under their bycatch limit.

Yes, and that characterization or concern was, I think, highlighted in one public comment letter that was submitted. For this. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Mr. Wood. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate the description up here, and it just to be sure I'm catching this right. So in the smaller boats have lower horsepower, smaller nets. If the excluders don't work as well because they're not going fast enough.

And so incentivize them to use excluders would mean speed up your boat. So that they work better. And I'm, I'm like, it seems like the purpose of excluders to allow them to escape because of the speed, right? So if they're going so slow that they are escaping, is the, is the bycatch larger because, because they don't have the excluders?

Through the chair, people may be able to speak to this better in public testimony who have worked with these designs, but I think rather than this, the not being able to keep the fish swimming out, I think the issue is providing the right flotation for it to open and for the dimensions to work so that with the hydrodynamics and water flow, the salmon can escape. So I think it's, it's more about finding that right design for the low horsepower so that it, everything floats right and allows for the salmon to get out in that way. I think your expert may be able to speak better to that than me.

This slide mentions a lot of the things we already talked about, but I guess to reiterate some of the takeaway messages we've learned from some of the past EFP work and on-the-water work with excluders is that different designs work better for different vessels. Horsepower is a big factor here. They can be highly efficient under the right conditions when properly used on the correct vessel. One point to highlight that Karla mentioned is that with past EFPs and other gear innovation design, you know, we've looked at halibut pots, slinky pots, other things in the North Pacific, a lot of regulatory detail on gear specifications can stymie innovation and require a long amendment process, especially in in the federal management process, amendments can take a long time. So with any regulatory language on approved designs, it's important to consider opportunities for future improvements.

There's been 6 EFPs for salmon excluders since 2003. There's currently one active EFP for a chum salmon excluder design, which is a very different design. And we've linked— the Council received a presentation on this EFP in June. And so I linked that presentation to the e-agenda. There's likely to be improvements, future improvements in design and configuration.

Okay. And we can have any other questions about Part 2 if you'd like. Otherwise, we'll turn it over to the presenters for Part 3.

I'm not seeing any. Thank you very much. Thank you. So just to introduce Part 3 here, this next set of presentations will be presented by Dr. Jodi Prittle with NMFS and Dr. Brad Harris with the APU FAST Lab on essential fish habitat. The information was requested to help the committee understand the federal statutory requirements for assessing the impacts of federal groundfish fisheries on habitat.

And the tools that the council uses.

Dr. Harrison Purdell.

Welcome. Good afternoon. For the record, Jodi Pirtle, NOAA Fisheries.

I'll begin Part 3 with an essential fish habitat overview, including statutory requirements for assessing the impacts of Council-managed groundfish fisheries on essential fish habitat in the North Pacific region and the tools that we use. Dr. Harris will follow with the Fishing Effects Model, our impact assessment tool. To begin, I'd like to orient you to the resources we provided with the e-agenda, including an excellent overall reference is our 2023 review final summary report, which goes into all the aspects of EFH in great detail, more than Dr. Harris and I are able to cover in our presentation today. There is a detailed reference on the 2022 EFH fishing effects evaluation from the last EFH review, which provides a great amount of information on our fishing effects evaluation. There's an infographic, which is a handy guide and a great place to start.

We also provide references detailing plans for the current in-progress EFH review.

Dr. Pirtle, I'm hearing that might be a little challenging to hear you, so wondering if you can put your microphone a little closer if possible. Thank you, Ms. Drobnica.

Is this an improvement? Okay, thank you. All right.

An introduction to the EFH statutory requirements. The Magnuson-Stevens Act defines EFH as those waters and substrate necessary to fish for spawning, breeding, feeding, or growth to maturity. The MSA requires that federal fishery management plans describe and identify EFH, minimize to the extent practicable adverse effects on EFH caused by fishing, and identify other actions to encourage the conservation enhancement EFH. In other words, we must identify EFH for species with the Federal Fishery Management Plan, evaluate whether federal fisheries are having more than a minimal or temporary adverse effect on EFH at the population level for the species, and act as warranted. And NMFS has published guidelines in the Federal Register for how to implement these MSA regulations linked here.

Federal regulations require that each Fishery Management Plan includes these 10 components of EFH listed here. The 2023 EFH Review Summary Report describes many of these in great detail. It's a helpful reference.

Our focus today of Part 3 are these components in which represent the decision support system together with our process and science tools to meet these statutory requirements for assessing the impacts of Council-managed groundfish fisheries on EFH. These are EFH Component 1: Description and Identification, what EFH is for each species and where it is. Component 2: Fishing Activities That May Adversely Affect EFH, for the species at the population level. And Component 10, EFH 5E reviews, which are the process. Together, these form the decision support system for meeting our MSA requirements.

EFH 5E reviews, Component 10, that last one in that list. This is the process. It is an event that occurs at least every 5 years. It's an iterative process with built-in iterative stages of review, including science peer review along the way to objectively evaluate the EFH information that we have. Some key milestones for your awareness was the EFH EIS, Environmental Impact Statement, of 2005.

And then the EFH 5-year reviews followed that, the first in 2010. 2017, Most recently in 2023, and the current EFH review is in progress.

Each review has brought a great deal of innovation and refinement to the science-based tools that we use to meet the statutory requirements for EFH and represents decades of commitment by our council and NIMPS to this process.

Process. The current EFH review is based on direction received from the Council and others during the 2023 EFH review, the last one, and reflects the current priorities of the Council and NIMPS.

Okay.

I'm being patient with the laptop.

There we go.

It's usually these maps.

EFH description and identification is that first component of EFH in that list that I provided, appearing in our fishery management plans as text descriptions, tables, and maps. This information represents what constitutes EFH and where it is located for each FMP species. Where is EFH? So this figure that's oval-shaped is to help us talk about this in easy terms. EFH is not all habitats and waters.

It is a subset of those habitats and waters where a species resides and that are required to successfully complete its life history. Represented by that smaller, darker shaded oval circle. And Habitat Areas of Particular Concern are an example of, under the EFH components, a type of conservation action that the Council can take and has taken in the past, as described by Sarah in Part 2 of the talk. This is an example over on the right of one of our EFH maps from the 2023 EFH review. For red king crab in the Bering Sea.

EFH maps for crabs in the crab FMP will be refined to map EFH by sex and maturity stage for the first time, as the data and modeling methods have advanced to do this well. And this was a recommendation coming from the last review, demonstrating how we take input along the way and continually improve this information. I'd like to mention that the first EFH maps in our region were literally drawing polygons around survey data and to highlight the areas of highest abundance for our species, which is, um, a place to begin. Historically, that was decades ago. Other regions in the country are still taking this approach.

Their data, their process, their collaborations, their relationships may not— well, let me say it this way— are different than up here.

We have come so far in our approach in the North Pacific region, and we represent the gold standard of how to do this nationally. I'll describe how we make these maps and how to read them next.

These maps are so data-rich that the laptop gets tired moving between slides. Here we go. We map EFH in the North Pacific region using species distribution models. Now, I love it when I have a presentation and I can talk about these for most of the presentation, but I, I won't linger here long, even though this is my favorite part. And my team at the Alaska Regional Office develops these species distribution models and maps historically, also with collaboration from our science partners at the Science Center.

Academic partners, and others. What are species distribution models? They are an analytical tool that combines data of species occurrence with environmental variables to produce a map of habitat-related species distribution for the area of the fishery management plan and with estimates of model uncertainty and skill. We introduced SDM EFH maps in the 2017 EFH 5-year review and have iteratively refined our models and maps with each subsequent EFH review to improve our methods, data, and skill. This map on the right is for adult Pacific Ocean perch in the Gulf of Alaska.

How to read this map? EFH is the upper 95th percentile of the spatial domain of occupied habitat for a species and is mapped with additional subarea percentiles. So you'll note the range of colors on this map. So the EFH area is all of the colored areas, yellow, green, blue, purple.

And then we also have a different, uh, subset percentile area called the core EFH area representing the yellow and the green areas. And the core EFH area is an input of the EFH component 2 fishing effects evaluation, which you will hear more about next from Dr. Harris.

As mentioned in each EFH review, when new information is available, we refine the existing body of information. For the current EFH review, we will refine the SDMEFH maps with methods and data updates. This review is focused on a subset of groundfish species in the BSAI and Gulf of Alaska groundfish FMPs and all species in the crab FMP. New in this EFH review, my team is developing spatio-temporal SDMs to explore changes in essential fish habitat over time. Those maps that you observed on the previous slides represented the long-term time series of essential fish habitat for the species.

Adding maps that represent whether or not a species EFH may or may not shift with environmental change and management measures as well is an approach that we'd like to introduce this review. These maps and models that we're producing are also part of the Council's Climate Work Plan. And if you are following along with the Gulf of Alaska Tanner crab protection action that the Council is moving along, for Tanner crab in the Gulf of Alaska, which are not an FMP species, these spatiotemporal models were helpful to demonstrate persistence of Tanner crab habitat. Over time under a variety of environmental conditions and management measures.

Thank you, Ms. Carlson-Van Dort. Thanks, and if this isn't the right time, just tell me you're going to talk about it later. But my question is, is what are the primary indicators that you use for EFH? Is it just concentration or numbers of occupation? What other indicators are you are you measuring or observing to indicate whether or not it's, you know, essential fish habitat or whatever that second tier is, the HA— what do we got here— HAPC?

Through the chair, thank you for the question, Ms. Van Dort. I would enjoy talking a little bit more about that. So those species distribution models are based on data. It's the species occurrence data from our surveys, primarily the bottom trawl survey by our Alaska Fisheries Science Center. We also have some fishery data-based maps from the 2017 review.

Those models bring in a whole stack of environmental variables: temperature, depth, coral presence, sponge presence, rockiness, substrate, currents. And we use all of that information together in relationship to where those species are found by our survey, and it shakes it up in this model that measures those relationships, and that's how it produces that map. So it's a representation of the species relationship to all of those environmental variables together that makes that map of essential fish habitat. It's where the species is, and it's why it's there. Which is the relationship to the habitat.

And that makes perfect sense. Thank you for that. And I'm assuming that this is done over time and that these are not just, you know, are these an average over time or is this representing a snapshot? Through the chair, thank you for—. Of species presence.

Thank you for that additional question, Ms. Van Dort. Our EFH maps and the fishery management plans are the long-term mean of where the species are occurring through time. Those spatiotemporal models I probably talked too much about, but I'm excited about, will show shorter temporal segments.

Thank you. All right.

EFH component 2, fishing effects. Each FMP must contain an evaluation of the potential adverse effects of fishing on EFH for species under the FMP. Each FMP must minimize to the extent practical adverse effects from fishing on EFH and the councils must act to prevent, mitigate, or minimize adverse effects to EFH from fishing to the extent practical. If there is evidence that a fishing activity adversely affects EFH in a manner that is more than temporary— in a manner, let me back up, that is more than minimal and not temporary in nature based on the evaluation. Now, this is at the population level.

We manage fish. We don't manage the seafloor. The council has taken several actions. These are the conservation measures with the habitat nexus that Sarah described in part 2. The 2023 EFH 5-year review summary report lists these actions and tables in great detail and describes their nexus with EFH, and we have linked those sections here.

Dr. Pirtle, can you expand a little bit on what no more than minimal or temporary means, what that threshold is? Through the Chair, Ms. Drobnica. Chair Drobnica, thanks for the question. The regulations require that we evaluate adverse effects from fishing to essential fish habitat for a species based on a threshold of not more than minimal temporary in nature, meaning a minimal persistent effect on essential fish habitat that does not recover over time. And we must demonstrate this at the population level because we manage fish and we manage those populations for sustainability in this long-term food system.

Think of National Standard 1 as a helpful nexus here. So it's effects to EFH linked at the species population level. If we cannot demonstrate that an adverse effect has occurred to habitat that is affecting the population to recruit, reproduce, exist at sustainable level of harvest, then it's not meeting that threshold. In the fishing effects evaluation, which I'm going to describe on this slide, I will get into that in a little more detail, which I think might also be helpful, which is why we bring in the stock assessment authors, the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, to conduct that evaluation.

All right. These are the stages of our EFH fishing effects evaluation, which correspond to the flowchart on the right. This is a multi-step process. We are just at the beginning of this process in the current EFH 5E review where we are reviewing the existing model inputs, the existing models, including those EFH maps. And we are updating those inputs, and Dr. Harris will describe, uh, the fishing effects model and those inputs next.

As his FAST lab runs and are the lead developers of the fishing effects model and have been indeed working on this type of work for, for decades and are national leaders. We're fortunate to partner with this group.

The part that brings in the EFH maps to this process is where, after the Fishery Effects Model is run, we overlay those maps with the model. Dr. Harris will describe this, and then we hand the stock assessment authors, the species experts who conduct the effects determination by species, and they do this at the population level. They are running analyses, quantitative analyses, to identify whether or not there is a relationship between the status of that population and the impacts of fishing to that area of AFH. I'm purposefully not getting into detail here. And then after that stage of the process, we report the findings of the plan team and to the council bodies.

And there is an opportunity to recommend species for possible mitigation measures as related to the fishing effects evaluation results. And now I think is a good time to, to remind everybody that this is one part of the EFH 5E review. The council receives a summary report at the end of an EFH 5E review. And historically, based on the information from the review, including the results of this evaluation, the Council may request proposals and consider additional management measures to conserve, protect, enhance CFH, which occur separate from any FH-5B review, as those are regulatory actions.

All right. This is my last slide. The current EFH 5-year review was launched in December 2025. You can find more information on the plan and priorities for that review in the documents linked to the agenda. As a next— well, backing up.

This past February, our SSC, Scientific and Statistical Committee, reviewed the proposed work plans for updating the EFH maps. And the fishing effects evaluation. The SSC is currently scheduled to receive a progress update on the EFH fishing effects model this February. And at the end, the Council receives a summary report of this new information and can decide to take appropriate action as follows, which could be updating the fishery management plans with the new information or not, and going from there. So, to close, my last statement, I just want to also emphasize that although there is this high bar to meet adverse effects that are not more than minimal or temporary to EFH at the population level, our evaluation is set up such that if a stock assessment author is concerned, if they're not finding relationships but they're concerned based on what they know about the stock, they can bring that concern to the SSC and the SSC can decide to raise a mitigation conversation with the council.

So it just doesn't stop in the quantitative part. It doesn't stop with math. It is a gut check and it's an opportunity for a deeper look. That's all I have and I'll pass it to Dr. Harris if there are not questions at this time. Thank you.

Great, thank you. We may have a couple questions. Ms. Kimball. Thank you through the chair. Thank you, Dr. Pirtle, for that presentation and I, I appreciate you going through the process and the data inputs and then providing these references.

One of the things that I look for as a council member is what is the cumulative habitat disturbed? And I didn't know if that was part of your presentation on our most recent EFH review, or is— am I jumping ahead, or is that— are you just focused on the process, not kind of what we're seeing? Because I think it's relevant to, you know, whether the council's taken mitigation— further mitigation measures recently is based on the results of that kind of analysis. And the most recent analysis, I guess I would say, did not provide us any strong rationale for taking additional action in any region. So I didn't know if you were going to provide the results of that, or if Dr. Harris is, or whether we could just have that in discussion.

I think it's important for board members to understand the results that we're seeing that makes us take action or not take action. Thank you.

Through the chair, thank you for the question, Ms. Kimball. Dr. Harris will touch on that in his part of the talk. I agree, that's important.

Um, also just a reminder that each time we conduct an EFH review and fishing effects evaluation, Those evaluations are occurring in the context of all of those management measures to conserve and protect habitat that the Council has already taken. And over time, it's not an isolation of actions we've already taken.

Thank you. Any further questions? Yes, Mr. Carpenter. Thank you. Thanks for the presentation.

Dr. Purdell, um, on the last slide you have, uh, I think it's step 3 where it talks about, um, the overlay of the fishing effects model and updated maps and how you calculate estimates of habitat disturbance for each area. And this may be something that you could direct me to, maybe it's not an easy thing to answer right now, but what kind of inputs go into that model to be able to calculate the estimate of habitat disturbance based on the type of fishing activities that are taking place in any one given area. So I don't know if that's some simple answer, probably not. If not, direct me to where I can like read about it. Thank you for the question, Mr. Carpenter, through the chair.

A great resource to learn more about that in detail is that 2022 Fishing Effects evaluation report linked to the agenda, and I'll pass the remaining part of the response to Dr. Harris.

Good morning, members of the Joint Protocol Committee. Apologize, my voice is a little scratchy. My son played a football game earlier this week, so he's doing my dad thing. So I will, Mr. Carpenter address the specifics that you're talking about. But first, by way of introduction, my name is Dr. Brad Harris.

I'm a research scientist and university professor with appointments at both Alaska Pacific University and University of Alaska Anchorage. And I've spent most of my career— well, I was born and raised in Anchor Point down near Homer, and I've had the privilege of commercial fishing salmon and then working for a number of years as a boat officer on the Department of Fish and Game research vessel Pandalus, and did graduate research on the East Coast. And throughout the course of my career, I've worked extensively with fishing gear, and I think the work that we're moving forward here related to gear should help provide some clarity to the questions that you, you posed in terms of what the purpose of this meeting is. I definitely welcome any questions. Along the way.

And so, Mr. Angel Drobnica, if you're ready, I'll just dive in.

I wanted to check in with the committee members. I just realized this might be a good breaking point. I'm sorry, you just gave an introduction, but yeah, I'm getting some head nods, so I want to make sure everyone is fully attentive during your presentation. So we might take a 15-minute break and come back. Okay, so let's come back at 10:25.

Thank you.

Committee members, please come back to order.

So it doesn't look like we're going to get to public testimony before lunch, so our testimony signup will close after lunch. Time to be determined, but probably around 1:00 PM. And we'll assess the time limits based on how many people sign up. We have some flexibility between, you know, the board process and the council process, but right now I'm guessing around 4 minutes per person. And so we're ready to continue on with our presentations.

And Dr. Harris, if you could point people to the title of your presentation on the e-agenda, that would be great. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just quickly again, for the record, my name is Dr. Brad Harris. I'm a professor at Alaska Pacific University and University of Alaska Anchorage, and I'll be covering Essential Fish Habitat Component 2 that Dr. Pirtle mentioned, which is the fishing effects evaluation. My presentation listed on your e-agenda. This one is called JPC Part 3, FEM, and then today's date.

So hopefully that's relatively easy to find. I'm not going to revisit the items that are listed on the e-agenda. Dr. Pirtle covered those really well, but they should provide you with quite a bit of background material in terms of the details associated with the fishing effects model inputs analysis. Structure outputs the full package, including an infographic that was prepared by council staff that tries to simplify some of those key inputs and outputs and so forth. As well as, as Dr. Pirtle mentioned, our— we are in the midst of an ongoing 5-year review, and so we are in— we are being responsive to guidance from the Scientific and Statistical Committee of the North Pacific Council with specific updates related to fishing effects work, which I'll touch on.

So to dive in, the slide that you see here in front of you has some imagery, and this was collected by a device called the cam sled that was built by Department of Fish and Game staff based in Kodiak, Dr. Craig Rosenkranz and others. And so this imagery is from Aleutians off Kodiak, primarily in areas where there's skulled fishing, But just give us a reminder of the types of seabed that we see, the organisms that are present, and remember that when Magnuson Act was created and when the Sustainable Fisheries Act amendments were made, there was a recognition that we needed to think about sustainability beyond harvest, but to think about the act of fishing and how that may potentially impact the ecosystem's ability to continue to produce fish. In a way that's consistent with maximum sustained yield. And so those provisions were included to make sure that we're, we're watching what's happening with the system beyond just harvest and so forth. And so, as was mentioned by Dr. Pirtle, since about 2005, there's been active process ongoing with the councils around the country.

And as you well know, each of the councils really has to follow the same structural guidelines, but is given the freedom to do so in ways that are consistent with the regions in which they're located. That's why we have 8 regional councils, is because there's some substantial differences between, say, New England and here in the North Pacific.

So I'm going to back up just for a minute to give you a sense of how we came to where we are today with this tool called the Fishing Effects Model. And so as the regulations went in place, councils around the country began to try and figure out how to— and agency staff— figure out how to execute the rules in that process, there was a recognition that this was— fishing is complicated, and in order to map essential fish habitat and to make a meaningful assessment of how our activities and harvests may be impacting these stocks, we needed tools to do so. And those tools, as Dr. Pirtle mentioned, we call today decision support tools, What do they do? They synthesize the available scientific information in the form of the literature, available data, information, say, from catch accounting to provide managers with information sufficient to understand what's happening beyond a single operation or type of an event, but to let them look at tradeoffs. And so here in the North Pacific, uh, in 2005, researchers developed what was called the Long-Term Effects Index, the LEI model.

And it attempted to take fishing information and some habitat information and make predictions about, um, how much disturbance was resulting in the ecosystem associated with a particular fishery. The challenge was it did so in using differential equations and so forth, and it produced an output where your fishery would get a score of 1.2. Nobody really knew what that meant. It didn't give the council opportunity to, um, say, consider different actions, look at trade-offs. And so, um, About around 2010, a team in New England that I had the privilege of participating with developed what's called the Swept Area Seabed Impacts Model, which was designed to take on board VMS, which is kind of new and emerging at that time, and use it to link individual fishing events to expected disturbance outcomes and so forth.

That's the precursor to the Fishing Effects Model that we see today. What's my point? There's a large team nationally who've worked on these tools over the course of 2 to 3 decades, resulting in, um, the work that I'm gonna talk about with you today. And so this is by no means, um, the outputs of just my research team alone. Um, and we continue to work collectively, uh, and collaboratively with the folks in New England.

Um, and indeed, uh, through international organizations that address these same issues around the world, primarily through the European process using the International Council for Exploration of the Sea expert working groups. And so while I do say things like my group and so forth, this is a much, much bigger initiative. And this has been growing and evolving now for several decades.

Okay. What are some of the things that we learned in the development of those foundational tools. Number one, in order to say something meaningful about the effects of fishing in essential fish habitat, we got to know something about the fishing events. Where do they occur? When do they occur?

What are they out there to target? How much effort is being required to achieve a particular amount of catch? What are the dimensions or other characteristics of these fishing gears that result in potential impacts to the seabed? That can be rigging, It can be the size of the gear, the way it's configured. So we have to move beyond just generic labels like pelagic trawl.

It's a specific piece of gear built out of specific materials, deployed, fished, and used in a specific way. How much of that gear contacts the seabed, that's a key focus because much of what we've focused on in the development of these tools is responsive to the fact that at that seabed, a seawater interface, that's where most of the action happens. Right? Crab live there, halibut live there, adult pollock are within inches of the seabed, Pacific cod are there, salmon are there. And so all of these potential interact and as well as seabed habitats.

And so contact and fishing in proximity to the seabed is key. For example, all of the gears that are actively managed in the federal fisheries here in the North Pacific make contact with the seabed. All of them have a documented literature of effects to the seabed in the course of fishing. Pots, longlines, even jigs, um, sports fishing gear, right? Lead weights when you're fishing for halibut, they're contacting the seabed.

And so the scientific community recognizes that and has built these tools to be able to assess the effects of all the gears. Emphasis has been on trawls because they're large, they have a lot of fishing power, and if used in places that are highly sensitive with low recoveries, they can potentially— they have the potential to cause a lot of harm. It's a recognition of that that we built this process. But we need to be able to leverage the literature to assess the effects that you would expect from a gear type in a habitat when they come into contact with one another. And we need to also address recovery.

These systems are already naturally disturbed. The species are evolved. To deal with that. And, and so the literature addresses both the impact and the recovery. And then ultimately, we want to know things, or the managers want to know things about disturbance.

Disturbance attributed to a particular fleet, fishing behavior, gear gives them information that they can act on. Some of the other things that we've learned are that if we engage in this process, Dr. Pirtle mentioned just sort of drawing boxes around areas worth high fishing catch, or, you know, for a while that was very popular to use marine protected areas in almost any scenario, that if we're concerned about something, but we don't have the appropriate information in front of us and decision support tools to evaluate the trade-off, it can lead to a precaution without precision. That means we're taking an action to potent— to maybe address a potential concern, but we really haven't thought about what happens if we do that and say it displaces all the fishing effort to an area that's more sensitive. Or we make a gear adjustment that then suddenly reduces catch performance, so you have to fish 3 times as much. So managers right away realized we need to be able to see the give and take.

We learned that precise fishing impacts management in this context requires science-driven, transparent decision support in order to be consistent with the law. Uh, we are required in federal fisheries to use best scientific information available. And then finally, fisheries food systems are really complex and dynamic. Are out there fishing for food to support a food system. And so we already expect that there will be impacts, and the, and the process that we're working under really looks for whether those impacts persist over time and are more than minimal when it comes to a particular stock.

So we need to—. We also need to expect that there's a lot we won't know. So we need to build tools that, that are where we anticipate uncertainty and build in precaution while the body of evidence grows. And then finally, we need to be able to rapidly explore alternative views when we don't understand things very well, call it a sensitivity analysis, as well as look at ways that we can update the information that goes into these models relatively rapidly. For example, every year that goes by, there's new fishing events that we need to be able to bring into this model flow.

We need a, a pathway to do that that's efficient, that's clear and transparent.

So how do we do that? Well, we currently use a tool we call the Fishing Effects Model. The lead analyst and developer for this tool is here in the audience, Dr. Scott Smeltz. He'll be available this afternoon for specific questions as needed. But the Fishing Effects Model is a decision support tool.

It employs spatially explicit vessel monitoring system or VMS information and observer data along with gear dimensional and contact information and literature-based habitat impact information to quantify and visualize fishing activity, estimate fishing swept area or footprint and bottom contact, and estimate the cumulative impacts of fishing on essential fish habitat, as Dr. Pirtle mentioned. I've listed some key information underpinning this work in terms of where the funding has come from. It's the series of scientific publications in which the core elements of this workflow have been through extensive peer review. Um, there's a lot of students that are trained in this work, some of them whom are in the room today. Um, extensive management reviews and then a host of management publications that contain all of the detailed information, um, that, that you've already requested.

Um, and we can make sure that you have access to those. I will highlight one other thing. While the foundations of this model came from New England, The refinements happened here in the North Pacific have now been ported back to New England. So our team runs this model for the North Pacific Council as well as the New England Council and the Mid-Atlantic Council. They use the same analytical structure as well as the same global literature review that informs the way the model operates.

So let's talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how the Fishing Effects Model works. One of the things that Dr. Pirtle pointed out that I think it's overlooked a lot is our region is incredibly fortunate to have done the hard work to build a really, really robust catch accounting system. In fishery science, it's extremely difficult to do sustainable fisheries when you don't really have good detailed information about what you're catching, where it's coming from, what its size, age, length composition happens to be. And here in the North Pacific, the level of observer coverage, Efforts by the National Marine Fisheries Service to link fishing events with observer data give us an— at the rate of coverage we have, really give us an unprecedented look at what's happening on the water. That's where we begin.

We have what is a data product that comes to us through a system called the Catch-in-Areas Database. If you see CIA in my presentation, it does not refer to national intelligence. It's a different form of intelligence related to catch. And so the National Marine Fisheries Service catch and areas database is, is provided to our team and it resolves the link between individual fishing events. So think of a track on VMS.

What was the gear? What was the target? What was the fleet? All of those details. And so we can look at them individually.

We can also look at them across the scale of an entire fishery. And in our case, we're bringing in data from 2003 to the present. And so when we talk about cumulative impacts, we're resolving about 9 million fishing events over that time period. So once those individual events are provided to us, the next question is, what are they? So those events are directly connected to specific gear types, and those gear types, there's 73 or 74 of them that we address in this tool, we have information about their dimensional characteristics and the expected amount of bottom contact associated with all of those gears that are derived from expert input.

There is in globally, there's no inventory conducted that identifies all of these features for all the gears in the water. We're working on that. I'll talk about that in my next presentation. But for now, we have a gear table that allows us to index an individual event to what we expect the size of that gear to be and the amount of bottom contact that we would expect it to have. That allows us to take those fishing events as lines and give them area.

How much swept area— that's the area over which the gear passes, but it may or may not be in contact with the bottom, depends on the gear. Of that, when that fishing event happens, how much contact do we expect it to have? And in these tables, that's presented as a proportion or percentage of what we think the swept area is, and that's called a contact adjustment. So we have both information on the area fished and the area we expect to have contacted. We call that the fishing module because it doesn't include any habitat information.

It's just about the gear, the fishing events, their frequency and distribution over time and space. The habitat model begins with our best information about what the habitat is, and that actually is derived primarily from a massive archive of sediment observations or seabed observations of the type, sort of sand, mud, gravel, cobble, the type of seabed present. But there hasn't been a synoptic survey of our continental shelf or any of the other continental shelf areas in the US. So we're, we have to amalgamate or pull together all those observations from many, many different studies. So we construct a map of habitat using hundreds of thousands of seabed observations collected over extended period of time.

Using a geostatistical modeling approach to build a map that allows us to understand the best we can what seabed types are there. That then leverages, allows us to leverage the literature. What sorts of organisms and structural features would we consider to be habitat for the species in our area that are associated with those different types of sediment habitats? And so in our region, we've identified a about 20 to 30 features that are associated with these different sediment types.

Um, those features can be living, sponges, corals, things like that that provide structure, or non-living, sand waves, cobble piles, and things that are known also to provide safe protection for fish and so forth. The team that originally put this together was the one that developed that swept area seabed model in New England. And then they impaneled a group of experts in all of the different macroinvertebrates and seabed types to come up with a structured literature review. So to go to the scientific literature, it's about 300 publications that address the, the links between fishing gear, these particular features, what we expect the impacts to be and how long we expect it to recover. And they used a structured approach where the team of scientists evaluated every single scientific publication multiple times.

With different subsets of folks on the committee to effectively develop what we call the impact and recovery tables. Those are published in a scientific paper by Dr. John Grabowski, and those— that can be made available to you if you're interested. So that's the core.

That's— I'll speak up. Yeah, that's the core internal engine that uses the fishing information, links it to habitat, and then just says, this is what the scientific literature globally says is likely to happen when this gear interacts with this feature. The model framework is a relatively simple one. When the fishing event happens, the seabed experiences disturbance. That seabed, from our viewpoint, involves these component features, and the question is, how long does it take them to recover?

And that alternating states of disturbed and undisturbed are driven by that recovery time. I hope that makes sense, and as we go forward, I'll show you an example, some examples. Oh, Nicole Kimball? Miss Kimball.

I'll talk loudly. So I think a relevant question then, and we were talking about this on the side, is like, are state waters included, or how are they addressed? And so, and I've actually had a question about that, but if the, if it starts with the fishing events, and for the parallel fisheries, the same monitoring requirements and catch accounting is done whether you're in federal waters or state waters, then that is included. Those state water fisheries are included. So what wouldn't be included would be like the Prince William Sound state managed fishery that doesn't have coverage.

Am I getting that correct? So in the Aleutians parallel fisheries and the Gulf of Alaska, that would be included in this analysis? Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, yes. Any fishery that is— whose fishing effort is captured through the federal catch accounting system is included. The model runs based on— the underlying model grid is 5 square kilometer cells that extend from 1,000 meters in depth into 10 meters of depth, irrespective of demarcation lines, state, federal waters.

What we don't have is state waters fishing information. If we did, these tools could readily be applied to state waters.

I guess if we're going to have this conversation now, let's, you know, I have a few questions in this space. Number 1, in some of the public comment, there was concern that, you know, the scale, that 5 by 5 kilometer scale that you're analyzing doesn't capture the state waters piece, I think, effectively, or with the granularity that they think is required. Do you have comment to that? Through the chair, Ms. Van Dort, I think that's an excellent question. As analysts approach— oops, sorry.

As we approach these types of scenarios, we spend a lot of time early on in these development of the tools deciding what is the spatial domain, and given that, what's the appropriate resolution? Bering Sea is 1 million square kilometers, 5-kilometer grid resolution. We're pushing computational power. Now, that's getting better and better. And we're exploring more high resolution.

So if we were to apply this tool to state waters, we would reconduct that analysis and decide what an appropriate spatial resolution would be to address the concerns of the, of the board and to ensure that the outputs were aligned with the process of interest. What's the scale of these fishing events? If a fishing, you know, longline set or a tow is 2, 3, 4 miles long, We don't want to have 100-meter grid resolution, right? That, that's over-resolving the issue. So we have to look at the inputs relative to what we want in terms of outputs and then decide what the appropriate scale is.

To follow up on that then, in terms of the gear that's actually being utilized and deployed, do we have really specific definitions of gear? What I've heard in the last presentation is that it's purposely not super specific to allow for sort of flexibility in how deployments are made and how people fish and how, how they want to run their operations. And the fact that the regulatory wheel turns slowly. And so you don't want to overregulate and, you know, inhibit that innovation. So my question is, is then you have potentially this wide variety of sort of bespoke operations.

I don't know in terms of the size of the gear if everybody's fairly uniform to a size of a vessel or how they configure that. So as you apply that variability to the fisheries effects model, how do you, how do you, how do you account for that? How do you, because everybody's real different, you know, how fast, how long they tow, all of the things that seems that would have direct impacts on your outputs. Through the chair, Ms. Van Dort, yes, that's exactly right. Backing up for a minute, I think what was referred to earlier has to do more with the role of managers in specifying detailed, you know, characteristics of fishing gear.

That's really a feature of the past where we managed by reducing efficiency. You can only have a vessel this long, you can only have horsepower this much, you have to have this mesh size, and it's because we didn't have rationalized fishing and we weren't using quotas. So to limit fishing mortality, you did so by limiting efficiency. Recognized over time that has some pretty negative unintended consequences. You're making your fisheries cost more, take longer, and ultimately potentially have more impacts and exposure to bycatch.

But those features, the manager's kind of tendency to want to get into the details of the gear, are still legacy within the regulations. They're still sticking around, and there's this emphasis on generalized gear labels, pelagic trawl, for example, is producing a lot of kind of confusion. And it's from the standpoint of gear research, that term refers to the design, not the deployment. It's a type of gear that can be controlled through any part of the water column versus a bottom trawl, which cannot, right? It does not restrict that gear in terms of where, where it fishes or doesn't fish.

That, that's a different piece. So we're, if you look back at that little foundational slide, you'll see the number of gear types resolved in each of those models is increasing. We went from 4, 5 gear types that were like trawl, longline, to we're at 70 or 80 different gear types that represent sectors within the fleet, times of year, depth locations, and it's our attempt to address exactly what you said. When I talk about the Gear Innovation Initiative, we're now moving away from generic labels to what exactly is in the water? I mean, the net plan, the materials used, the rigging, and how is it fished?

Because as you say, that has a huge effect on whether it has contact with the bottom. Thank you for that. And the context is important and I appreciate it because, you know, it is a bit archaic how we have managed to efficiency, time area, all the things, right? But that's— those are the tools that we have. And most importantly, those are the tools that are relevant for enforcement action.

And so while the innovation is good, there is that enforcement piece. And so, you know, I'm just curious how that's defined. I'm not necessarily right now, but I mean, how you're using that within the context of the model. And I think you just explained that very well. Thank you.

Mr. Wood. Yeah, thank you. Are you also looking at this in terms of like user days? Like when you look further out on the Aleutians and you have 2 boats and some of the other state waters where you're only dealing with 14 or 44 versus other areas that have much higher impact of user days, like is that factored into it in terms of how much impact is being created to the ocean floor potentially or just the fishing? Through the chair, Mr. Wood, if I understand your question correctly, absolutely.

And it's done so because we actually leverage every single fishing event, its date, its location. And so that just, that is the essence of the model, right? It allows us to directly resolve specific fishing events in the place, the time, and mode that they occurred. And so the model steps forward from 2003 to the most recent run we did through 2022 at a 1-month time step throughout that entire domain. Every single 5-kilometer grid cell throughout the whole domain.

We're tracking exactly who, what gear, what, uh, how big it was, how much contact we expected to have, how that is, is expected to impact the habitat, how that habitat's expected to recover. And by looking at it over time, anything that hasn't recovered in this grid cell in this month stays. It only.

Fires when it recovers. And so if you have an impact to a feature that takes 5 years to recover based on the literature, that effect stays in the model in that cell for that time period. So that's why we refer to this as cumulative habitat effects.

Yes, Mr. Carpenter. Thank you.

This is all very interesting, and I appreciate, appreciate everything that you're bringing forward here. When, when I look at this series of slides you have, if we, if we think about a very specific area, there's obviously multiple gear types can be used in any one area, and each gear type has different levels of bottom contact, for example.

When you look at the footprint in which multiple gear types could have an impact on any given area, and then you— I would assume that you have ratios or percentages of how much impact or bottom contact is associated with any given gear type. If you have an overlay in an area of multiple gear types, how do you quantify when it comes to habitat or the, the length of time in which the seafloor would need to, let's say, rehabilitate itself? How do you quantify in that particular given area which ones of, which gear types is creating the actual problem. And do you see what I'm trying to get at? Maybe I'm not asking it real eloquently, but if you could try and touch on that, I'd appreciate it.

Sure, through the chair, Mr. Carpenter, first, the not just multiple gear types, but a single gear type can repeatedly fish the same location over and over, right? So part of what I hear you asking is how do we handle that across gears, but even among gear types? And so there's a very detailed, uh, process for accounting for repeated events and the way in which habitat disturbance progresses through that. So for example, if the first pass of a piece of gear is expected to remove a certain proportion or percentage of, say, habitat feature, whether it's a longline, a pot, a trawl, that's gone, right? And then what happens in the next one is it's impacting the remaining features.

And so there's a process, a mathematical framework within the model that accounts for overlapping events regardless of what gear type they occur. So they're all accounted for in that cumulative process.

And Dr. Harris, just to follow up on that and just for a point of clarity, does the model account for movement in all gear types, including those defined as stationary? Like, are there—. Do you—. Are you taking in— I understand that in the gear innovation initiative where you're getting a more refined view of the gear characteristics, as Ms. Van Dorr asked about, and that model is improving over time. There's going to be field studies associated with that.

But you've relied on expert information and testimony from captains. Are you relying on that same information for, um, uh, pot and longline, uh, operators as well, as far as trying to understand the movement of that gear?

Uh, through the chair, Ms. Drubnicka, by movement I presume that you mean the gears itself is being updated, it's changing over time, or are you referring to actually actual movement? Yeah, the way movement on the bottom is captured, let's think about a trawl event, right? We have VMS data that tells us where it started and where it ended. That's confirmed by an observer aboard, and it's linked to a sector and a target and so forth. So we can say, all right, that's a pelagic trawl from the pollock fishery in the Bering Sea.

It's a catcher-processor, and the expert opinion or expert input tells us it's dimensionally this big. We know the length of the hull. We now know the width of the hull. So the movement becomes that swath. It's the same for longlines.

It's the same for pots. It's the area that it occupies within the time step of the model. And the model timestep is longer than the fishing event itself. So movement's encompassed in the area associated with that length by width contact calculation. So it's done the same for pots, longlines, and so forth, with the caveat I, that I said earlier, where depending on time of year and location, target, and so forth, that those parameters are likely to be different, and that's what's in the gear table.

Ms. Funder, what's the margin of error in the model?

Hmm, I will talk about uncertainty. This type of a model is really a workflow, and so we're not able to say something specific about margin of error. The way that we would address that is to look at the impacts to the outputs associated with a particular decision point or change. So when we assume X size of the gear, well, what if we're wrong? And so we pose a much bigger version.

If we assume X amount of contact results in this amount of impact or removal, what if we're wrong? And so we double it. So we're able to do sensitivity analyses to tell you how, how the model responds and in that way provide measures of uncertainty around the prediction. But I wouldn't call it a margin of error. Okay, that's fair.

You know, I'm just trying to figure out You know, you mentioned the length of the toe and, and the, the movement and all of the things. I mean, I'm trying to account for errors in the inputs as well. Through the chair, uh, Ms. Van Dort, I'll talk a little bit about that, um, and the way we approach that. You have something?

Yeah, okay.

All right, so some of the things—. I think we might have another question, Mr. Wood. Yeah, thanks. I guess I'm kind of focused on the topography of these different areas. So there's a lot of pictures here of like seabed floor and grass and sand and clamshells.

But when we were presented with the Prince William Sound stuff, we were looking at what looked like very detailed 3D maps of canyons. And people fishing in canyons. And, uh, it looked like basically trying to drag a net through the Ruth Gorge below Denali, you know. And I was like, how do you— are you using that kind of mapping as well? Because a lot of the concept seems to like we're talking about hitting the ocean floor, but in these steep rocky canyons, is that even a possibility?

Are we talking the sides? Like, are you factoring that into the models, I guess, is a vertical cliff the same as an ocean floor? Sorry, I don't have a very direct comment or question, but is this a factor? Through the chair, Mr. Wood. So terrain and texture are a really big deal.

Unfortunately for our domain here in the North Pacific, we don't have the kind of multibeam coverage that you might have for subareas like Prince William Sound. We don't have that synoptically throughout our domain. What we do have is pretty high-resolution depth information, Dr. Pirtle's species distribution models use this extensively, and as you might imagine, depth is a big deal to fish. It has a lot to do with where their distributions are, and she can speak more to that. On the fishing effects side, the behavior of the gear related to, say, fishing in a canyon versus up on the continental shelf comes forward in the gear tables because we'll have a depth threshold, for example, and then the dimensional characteristics of the gear might be different.

As well as the expected bottom contact. And so that's the way that information would come in through the model. Did you have something you want to add, Jodi, or you can—. Through the chair, can I add just a little bit more to Mr. Wood's question? From the perspective of the information we use about seafloor terrain to make the essential fish habitat maps, when I was responding to the question by Ms. Carlson-Van Dort, one of the— we have several layers of terrain that we derive from the bathymetry.

We include seafloor slope, slope, we include something called curvature, we include bathymetric position index, and all of those terrain variables together speak to how those species are using different terrain features with respect to where we catch them in the surveys. So that's how terrain enters into the fishing effects model, at least from the BfH mapping side.

So that is— so that's a way of also looking at the vegetation. Would in, on the seafloor bed? Like on land, you'd look at latitude, elevation, you know, exposure, temperature. Is it similar to figure out what's actually kind of growing there or what it's producing in terms of an ocean bed covering for the habitat? Through the chair, Mr. Wood.

Wish we had the level of resolution and information products available for terrestrial studies, which are awesome because we can use optical sensors from space to make those measurements. We're restricted underwater to pretty limited ranges optically, and acoustically we can't resolve those things. So as you probably heard before, we know far more about the surface of Mars than we do most of the seabed on this planet. And so how do we overcome that? We have literature, extensive scientific studies that have characterized the type of, um, features, living organisms, communities associated with different types of habitats.

And in the ocean, because water is 800 times more viscous than air, vegetative cover is sort of replaced by sediment composition. And then we think about living organisms that are either plants, animals, whatever, that are attached to that. So we start off with sediment, And then we let the literature tell us, hey, given this sediment in this region, what are the likely features present? We use the ones that could be there, not the ones we've necessarily seen, to account for the fact that, let's say we do have impacts that are more than we realize, then we could have extricated those species. And so they're not showing up in our field observations, but the effects of our gear to those things should be something we consider.

So what's one of the precautionary approaches we use is all of the features that could be present. Even if they're extremely rare, are included so that we have a full evaluation of what those impacts could be in a really conservative fashion.

Thank you. Ms. Kimball. Thank you. I don't know if this is related, but I mean, we keep hearing about the like enormous investment that NOAA's put in the deep sea coral and sponge program and those maps. And so we are incorporating that information, aren't we?

That, that's real information. It's not just looking at the substrate and what types of vegetation can exist or organisms in that substrate. And I, I feel like, I don't know, maybe that's going to be in your presentation, but that's a big addition to this next version of the EFH review, is it not?

Through the chair, thank you for the question, Ms. Kimball. Thank you for referencing the NOAA Office of Habitat Conservation's Deep-Sea Coral Research and Technology Program. We just finished— our science center and partners just finished the most recent Alaska Initiative. These occur about every 10 years. They're opportunities funded by the federal government for our science bodies and partners to go out and collect new data and information on where these structural invertebrates that are important to the ecosystem in their own right and important to our fish as habitat live.

So an important aspect of that program's work over time is that database that Nicole Kimball just referenced. And we have a new and updated iteration of that database that we bring into the Essential Fish Habitat models and maps, where in this 5-year review— in the past, we've just used presence absence— in this 5-year review, we're, we're taking that updated data, more data than before, and we're creating updated layers for the Essential Fish Habitat maps. And so most of the data comes from our bottom trawl survey for where we understand corals and sponges occur with our species. Some data comes from cameras, an untapped resource that would also be helpful to derive data from is our longline survey, as we also understand that that type of gear interacts with corals and sponges on the seafloor and can provide helpful data for how that survey is interacting with the gear and the species that they target associate with them.

Okay, I may. So out of the fishing module, before we consider the habitat information, These are some of the information products we're able to provide to the council that you can see here on the screen. Something simple that just says over time, how much bottom contact do we expect to, or is happening associated with these, these fisheries? And on the other axis of this particular graph, you can see the amount of swept area. So how big is the gear fishing footprint and how much bottom contact?

This is important because these things vary based on harvest allocations. They based on, they can be influenced by changes in terms of internal structures within the fleet, if they move towards rationalization, there's a lot of factors that influence how much fishing happens and then the amount of potential contact associated with that. So you might be surprised to hear most fisheries councils around the country don't have that information. And so the catch accounting program we have here is really demonstrated in this graphic because the gray bars, the light-colored ones, represent the unobserved fishing events for which we have VMS, but no actual individual on board to confirm, to start and end tows and so forth and so on. So we have the vast majority of fishing events that occur in this domain are VMS tracked and they're observed.

So we're able to show the Council, hey, this is for all these gears, you have about 8 to 9 million fishing records, about 12 to 18% of these events are unobserved. This is the amount of swept area that's being incurred in the course of fishing. This is the expected amount of contact, and then we can look at those trends over time and see if some of the Council's initiatives and efforts are being realized. If the goal is to reduce the amount of unobserved fishing, we ought to be able to see that here. So it's just an information product.

Another reminder that this graphic includes 3 types of jig fisheries, 4 types of pot fisheries, 7 types of hook and line fisheries, 24 different types of non-pelagic trawl fishing, and 35 different types of pelagic trawl fishing. So there's a tremendous amount of nuance and detail available to drill down as the Council asks questions. This is an emerging theme built for essential fish habitat. This tool is now becoming more useful to the Council in other related questions to do with how these fisheries are performing. We're not going to touch on those uses of the data here, but we perhaps can talk about them during discussion in the afternoon.

Specific to essential fish habitat, this map that's on the screen is going to— it's dynamic and it's going to loop for a minute, so I'll talk you through what you're looking at.

The map itself represents, shows the 5-kilometer grid cell domain throughout the North Pacific from 1,000 meters in depth into 10 meters. The color ramp shows you the percentage of each of those 5-kilometer grid cells that is in a disturbed state at the month and year that's ticking along at the top, and that's why the map is dynamic. So you're looking at the heartbeat of your North Pacific fisheries. This is aggregating all gear types, across the whole domain. So this is a really important tool to help you see, hey, where, where are the fleets fishing?

And you should see things that you already know to be the case. You should see Cod Alley. You can see it there. You can see the canyons off Kodiak that receive a lot of specific targeted fishing. You can see lots of the domain gets relatively small amounts of fishing disturbance.

You can see your marine spatial closures there in the Bristol Bay, around the Pribilof Islands, and then you can see some important emerging trends in which the fleet is moving with the fish as fish change their distribution. You can see the 8 in the graphic that's ticking along in the upper right. Those spikes and valleys are the A season and the B season fishing dynamics. The fact that you can see those tells you that there's recovery in those habitats happening on the scale of months. The big shift in the middle of the graph between around 2008 on down to 2015 is the result of rationalization and the creation of the Amemoneidae fishery, followed by the elevated sweeps in those flatfish trawls, which change the amount of bottom contact associated with that gear extensively.

You can see that the proportion of a continental shelf represented in that y-axis, where impacts just amount proportion of disturbance throughout the domain ranges from just a little bit above 4.5% down currently to around 2.5%. And that little bump to the far right of that trace plot, as you watch that green bar get there, pay attention to the map and you'll see that fishing extends north towards St. Lawrence Island, primarily as the fleets move to follow Pacific cod and other flatfish and flatfish species as their distribution shifts, and you can see it there. That bump is really interesting because it shows us the increase in disturbance associated with accessing new and undisturbed habitats, followed by the recovery of the habitats that were vacated as the fleet moves north. Our ability to pick up on those types of dynamics gives the council confidence that what they're observing through this framework is real, and it allows us to track these cumulative, uh, disturbances by time and by space. This information product is a synthesis one of all GEARs and all areas.

Dr. Pirtle talked about those essential fish habitat maps and the associated core EFH areas. This is the part where we now provide to each of the stock assessment authors specific information out of the fishing effects cumulative trajectory that applies to their particular fishery. And so I'm going to walk you through this.

This is probably the most important part of, of the process that I'm describing here today. Up until now, it's us synthesizing information and providing it to council members and stock assessment authors in a form that relates directly to the Essential Fish Habitat mandate, which is to evaluate impacts to species, at the population level that relate to feeding, breeding, spawning, and growth to maturity. And it's up to each council to determine how they operationalize that in the context of an impact that's more than minimal. So it's substantial and it's not temporary. So in, uh, 2016, the, uh, Scientific and Statistical Committee of the North Pacific Council formed a subcommittee to review the regulations and come up with a structured systematic plan for how we would make those evaluations, and this is what they produced.

So the first question that we would ask in terms of the effects of a fishery, or of fishing on a habitat, is what's the status of that stock? Is it below its minimum stock size threshold, suggesting we have got some significant problems in terms of the rate of replacement in that fishery relative to removals? And that can potentially be overfishing, although we have really restrictive, um, processes to deal with that. If a stock is in that depressed state, we should probably take a look at the potential for habitat to be a part of that. So this hierarchy isn't determining adverse effects, it's determining which of these fisheries should be considered more deeply for adverse effects and potential mitigation.

The goal is to be able to provide the, the system, the managers' information, not just about if there's evidence of the stock being affected by habitat disturbance, but how, because that'll tell you what you need to do to fix it. If you don't understand the mechanism, then you don't know what tool to use to potentially address the concern. So that's what the SSC was getting at. So this little hierarchical flow process really just identifies these key areas in which a stock could be elevated for further consideration. So the next one, uh, examines whether or not— let's just say the stock is below minimum stock size threshold.

The author could say, hey, I'd like to see this evaluated, uh, for further consideration of adverse effects. If not, um, we move on to the next step. So the next one asks— this has to do with whether an effect is more than minimal or not. In that core essential fish habitat area that Dr. Pirtle described, which is where most of the fish reside, as it regards the, the habitat features, we ask, is there evidence that that lo— that area is disturbed at a rate or a level that's more than 10% of its total area? What's that mean?

Less than 90% of it is in an intact, undisturbed state. That's the SSC's determination of what is more than minimal, 10%. If we say, hey, there's more than 90% of this area that is in an undisturbed or intact state, then it doesn't meet the SSC's criteria for more than minimal. Um, if it is, then it greater than that, it would be elevated for further consideration. Next, and probably most importantly, what about the linkage to those specific features.

What do you expect to have happen when you interact with the seabed, say remove structure? Well, if it's something that juvenile fish use to hide behind and provide protection and it's removed, you would expect to see problems with recruitment. If it's something, a feature that's really critical to their successful feeding and it's removed, you would expect to see depressed size at age. Right? Mechanistically, we're looking for signals within the stock that align with expectations from disturbance, because that's going to be key to determining what we need to do about it if there is a problem.

So the assessment authors look carefully at a set of features about their stocks that align with feeding, breeding, spawning, and growth to maturity to examine whether there's any correlation with fishing disturbance in the areas deemed to be essential habitat for their species. Next, the stock assessment authors, even if there aren't meaningful or significant correlations, have the opportunity to say, I'm concerned about this, and that automatically elevates that stock for further consideration. Finally, if this process, as we walk through this, does not result in a stock being elevated for further consideration, that's the equivalent under this SSE framework of finding temp effects to be temporary and minimal, or minimum. So we tried to build, the SSC tried to build a process that actually ties back to the mechanisms and, and, uh, linkages that are inherent to the definition of EFH so that if we do need to do something in terms of the management arena, we're doing something that is actually tied to what the mechanisms behind the problem, as opposed to applying tools without really understanding the linkage. So let's look at a specific example.

This was provided by the stock assessment authors for Pacific Ocean Perch in the Gulf of Alaska in a previous EFH review. The time series by year and habitat disturbance is extracted from the fishing effects model for the area That's demonstrated in the map right above that. So that's Gulf of Alaska POP. And then the table next to it identifies size at age, growth parameters, and other assessment outputs that align with feeding, breeding, spawning, and growth to maturity, and they establish the correlation between those parameters and the time series of disturbance.

This is how the determination of adverse effects happens within the North Pacific Council, and it is conducted by the stock assessment scientists as the content experts in terms of area and species, and those that understand the dynamics of that stock probably better than anyone. I'll pause here for questions.

Okay, so let's talk about precaution and what happens next. So, Within any framework like this, there are a lot of moving pieces and parts, and we have to fill in the gaps in between information products that we can pull from the literature, evidence and information we can get from surveys, and then say expert inputs coming, say, from industry or elsewhere. There's a lot of differences in terms of the type of information and maybe the uncertainty associated with it, and Miss And, uh, Van Dort's question earlier really kind of gets to that. So what do we do about that? Well, the framework in fishery science is to be precautious.

In the absence of being able to absolutely address that uncertainty or even quantify it, we need to be careful to lean into the sort of the direction we would like to go in terms of conservation. And in this case, we would rather overestimate impacts and get it wrong in that direction be overly careful than to underestimate impacts. And so we've built in several structural steps to add precaution. For example, when we look at gear size and bottom contact and we get expert input, uh, from industry and gear, uh, and gear designers, we think about, um, how that gear could change throughout the course of its use and we apply the largest or the most impactful estimates for those gears. For example, pelagic pollock gear for catcher processors in the Bering Sea currently, and have for all iterations of the Fishing Effects Model, been assumed to be on the bottom every single tow because we cannot demonstrate otherwise.

Pollock live on the bottom. The fishery only functions if they have access to fish in that zone. We assume every single event is in contact with the bottom. We also assume that the gear dimensions are, so, are associated with the widest spread that that gear can achieve, and that the bottom contact represents somewhere between 70 and 90% of that width on every fishing event, even if it's in the canyons, even if it's at nighttime when the fish are up in the water column. So we are overestimating effect on purpose.

Until we have better evidence that we can lean on. When it comes to the impact and recovery values that we derive from the literature relative to other models that do the same seascape-scale estimation, we're overestimating impact. So when we see a range in values associated with estimates of, you know, one type of gear, say on corals or sponges, our estimates of proportional removal are substantially higher than those used by other teams, uh, addressing the same data or using the same inputs. The same with recovery. We have a framework for recovery that doesn't look at average recovery.

It looks at recovery to 95%, and we use that as our basis. And so we're being precautious on purpose, knowing we're overestimating effects. And if we can live with that, then we know the answer is somewhere lower than what these estimates are. Giving us comfort, confidence that we can move forward while we work to improve these information products. Finally, that hierarchical decision process related to adverse effects has already got built into it some really conservative measures.

We're looking to see 90% of a core EFH area for a given species undisturbed. That's a threat. That's a really high threshold for determining what is minimum, especially with the scope and scale of our fisheries. So precaution is embodied both in us clearly demonstrating where those limitations and uncertainties are, doing the sensitivity analyses that I talked about, but we've also built into the, the workflow these careful thresholds to ensure we're treating that information appropriately given its uncertainty.

You know what? I think Ms. Kimball has a question. Thank you. I, I mean, I don't know that those tables that you use are appropriately caveated to show that those are your conservative estimates. You don't know much about the gear and its contact on the bottom in every different configuration, so you're assuming 100%.

I think people are taking it as it's 100%. So I, I have not looked ahead, but I assume you're, you're going to provide something in a presentation about your efforts to update those. Okay. Yes. And then my second question is really just thinking this through, like on your slide 7, even if you're making those conservative assumptions, your average disturbance, like just if you looked in the Bering Sea from the last time, was around 5% for all years.

So is, I mean, just, just on a practical level, is that because fishermen are basically staying in the same area? Like they're all fishing, trawling is happening in this, in a small footprint, but in the same area year after year? Is that, what is the, how can we understand that relationship? It's, you're making these very conservative assumptions, assuming on the bottom all the time. But the results are, are less than 5% disturbance from trawl, pot, longline, jig altogether.

And I just want to understand, just, that's not intuitive to me. Sure. Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, I think the number one challenge people have is understanding scale. We're talking about an area that, I mean, it should invoke, you know, numbers like stars in the sky and grains of sand on the beach. The Bering Sea is massive relative to the scale of a fishing event.

So even if we, we've run what we call the scorched earth model where there's no recovery, just the scale and scope of the fisheries, even though we're harvesting, you know, relative to the other regions of the country, far more, the amount of just fishing activity is really small. Furthermore, as you zoom into areas that have repeated overlapping fishing, there's a tremendous amount of real estate annually that is not touched. Even in the areas that are highly concentrated fishing, because the scale of the fishing events themselves relative to how much area is out there is quite small. So for starters, that's why these numbers are as low as they are. We also have a relatively dynamic ecosystem that has, based on the literature, pretty rapid recovery, uh, for many of the features that we look at in terms of essential fish habitat.

And so that's another factor that determines that cumulative disturbance footprint. And you are right, uh, Dr. Smeltz has developed this model here in the North Pacific. He runs it in New England. The estimates of disturbance in New England are much higher per unit area. And he's also run, uh, developed the global version of this model, which he implemented during his PhD at Cornell University.

And it shows that our region is, um, really stands out. In terms of a tremendously small amount of initial disturb— or initial contact and then disturbance relative to other parts of the world, especially when you consider what we produce. So one way to think about this is we're only showing you half of the meaningful conversation when it comes to a fisheries food system. This is the amount of disturbance, and we're focused on essential fish habitat. One major question, and one thing the Council has asked us to provide is, What about units of disturbance per unit yield?

This allows you to then put other fisheries in other regions at least on par and see how we're doing. You can also track it over time and say, set goals to reduce the amount of disturbance per unit yield. But if you don't consider yield in that conversation, it's very difficult to compare our region to others or to understand what 2.5% or 3% means.

Thank you. And I'm not looking for a long explanation of this, but to a previous question, you could run this on a finer scale. I understand you're meeting Magnuson Act requirements and this is what Magnuson Act requires, but if the council understood better what level of question to ask, we could look at this and run it on a finer scale or a finer scale by gear type. That's a possibility. Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, I would say not just a possibility, you already asked.

Okay. Right? As you to ask us to give you information about this spatial closure in this month, in this year, that is pushing the bounds of our current 5-kilometer grid. And we should, we, we're gonna work to provide you that information back at scales consistent with the question. Cool.

So absolutely. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.

Um, so this is really exciting and very interesting to me. Um, and I wanna thank the council for the remedial education that you're providing us board members here, state Board of Fisheries members. But my interest particularly, and why I'm sitting here today, is the application to state waters fisheries and the jurisdiction that the Board of Fisheries has. And so while this information is fantastic and it certainly builds confidence in the federal fishery, the question that I'm interested in is how does that apply, or can it be applied, is it being applied to state waters areas? So the first question is, is there sharing between, you know, the council's science teams and ADF&G?

If so, to what extent? And then I think dovetailing off of Ms. Kimball's question, can it be scaled to statewide impact and is that being done? And perhaps this isn't a question for you particularly, perhaps it's a question to the department, but I think that that's where a lot of, The angst that I'm hearing about, particularly in the state waters fisheries, is that, you know, how are we accounting for that at state level? Can we, first of all? And then also, second part of that question is, are there more sensitive areas or habitats in the nearshore state waters fisheries that we should be considering as we evaluate some of the proposals that come forth to the board?

So I don't expect you to, to answer all of that, of course, but I am curious about what what is the nexus with state waters management, if any? Because that's the part that I'm interested in particularly today. Through the chair, Ms. Van Dort, outstanding question, and taking off my, you know, hat in terms of an EFH process partner and just saying, you know, for the team developing the fishing effects model, our goal is to make it as useful as possible to the management process, state or federal or international. And so the model, framework already runs through state waters. What is not available to us now is catch accounting information, and, you know, I think were we to pursue that, the bulk of the groundwork is already laid to do this.

Department of Fish and Game is actively working with NOAA Catch Accounting to first address the gaps in fishing that's happening in federal waters, but is recorded through the state's catch accounting system. So that would be crab fishing, scallop fishing are not currently reflected in these estimates because that information is not linked to the federal fish catch accounting pipeline. My understanding is that can be overcome and that the state, the two agencies are working together. As soon as that information becomes available to us, it will be included. Here, your question about sensitive habitats and so forth is an open one that we would potentially work with the board to address.

So the decision support system grows and evolves to fit the needs of the manager, manager's questions. And we recognize you would probably have different questions, which is fine. And so from the perspective of the team putting the tool together, we're ready and willing absolutely to work with the state to do whatever we can do. And if that produces better communication, more consistency, I mean, there's some things that will just emerge from that. When we develop the gear tables, we're going to have to talk about what we call things.

We're going to talk about gathering information on state fishing gears that will likely generate a lot of benefits beyond just the impacts estimation process. It may really also help. I mean, this is dense material. It's complicated. I've worked on this my whole career, and it's hard to understand.

I can understand why this is complicated and challenging for the public to digest and understand. And so maybe that's another outcome that may come from this system being applied both in state and federal frameworks.

And through the Chair, to add to that, from the essential fish habitat mapping aspect of the fishing effects evaluation, we do a lot of work and development in the background that the Council and the public may not hear about during an EFH 5-year review because it's not ready to go or we don't have the capacity to do it at this time. We've spent a handful of years developing a modeling method and gathering the data to develop more high-resolution EFH map, partner maps for nearshore habitats, maps following the coastline. So we're there with the methods and, and the technology to do that. We don't have the capacity at this time to bring that to this EFH 5-year review, but it would be possible given our capacity to partner with the state to develop maps at higher resolution for nearshore areas. And the last thing that I'll say just briefly is we've only talked about Subpart J of the EFH requirements today.

That's, you know, contents of Fishery Management Plans. An aspect of that is non-fishing impacts to EFH, and we address that through our Subpart K consultation process with action agencies and entities that are engaging in actions that may adversely affect DFH that are not related to fishing, such as mining, for example. Not to pick on the mining industry, but that oil and gas development and all that. And that is part of our work where we could really partner with the state. We could partner with LKTK providers of information to talk about what is important in those areas where they live, where EFH may be impacted by these anthropogenic activities and an avenue for that to enter into that as well.

Thank you. It just, it's very exciting to me and encouraging as well. And so I'm encouraged to hear that those collaborations are starting. I hope, and that they will continue to advance. And my message to the State Waters Fisheries stakeholders that are in the room and listening online is to start advocating to the department to do this, to take advantage of the resource that's available to them and answer some of the questions and get some of the information that the state fisheries managers don't have right now.

If it's here and it's possible and it's scalable, I, I, why not? Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. Van Dort. Mr. Wood. Yeah, thank you.

And this might seem rudimentary, but just to clarify, I think one thing I'm hearing that I really appreciate is that the health of the habitat is reflected in the health of the fishery.

And that's some— and there are so many factors that go into that. That's something on the state, on the board process I really wish we looked at as well, because the habitat involves not only the ocean but the inland, the interior as well. And so, and that species that you're talking about are, you know, perch, pollock, cod, whatever, right? I get that. But it's not these other salmon that migrate inland or other fish that migrate inland.

But I really appreciate that comprehensive view of looking at it from all angles and the conservativeness of it, because in many ways it sounds like you're shooting yourself in the foot, especially when you come from— we heard the other day about how all models are wrong, some are helpful. And I think people overestimate models, but in this case it does appear that you've gone to lengths to underestimate. It to add that. It's just my first glance. Anyhow, I appreciate this education.

Thank you. Thank you, Ms.— Dr. Pirtle, and thank you, Mr. Wood. Just briefly, through the chair, I— Mr. Wood, your statement made me think of— we use the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's anadromous waters catalog that represents in-stream essential fish habitat for salmon.

Salmon for the Salmon F&P, because as we discussed earlier, EFH is across the life cycle of the species and what is important to maintain their growth from being born to dying away in the streams. So that is an important resource that's provided by the state that, that we use. And of course, we're mainly talking about offshore fisheries here, but those come into play in those nonfishing effects consultations.

Thank you. Thank you for that clarification, Dr. Pirtle.

Okay, Madam Chair. Okay. Almost finished. So the last thing I'd like to touch on, as Dr. Pirtle noted, this is a living dynamic process, and we are incredibly— I would say, as the fishing effects team, we are incredibly grateful for the working relationship that we have with the regional office staff and Dr. Pirtle's team. And we work, we work on this, these analyses, information products all the time, regardless of whether we're in a 5-year review or not.

And as I noted before, lessons learned as these decision support tools have been built up around the country is that they have to be readily updatable. And there's some standard information products that that are coming forward each time we do a new 5-year review. And so what are we going to do this cycle? Well, we're, we've already reviewed this with our Scientific and Statistical Committee, and the plan going forward is obviously to update all the fishing events. Since we ran the model for the last review ending in 2023, there's been another several years of fishing.

So the Catch and Areas Database that I mentioned before has been updated. It's actually been substantially improved, reevaluated, and gone through a massive QA/QC process, and so we will have new and better high-resolution information on the actual fishing events themselves. The gear parameters, the gear tables that I talked about, I'll show you what we're doing with pelagic gear in particular, an initiative actually that started well before the current concerns emerged to update those gear tables and move them from generic labels to really specific information that captures fishing behavior, but we'll also be going back to all the other fleets and requesting updates and information in terms of how's their gear changed, has their fishing practice changed, do these size and contact parameters still align with what their viewpoints are, and so forth. Habitat literature is always being updated. I know there's some interest in a study recently emerging from Scotland where there was some evidence that with the reprieve from fishing that the system recovered.

So there's several hundred publications that we use to inform the this core disturbance estimation process within the fishing effects model. All new scientific literature published since the last time we did this will be included in that update. And so we're— and finally, if there's any additional seafloor observations that have been made over the past several years that weren't included in the last go-around, that information will be pulled in, and those seabed habitat maps, that geostatistical analysis will be rerun including the new data. What won't change is the peer-reviewed, uh, published structure of the model, um, the dynamics that I showed you in terms of each of those modular inputs, um, the workflow, uh, is all the same and it follows what was, uh, previously reviewed and approved through, um, not just this council, but remember all of this happens in New England and in the Mid-Atlantic. And so, um, our the team gets to address those.

And, and so when an improvement's made through a process in New England, North Pacific benefits and vice versa. And Madam Chair, that concludes my remarks. Just to highlight, this is the work of an extensive team over decades, and so I mean, we're incredibly privileged to stand on the shoulders of giants and to work with really truly world-class teams like Dr. Pearls Thank you both very much for your presentation. Dr. Harris, before, before you leave here, transition into your next presentation, I just want to circle back quickly on the literature review. I know you've mentioned that a couple of times.

There are a lot of interested participants in the process, you know, that bring forward various pieces of research globally and share that information, a lot of exciting work being done. I read through those sometimes and I'm like, I, you know, I don't feel qualified to really infer conclusions based on, you know, what I'm reading and the relevancy to the North Pacific. But so it's really important, I think, that we have a scientific review process associated with that. I just, I'm wondering how interested participants really, how do they understand, you know, what aspects of that research were determined relevant to to the fishing effects model and how that was translated back into the EFH process in general. Can you, in very simple terms, like, is there a way to really follow that trajectory of that review process and the incorporation into our process?

Great question. I mean, I think this is really the core issue, and it kind of explains perhaps why the council members have quite a different perspective on this current issue or challenge than maybe Board of Fish and other groups, because you do have and have had exposure to that. So first, that process is really well described in the supporting documents that are already on the e-agenda. There's scientific publication led by Dr. John Grabowski. He was at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute at the time when we conducted this initial work, and that core body of literature kind of beginning in the mid-'70s running through now, the bulk of which is already incorporated and is in that scientific publication, we simply follow those exact methods for each new publication that comes along.

And so finally, when we go through our full review of fishing effects updates and so forth before the SSC, which I believe is scheduled to come up in February, we will again walk through that body of literature with a selection process to determine if that publication is relevant to this region, habitats, gears. For example, we don't use a lot of stuff that comes out of the Great Barrier Reef. Right? But there may be instances where that does work here. So we have criteria and a process that we will walk through again and make, make sure is readily accessible.

I'm really excited to say that New England Council, Mid-Atlantic Council, North Pacific, because we all, they all use the same core literature review, pooled resources and commissioned another independent review of all of that literature, which is now, I've I believe is publicly available in the form of like a Shiny app that you can, uh, access the summaries of all those publications, what gears were involved, where they were. It's just a really nice way to make that more accessible. You don't have to read the whole paper. It has the abstract available to you, and then you can chase it down if you want. So that should also help make the, that body of information a little bit more accessible for folks.

Thank you for that reminder. Appreciate it.

I think we're ready to move on. Thank you so much.

Oh, what I—. Just for timing purposes, what I think we'll do is we'll get through this presentation, we'll break for lunch, and then come back and take the presentation on the EFP and then our concluding presentation and updated council actions. Thank you.

Through the co-chairs, Sara Marrinan, Council staff, I just, I was going to provide a little introduction to this next section. So we have some presenters for active research and analysis. The Council is not a research body. As I referenced for the chum salmon excluder EFP, a lot of the innovation comes through the commercial fishing industry. So it was requested that we invite non-agency staff to present relative to ongoing gear innovation.

So first we'll hear from Dr. Brad Harris again on the Gear Innovation Initiative, and then we have Dr. Noel Yokum and Shannon Carroll with Trident Seafoods who are participating in a modified trawl foot rope design under an exempted fishing permit. And I know we're tight on time, but following the presentations, these are also good people to ask questions if you have about gear configuration and design, if you have more questions about salmon excluders, Dr. Yokum has had some experience there. She could be a good person to— a good resource for you if you have additional questions. These PowerPoints are linked in your e-agenda under Part 4. And with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Harris.

Thank you, Sarah. Madam Chair, I don't think I'll introduce myself again. I will say The one thing standing probably between you and lunch is the questions you ask. So I'm more than happy to answer them, but I'm also going to be available all afternoon for further discussion on any of these elements. So I'm going to try to move through this section relatively quickly, but we'll see.

Okay, so I'm going to talk about— put on a completely different hat and really focus on line of research that my team and I initiated with Pawlik Fleet. Probably close to a decade ago, but that we really formalized in 2022 and '23 called the GEAR Innovation Initiative and talk you through what we're doing and why we're doing it and show you some of the results that are emerging. But as we talk about research, I'm going to step away from sort of structure, agency regulations, and talk more about process and things that are interesting to scientists like me. So when we think about, especially those that grew up fishing, but we think about fishing, one of the things I think most fishermen inherently understand is that harvest depends on the encounter between your gear and the fish you want to catch, whether it's a baited hook on a long line, a pot in the right place, or a trawl. So when we talk about pelagic trawling for pollock, it's really important to step back and think about the actual operation of fishing.

What is happening? Why? And then in that context, what about bottom contact? What about disturbance? What about interactions, unintended interactions, say with crab that could result in mortality?

All of the things, right? Because they're, they all have one thing in common. Whether it's the thing you want to catch, the thing you don't want to catch, or the habitat you don't want to disturb, everything comes back to the gear. Where is it in the water column? How is it configured?

Those are the things that determine whether there's even an interaction to begin with, and then if there is an interaction, what kind is it? What components of the gear actually made contact? Currently within our framework, we're not resolving those details, but we could. So when we think about a pelagic pollock trawl, if you look at the slide, you can see an operator in the wheelhouse consuming vast amounts of information that tell them where the fish are so that they can control that trawl, which makes it pelagic, and put it in alignment with those fish to ensure that they're catching what they need to catch, keeping in mind that on the fisheries management side of the house, the composition of what you catch, size and age, has a huge impact on whether or not that harvest is deemed sustainable. So as adult pollock live on or near the seabed, it means that in order for sustainable fishing to take place, that gear has to catch them on or near the seabed.

The shape of that gear in terms of, you know, a pelagic trawl really can— it functions like an oval, and the faster you tow it and the, you know, rig it with larger doors, you can change that shape. But that geometry determines how much contact you're likely to have, which is the then source potentially for an encounter with a crab or a sponge or any of those other things. And so we need to keep that in mind when we're thinking about gear. It's not a generic label. It's a specific piece of gear built out of specific materials fished and deployed in a specific way to achieve a certain outcome as part of a food production system.

And so we're starting off from that framework. And then if you look, this, uh, there's a three-dimensional animation that should give you a feel for what a pelagic trawl in the pollock industry actually looks like. And to remind yourself that the target catch, the bycatch, the PSC, the habitat interactions through seabed contact, and any unobserved mortality that may result all stem from the exact same gear and behavior. Why am I saying that? Because if you alter one thing in the structure, configuration, location of that gear, you affect all of those.

Why am I bringing that up? Well, let's say you elevate the gear off the bottom. That seems like a good idea for habitat. If it reduces your catch per unit effort by 30%, you now have to fish that much longer. And so we need tools that can evaluate those trade-offs and help guide council members more, more in sort of in the form of a dashboard than in terms of a single unit, single metric or outcome.

And so we have to remember that maybe we're focused on habitat here, but any action that we might do related to gear and habitat will affect all of those other processes. Finally, contact doesn't equal habitat effect, but it is the precursor for that event. If we don't have contact, we're not worried about it. If we do, we then start that analysis. It's the same thing.

An encounter with a crab doesn't necessarily result in mortality. There's a whole spectrum of outcomes that might happen, but we need to know whether or not there was an encounter to then start down that process. So the lines of evidence needed to address these concerns— habitat contact, bycatch, unobserved mortality— those that I know are on everybody's lips, all tied to the same processes, but require different lines of evidence and analysis. Our goal is to build out information to help inform all of those. But what we've got to work with now are these static gear tables that I just told you about, and so they capture some of that, but in a pretty rudimentary way.

For example, we can say in these depth ranges in the B season, the catcher-processor fleet for Pollock is using gears that are about this big and assume the biggest and assume the most contact, but that doesn't actually capture what's happening in terms of real fishing. And when that school of pollock moves up into the midwater or higher off the bottom at nighttime, the shape of the gear is going to change, and in that instance, so is the amount of gear available to make bottom contact. And our goal here is to try to get to that level of detail so that when the Council asks us a question about a specific location and time, we can ensure the results we're giving them are as accurate as possible to that real fishing. So we created what's called the Gear Innovation Initiative, and it really has two primary goals. One is to improve our a detailed understanding or improve our understanding by increasing the resolution and detail of the gear itself, what it's made of, how it's designed, and how it's fished.

It also then provides a foundation for innovation. Typically innovation begins with understanding what you're currently doing, identifying something that you would like to change, and then testing to improve that. Well, it's hard to do that if you don't know what the gear is currently doing. So the initiative is designed to get us information on what gear is currently used in the Bering and Aleutians and the Gulf, how is it implemented in the actual fishery, when, where, and how much is that particular gear fished, when, where, and how much is the gear likely in contact with the bottom. And so this process, we identified 3 really key steps.

First is to just catalog the gear, right? But that information is generally held by the fleet and the net designers, and it's proprietary. Industry. And so building a relationship with the industry such that they would hand over the net plans for every single trawl, that's something that has not happened in other regions around the world ever. In fact, many of our colleagues are sort of stunned that the industry in this region is willing to give those over, but that's what the basis of the gear catalog is for every single trawl.

Next is how are those gears actually fished? That's interviews with skippers to determine how they actually design, implement, and deploy the gear in the course of fishing, and then ultimately to recreate those in a framework that's something that we can use as a scientific testbed. If we're going to make improvements and say Dr. Yokom comes up with a new design for foot rope to hear about, we want the ability to plug that in and say, okay, relative to the status quo gear, what is that likely to do? It's extremely expensive to go try to do that in the field or even in downscaled models like in a flume tank. So we want to develop simulation capacity that lets us explore and test those innovations before we have to pay to build them, if that makes sense.

And so this is the structure of the GEAR initiative. We have international partners that we're working with where we are conducting similar types of efforts inshore with an inshore fleet in New Zealand, as well as the Nephrops fishery in the North Irish Sea in collaborations with from several government and research agencies in Ireland.

Okay, so let's talk through a gear catalog. So we're, like I said before, we're acquiring the net plans for every single trawl in the fishery, and for catcher processors, we have them all, every single net. And I, I mean, even if it's the same model on 5 different boats, we have 5 different sets of net plans, 5, because there's different rigging for all of those, the materials, what are they built out of, Specific dimensions of chains, lines, what does it have, self-spreading twine or not, down to the individual bars in the meshes configuration. What doors are you using? How have you rigged those bridles?

Do you have inline weights or clump weights? Many of these words may not mean much to you, but they're absolutely critical for fishermen. Regardless of what the fishery is, whether you're gillnetting, seining, longlining, Those details really matter, and that's what separates a highliner from maybe somebody who's not, right? Those details and the way they're operated. Finally, a modification.

We talked earlier about salmon excluders. If you're losing 15 to 20% of your pollock catch in the process of excluding salmon, this is going to have a big effect on how much contact and fishing that particular gear requires. And so, or, or results in. So we want to know any modifications in terms of how that gear is configured or operated. The next thing is to then sit with each of those operators and ask them, okay, with this gear, when you're fishing this model in this, you know, in this fishery, when do you make adjustments?

Because they don't fish the same piece of gear the same way all the time. And so that's called a fishing practice profile. We want to know what the actual fishing dynamics are. So when we simulate fishing, with your gear, we're actually modeling those simulations after real-world fishing. And that may, may even include behaviors like, hey, in the presence of salmon, when we're really concerned or approaching limits, we do this versus that, right?

Those behaviors really influence how that gear shapes up and how much contact it's likely to have. The simulation capacity available to us is quite powerful. There's a software developed by the state Fishery Science Agency in France. The software is called Dynamit, and it allows us to load in a net plan, which is really, if you know, my mom was a seamstress, so if you, you know what a cutting plan is for a garment, right? It's what it looks like when it's in, you know, two-dimensional pieces laid out on the, on the table before it gets stitched together and all of the custom fits happen.

That's what a net plan is. It's the cutting plan. But with that information, we can load it into the software and convert it into a 3D model that has to interact with the physics of flowing water. And so we can simulate that gear, and this example on the screen simply shows you just changing the speed. We can, through that simulation, show you how the shape of the gear changes just as a function of speed.

We can now isolate those effects. Is it a behavioral effect, the decision of the skipper? Is it a rigging effect? Those are really critical to making sure we've got the specs right for what's happening in the water, and those are the features we are likely to alter if we're going to make or do an innovation. So we need to be able to simulate those.

So these simulations generate expected geometry as well as forces under realistic rigging and fishing iterations without us having to go into the field with some potential new gear— hundreds of thousands of dollars to build one of these troughs, or even a scale model to take to a flume tank— still looking at $30,000 or $40,000 for one model. Here we can replicate many different configurations and explore their performance. So here you'll see an example of one of the simulations that mimics a trawl setting down on the bottom that incorporates real gear plans, real information on rigging and configuration details, and real information on towing conditions that are associated with what's actually happening in the fishery, allowing us to basically reconstruct the gear in its operating framework and explore different outcomes associated with behavior. So if we said, hey, let's simulate fishing on the bottom with this vertical opening, because that's what it really looks like in 100 fathoms to 50 fathoms in the BCs, we can create that simulation and use that to inform the framework and the details we use to account for that in the fishing effects model. Okay, great, that's a model, and as was pointed out by Mr. Wood accurately earlier, all models are wrong and some are useful, and so this is the point where we need to validate this.

So we have field work ongoing where skippers use the information they have readily available to them in the wheelhouse in terms of the geometry of the trawl. We're not asking them to tell us how much bottom contact there is, we're just simply saying, hey, when you look at your net sensors, How wide are the doors apart? How high is the headline from the foot rope? The basic, uh, information we need to capture that geometry and then determine whether our simulations are telling us an accurate story or not. And so we're actively collecting information through what's called haul logs that identify what gear is it, how is it rigged, and how's it fished?

And then what are these dimensional characteristics?

After that's done, we still have validation work to do with these models because, um, there's mathematical predictions. And so we need a place where we can run controlled experiments. And so here's some work that we did over the, uh, summer, um, results of which will be forthcoming to the council in February. But you can see some examples. So this is a flume tank facility at Memorial University in Newfoundland.

It's about 2 million liters or 450,000 gallons. It has a large test area, and that is a pelagic polychtrol. That model that you see there is the most commonly used throughout the fleet, accounting for probably 60% of all fishing, and a series of trials are used to determine whether and how the scaling works. So that particular trawl is 1/40th scale. So if one section of the net were 40 feet long, the model would be 1 foot, right?

And even that scaled model is still pretty big. And so we're going to run it through its paces in the tank and mimic the behavior that we see in the field and align that with our simulation. And so now we have 3 different ways of looking at that geometry and how that gear performs. Here we're specifically looking at what happens when you bring that gear to the bottom and how the contact with the seabed emerges. The tank has mensuration systems that allow us to make detailed measurements.

And you can see one of the staff members here using the system to, to generate science, scientific level size, shape, orientation information during these trials.

Here's a really cool just image that shows another one of the trawls that represents a large proportion of those in the Bering Sea. Here's the scale model in the tank, and on the screen that you can see in the lower part of the image is the high-resolution dynamic finite element model. And we're looking at whether or not the exact same geometries are realized in those— with those two different approaches. And this will highlight where perhaps we've got things wrong. And so the program of study that we put forward, we were there at the flume tank for just about 10 days.

We were able to work through three separate trawl models.

With an A season and a B season fishing configuration, 4 rigging arrangements, 5 different door spreads, and 10 different speed settings. And ultimately, that's over 150 test iterations that we now have available to us to examine whether or not our simulations are appropriately accurate or not, what the uncertainties are, and then where we need to improve.

So where are we with the gear initiative? We have acquired the net plans for almost 300 trawls. So as soon as we finished, or actually while we were still working with the catcher processor fleet, the catcher vessels came forward and said we would like to do this as well and have been actively contributing net plans and participating in developing the practice profiles and so forth. So about 300 trawls currently in the catalog and it's growing. Over 100 fishing practice profiles aligned with those specific trawls, well over 100, probably closer to 200 simulations that have been put together.

We've got over 250 haul logs that have come in. So for those specific trawls, how are they shaping up in the real world? And then we were able to test 3 of the dominant trawls in the flume tank to produce this link between what we simulate, what we measure in the field, and what we can observe in the flume tank as a way to ensure that we're capturing these dynamics appropriately.

And I'll stop there.

Thank you very much, Dr. Harris. Yes, Ms. Kimball. Thank you, Dr. Harris. I appreciate the presentation. I learn something every time we get an update, but if you could go back to Slide 4 that has the gear parameters that are fed into the EFH analysis.

So that last column is the bottom contact adjustment score. And so is, is all of this work— and that's where you were saying you had multiple assumptions, conservative assumptions, because we didn't know a lot about how the gear actually operates in these various configurations. Now you're testing all of So is that the column we would expect to see change for this next version of the analysis where we're not— we're using real information, I guess, to create this column as opposed to the conservative estimates used in the past? And then will this table be 10 times as long? I don't— I'm just trying to gauge what the expectations would be for the council or the public.

Through the Chair, Ms. Kimball, In my presentation to the Council in June, I tried to highlight the way we will transfer this information into the Fish and Effects Model, and the term that I used is tiered. So we'll have gears, fixed gears, and so forth where we're going back to the fleet and asking for their expert input. That's the status quo that we've used thus far. For the catcher processor vessels that are in that table, there are 6 categories for the catcher processor fleet, bearing sea, pollock. What we will likely do is replace those 6 categories because they're depth-based, time-of-year-based, and so forth, is an actual set of parameters that identify the relationship between the size, the shape of the gear, and the height of the headline above the seabed.

So for example, if the vertical opening of the trawl is 10 meters, and the headline is 15 meters from the seabed, you already know you have no contact, right? So we now have the ability to quantify based on the gear design configuration fishing what the shape is. We also have data through the observing program and logbook program that tells us the headline height for every one of those fishing events, and we know the water depth. So we now have the ability to create a more dynamic representation of that gear, and it alters both. If you look at the graphic that I have up here, both of the dimensional width of the gear, which we have been assuming is fixed, it is not.

Depending on the headline height and how the operator fishes the gear, how much wire is out, how fast they tow the gear, the vertical opening and the shape of the gear changes, leaving less or more of the gear available to contact the bottom. We now know that relationship. So all we need to know is the headline height and what trawl it was. The rest of that information allows us to actually predict the geometry and location, or use the geometry and location to actually quantify contact. So it's a different framework and it won't be a lookup table.

A lookup table is limited to, you know, labels as opposed to developing a process that actually captures the dynamic of fishing. Issue. So there's going to be a fundamental change, and we will walk through that in detail in February, but it won't be for all the gears. We will start off just with catcher processor pollock, and we'll see where we are with catcher vessels by the time this goes forward. So that's the tiered approach.

There'll be different levels of information in terms of detail coming forward for these different sectors of fleet. Ultimately, our goal is to do this for all the gears. This applies to fixed gears just as much as it does to trawls. Different framework, different parameters, same process. Our hope is that the council eventually has available to it something like the fleet profiles that were developed back around, you know, 2010 to '15, a gear profiles document that allows you to actually see and understand these dynamics, um, to help inform you when these types of gear-related issues come before you in the future.

Good. Um, Mr. Wood, and then back to Miss Kimball.

Mr. Wood, do you have—. Oh, sorry, it sounds like a long-range shooting app.

So, uh, when you, when you develop a long-range shooting app for a specific gun, it's like the load, the barrel, the twist, the weight of the bullet, all that stuff. It's like, and it's just a matter of, you know, times you've used it. It sounds exactly like the same thing. Through the chair, Mr. Wood, my dad was a reloader. We did mostly 06, and I understand what you're talking about.

And yes, there's a lot of parallels.

Yeah, Miss Kimball, just a quick one. Thank you. That, um, so if behavior is such a big component Could you then use all of this new tested information to have a better idea of how each gear contacts the bottom or how often, but could you hold the behavior at a very conservative level, like assuming everyone's going to fish in the way that would make the most bottom contact? You're still going to have to make some of those assumptions, correct? Okay.

Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, I mean, we would have— our goal is to move from labels and expert opinion to empirically derived transparent, data-driven estimates of contact. What the council guides us to do and the SSC guides us to do in terms of continuing to be conservative is a separate question. We're going to bring forward the information at the highest resolution possible, explain how we got there, identify the uncertainties, and then how that moves forward in terms of the precautionary framework will be determined by the SSC, and we will Yeah, we're also going to produce a bridging analysis that lets us say, hey, we've captured fishing events through the catch and areas database this way. Now we have a new version of that. How does it align with what we did in the past?

Does it give us the same answer or does it differ? Same thing here. We'll be able to show you, here's what the model run looks like using the generic gear tables. Here's what it looks like when we bring in this new highly resolved information about pollock fishing. I think one thing to keep in mind, because of those precautionary assumptions built into the gear tables, that 70 to nearly 100% and so forth, there's only one way for the needle to go.

Actually two ways. It can stay where it is, or contact dimensional characteristics could potentially go down. So if we're looking at, say, nighttime fishing and we actually account for that, and there's clear evidence that that gear headline height is well above the seabed relative to the vertical opening, that's going to result in a subset of fishing events that we assumed to be on the bottom not being on the bottom. That's a better representation of what's actually happening, but it's important to recognize that's the function of us moving into a more data-driven, less precautious framework as uncertainty goes down, not because— not some new, you know, version of the, of the model or some change in fishing behavior. It's just an improved information product.

And our goal is to be able to show you that contrast if it does occur, identify when, where, and why, and then the SSE can decide whether they want to accept that or not.

Thank you. And Ms. Van Gorder? I'm sorry, but I got a question. Last question. So building off of that, will there be— is there a component of sort of in-field verification of that bottom contact and how would that be done and when would that be done?

Through the chair, Ms. Van Dort. So what I didn't have time to talk about today is in parallel with this work beginning almost a decade ago, we have developed and deployed accelerometer-based tilt sensors. So the same tool in your phone that knows the orientation of the screen, gets installed in a, you know, housing attached to a piece of metal rebar that gets snapped onto the bottom of a foot rope so that as that trawl sits down, that tilt tells us the height or clearance. Now you have to— it's extremely difficult to put those on and take them off in the course of regular fishing because you have to have people out in the trawl alley while the gear is being deployed, which means that you have to choke it off and make it secure every single time you attach a sensor as you— and we just— we want them around the whole arc of the trawl. And so we've spent a fair bit of time as a team and then working with our international collaborators to develop and test to deploy those types of sensors.

And so I envision us getting into a mode where we have a— if we have a very specific question about a component of the trawl, or we have a new design that we really want to validate in the field, That's gonna re— and we want to do it at scale. You're talking about taking a catcher processor offline in order to deploy this stuff, and you can't roll those up on the drum. They have to get snapped on and taken off every time you put the gear in the water. So we're not asking a question with these tilt sensors as to, or bottom contact sensors as to yes, no, whether contact is happening. That's actually pretty easy to determine already.

And we have already assumed 100% contact in all of these events going forward. We would use those sensors and research capacity to say, oh, Well, if we use neutrally buoyant materials instead of chain, we can get higher clearance but have the same fishing outcomes. Balancing catch per unit effort, say, with habitat benefits, going to lighter materials, changing rigging, then we have a hypothesis that we can test with those sensors. Um, and so I didn't cover that. Dr. Yokom will talk, uh, about just kind of the general realm of sensors.

There is a lot of confusion. When people say, oh, I jumped on Google and I looked it up and this, you know, Simrad, Scanmar, Marport offers this sensor, those sensors are not the type of sensors we're talking about that give us information about contact and clearance. They will tell you yes, no, and that's typically more useful if you're fishing with a bottom trawl because you need to know you're in contact in order for that gear to work properly, or say with the Fishery Service survey. They need to know the gear is on the bottom in order to ensure that they've got the right swept area for a given density estimate. We're talking about something completely different when we're talking about sensors to produce good estimates of clearance and contact, because these gears have to be able to fish within, you know, a meter or less of the bottom to achieve effective catch of adult pollock that are the ones that are the, that are being prescribed in terms of harvest for these fleets.

And So we need to be able to detect and measure things at that resolution.

Great. Thank you. Any final questions for Dr. Harris? No? We appreciate your presentation.

Thank you. So with that, I think it's a good time to break for lunch. We'll come back at 1:20. We'll close public signup for testimony at that time. So please sign up before 1:20 if you'd like to testify.

We'll come back and finish our second part of our fourth agenda item, and then we have one more presentation after that. So I'll see you at 1:20. Thank you.

Still missing most of our committee members, so let's get this meeting over. Just kidding.

Let's—. We will give it a couple more minutes, maybe refresh and come back at 1:30.

And yes, public testimony sign-up should have closed at 1:20. If anyone had challenges signing up, please do let us know. Thanks.

Committee members, please come back to order.

Before we start, um, for part 4 of our agenda, um, with Trident's EFP, I'm going to hand it over to Ms. Evans to make an announcement.

Uh, good afternoon. I just wanted to let people know that, um, we had originally noticed it is not the council's policy, and we discussed this with the board before, that we were not going to record. Um, we often in court— let me start again. Um, we often— we do not post the recordings of meetings, of our committee meetings for the Council. So it was not our intention to post a meeting recording, an audio recording of this meeting.

However, given the conversations today and that the purpose of this meeting is really information exchange, we think it would be really valuable to augment the written materials that are posted to the e-agenda with the audio recording of the discussion back and forth about the presentations today. So we have that record for people who are interested in understanding better about these issues. Issues, because I think we had a lot of really valuable discussion that augmented the written presentations. And so we would probably sometime next week, we will pull out the portion of the audio recording that is focused on these presentations, and we will post that as part of on the JPC, the Joint Protocol Committee, e-agenda page so that people have access to that if they're interested in following that. I just wanted to let people know because we had said that we weren't planning to record this meeting and post those recordings, and I wanted to make sure everybody knew that we were had changed that practice a little bit.

Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Evans.

Welcome. I think we're ready whenever you are.

Thank you. We're just waiting for the PowerPoint, but for those, um, listening in, this is going to be on the e-agenda under the Trident presentation.

Okay, thank you so much for having us today. I am Noelle Joachim, and with me is Shannon Carroll from Trident Seafoods, and we're going to talk today about our EFP project for the modified foot rope.

Oops, there we go. We're going to start a little bit backwards to think a little bit about the context for how we got here and what led us to do this project by talking about measuring C4 contact and a little bit of overview on trawl design.

I think that one.

Yep. For—. So just a little background. So for the Pelagic Trawl, this is often also referred to as aimed trawling. This has evolved over time with acoustic sounders to have this technology create these acoustic images that are used to find the fish, and then the captain can target the fish where they're at in the water column.

And this can be anywhere from the seafloor to the water column. And that's the concept behind the pelagic trawl, is that they're aiming for where the fish are at.

It also is characterized by a net that has a large vertical and horizontal opening that's suspended in the water column, and it's allowed to make that shape by having counteracting forces of spread and lift and weight.

So this is an example, as you saw from Dr. Harris, from the flume tank, same idea. And just to show you, the doors are what gives our polytrol that lift and that spread. Because as you know, there is no flotation on the headline. And then that's counteracted by opposing weight clump weights and then also the foot rope. So the foot rope is there in place in order to provide this counteracting weight for those spreading forces to create that large horizontal mouth that can move up and down in the water column to target and aim pollock for where they're located.

And for those who might not be as familiar, I'm guessing everyone is at this point, but this is an example of a foot rope from one of our catcher vessels. And just to give a sense of scale, this is a 2-inch, a 2-inch chain that goes along the foot rope to distribute that weight evenly along, along the bottom in order again to create that counteracting weighting for force. And just to provide a little bit more, I always love making these cheesy, uh, animations, but this is kind of the idea. If the fish are in the water column, those spreading and weight forces allow that mass to open and target where they're at. But then if the fish are found near the seafloor, the captain can move the net down and target them there where they're at.

Now, the distance above bottom can affect catch efficiency and bycatch. We know that if they're not targeting, if they're intentionally going above bottom and they're not where the fish are at, will reduce efficiency. And we also know that our captains, if they suspect that there is going to be bycatch such as salmon higher in the water column, they'll try to put their net deeper in order to avoid them. And we also know efficiency matters. I think that's been brought up by several people today.

And this is something that I feel is very important.

So if we're intentionally taking our net off bottom when the fish are found there, that results in inefficiency. And we know that when we're efficient, it means there's fewer toes, which can reduce bycatch encounters, bottom contact, fuel consumption, time at sea, which translates to safety, and many other things. So it's really important to think about when we're thinking about how we're modifying operations or gear to maintain that efficiency. So in thinking about that and trying to maintain efficiency, we, when we started this project, we were thinking about, well, how do we go in and, and estimate our contact? How do we do this so we can be efficient but also mitigate and reduce our contact?

I guess I wanted to provide a little bit of context that this project is really oriented around the Bering Sea fisheries and oriented around a real specific area of uncertainty, which is unobserved crab mortality. And so the much of the focus of the presentation and what we're talking about is really applicable to the Bering Sea, not the Gulf of Alaska fisheries. Thanks for that clarification. That's helpful. So we went and did a deep dive into understanding how to measure seafloor contact, and I'm going to provide a little bit of some of the things that we looked at and just provide some explanation that led us to where we did with this EFP.

I'm happy to answer more specific questions if people are interested, but I'm going to try to keep it a bit high level, but just to sort of give some information about how, how it works to measure seafloor contact. And I think Dr. Harris already went over this, this, but clearance is what we refer to when we think about that space below the foot rope, um, between the foot rope and the seafloor. So that's what we're referring to with clearance. So there's mechanical options, um, that are available that can measure that contact and clearance. Um, and those are some examples, and I'm happy to get into the trigonometry if folks wanna understand how those estimations are made.

But, um, also as Dr. Harris had said, these are more— these mechanical sensors are typically used for things like bottom trawl surveys. Where the question really is, were there any issues with my toe? Is my gear performing correctly? Are the data usable? Really just sort of relying on that one bottom contact sensor at the center of the gear that assumes that there's going to be constant and consistent contact over the foot rope and that, that, that sensor information is pretty coarse and can let you know, like, were there any general problems?

This doesn't necessarily work very well for our pelagic trials. This is, this is some information here that it's based on a study that was done by Brianna King for her master's thesis in 2019, working with Dr. Harris and myself as a collaborator. And what she found is, and this is sort of an image looking into the trawl net, is when you think about contact over the duration of a tow, this is one of the images that she created, or one of the figures she created and showed highly variable contact. So over the extent of the toe and over the location of the toe, seeing that there are places in the black where there was actual contact and then the different shades of gray going to lighter, having more and more clearance. So given this high variability, and this is just a little video showing what some of that looks like, it's a very different situation than with that bottom contact sensor for the trawl.

Oops. So again, this becomes— this contact is highly variable. And for those who are interested, this is really due to trawl dynamics. There can be intentional changes in depth because the captain is moving the gear up and down, terms, bathymetry, also sea floor contour. We know that there is not a consistent contour over the spread of the net and over the duration.

So you're likely going to have high variability. And so you have to have— you think about How many sensors would be needed in a situation like that? There's also more— I can go into the details on this, but there's issues with snagging. There's lack of attachment, uh, locations for these sensors. We showed the, uh, image of that chain.

There's not a lot of places to attach gear. Um, and as Dr. Harris said, it needs to go over the net reel cost. But one of the other big challenges with the mechanical sensors is just the data processing. There's a lot of noisy and erroneous data due to the sensor bouncing around. Interactions with debris.

There's also pretty strong bound, uh, bottom currents that are generated from the gear that make it hard for those mechanical sensors to behave. Um, and they also bind up and twist as we saw out doing the field work. One of the other things I think is sort of an interesting thing to note, um, when you think about attaching a sensor to the foot rope and you think about this is the direction of tow, um, you would need to have these all sort of have their own special housing based on the angle of attachment in order for them to actually work. So when you think about logistically, you'd have to have a sort of a specialized place for each of these based on the angle of the gear at a location. So it becomes very problematic thinking about how you would attach these.

And from Brianna King, from hers, we really found that in order to do to really understand the, the data that you're getting from these, you would need video to ground truth. So what we found is for a fishery where the intention is to fish very close to the bottom, given the where the pollock are found at times, that these sensors are not necessarily designed for that fine-scale resolution. There's also the idea of using a head rope unit or a third wire trawl sonar, And this is an acoustic sensor that sends down these acoustic signals, a sound, and it bounces back off of the hard parts and that's generates data of how far away it is. So this is another thing that's used and we looked at for an opportunity for measuring that distance. There's multiple companies that make them, but essentially this is kind of what you're seeing.

You get these, these plots that show where the bottom is and hopefully where your gear is and where the fish is. But we ran into a lot of issues with this as well. When the foot rope gets really close to the seafloor, it becomes very challenging to see it. It becomes blended in with the bottom, especially given that the return, the acoustic return from the bottom is so strong. There also, the confidence is really just at the center of the foot rope.

So when you think about confidence along the extent of the foot ropes, similar with the bottom contact sensors, you would need multiple sensors to really have a strong understanding of, of what's— of that, of the clearance at those different locations. And also the sensors are heavily affected by things like pitch and roll. So if you were to have, you know, if you have an unequal warp and it's kind of going to one side, or if it's being pulled too hard by the, by the third wire, you end up getting pitch and roll, which throws off the values. There's also side lobes and all these other fun things. I'm not an acoustician, but from what I've learned, it's— there's some challenges here.

And we also have acoustic dead zone, which has been made better with shorter pulse durations and things like that that have improved with the sensors. But it still exists. And I'm happy to go into detail. I'm still trying to keep a higher level, but the challenges with these we found were to have similar to mechanical sensors, and then found that these really were not designed for that resolution that we need for this fishery where the fish are so close in proximity to the seafloor at times. So we found that thinking about what can we do with bottom contact sensors to think about reducing our, our contact and thought about how difficult it would be to integrate this new technology, developing best practices, how we process all that data, and even just thinking about housings given the angle of the foot rope, we really kind of thought, well, maybe when we're thinking about how we can reduce our contact, we might consider moving to thinking about gear modification and understanding fishing gear parameters a little bit better.

So our objective at that time became to think about an engineering solution, as Shannon said, to overcome that presumption of unobserved fishing mortality and those negative impacts impacts by having some kind of a gear modification, but also thinking about doing that in the context of not impacting operations or safety, making something that was going to be applicable to multiple gear types and our fleets, the catcher vessels and catcher processors, something that would be affordable, wouldn't require big modifications to the gear, and also would not lead to an increase in bycatch, or as I talked about earlier, a reduction in efficiency. So that led— so that's all sort of the background and story of how we got here to this exemptive fishing permit project where we wanted to see if we could modify the foot rope to reduce the bottom contact.

So this is again just a cartoon of the trawl just to give you a reference. And so the idea that we came up with working with Seamus Smelly at Swanet who had the original design concept, was essentially how can we take the foot rope and change the orientation to reduce contact? And as I mentioned earlier, the foot rope really is just there in place to provide counteracting forces against that spreading. So what you need is to have weight at the various points along the foot rope, but it doesn't necessarily have to be in the design that it is currently. So the concept was to take this chain break it into smaller pieces and change the orientation.

And in doing this, essentially what it does is if you were to look at it now here with the modified foot rope, is it creates space between the chains that would allow, um, anything near the, um, seafloor to pass under and also, um, reduces that amount of contact. So this is an image from the flume take where we took it to, um, the same flume take that Dr. Harris is referencing. To see how— just to understand the gear better. And hopefully this gives a sense for how it's designed. And I brought the model here.

If anyone's interested in seeing it, we can happily pass that around to people.

And so essentially the idea is that when there is contact being made, instead of having the chain making that contact over that extent, that there'd only be contact of 2 inches. Every couple of meters per the design of the foot rope.

And this is a— this is really just for illustrative purposes that when we were thinking about what kind of reduction we could be talking about here, we made an assumption if there's full contact, what that would look like in a reduction. And based on that foot rope of 2 inches, we were looking at something close to like 96% reduction if, if near the seafloor. So just to give a quick update on the EFP, we're currently using this modified foot rope on all of our Bering Sea POLLOCs, CVs, and CPs. And our next steps that we're working on currently is to, to go and do some modeling of the data. We've collected an extensive amount of data, largely thanks to our captains, to look and understand efficiency.

We have captains that have indicated that it works just as well is the standard foot rope, but we want to show that with the data. So we're going to be doing an extensive data analysis with that. We've also collected some video footage and we're going to take a look at how much time that foot rope is on bottom and to also think about the design in regard to different locations on the foot rope and the different designs. One thing that we did do is for one of our CPs, we tried a second version where we tried to reduce the number of chains to see if we could get the contact down even more. So we're gonna look at that in the video.

And then also we gathered some data. We went to the flume tank similar to Dr. Harris, looking at variables that might affect how those, how the chains contact. And finally, we hope to publish this to make it publicly available to let people build and learn from it. We're gonna also work with Dr. Harris to get this model into his GII initiative, and we continue to think about ways to improve it and encourage others who might be interested, um, in taking this and making it their own. So 3 kind of takeaways for all this information that I've just shared is essentially we did a pretty deep dive into the sensors and it doesn't seem that they are made to, um, work the way that we would need for our purposes.

Um, they might exist, but they are a tool that is, um, is really not bespoke when you have something where you need to get so close to the seafloor. We also know that efficiency means less impact ultimately, so the trawl really needs to be where the pollock are, and the SPF demonstrates as an example how gear design might be able to be used to reduce contact while maintaining that efficiency.

Before I wrap up, I just really want to acknowledge that this project is really Thanks to the captains that I've been able to work with at Trident who have really given a lot of time and energy into this project, have been willing to collect data, give input and ideas on for how this could be done, have provided ideas on how to modify the foot rope. So just a big shout out to them and to SwanNet for being a partner in this project. Anything for you to add? Yeah, I guess we didn't do the best job introducing ourselves, But for those that don't know Dr. Yokum, we hired Dr. Yokum away from the Alaska Fishery Science Center where you spent the better part of your career doing gear modification research cooperatively, including on the salmon excluders that we now see in the Bering Sea. So has a long history of working with this and is really an expert in her field.

So if you don't know her, I just wanted to make sure that that introduction was clear. Thanks. Thank you, Mr. Carroll and Dr. Yoakam. And thank you for your leadership on this work. It's very responsive, I think, to the issues that the council's working on right now and obviously some of the public attention on the gear.

So thank you so much.

So, Ms. Van Dort. Thank you. Appreciate the presentation. Two questions for you. Um, maybe I missed it.

Do you have a scaled image of a sensor in the presentation, or a scale? Uh, sit chair, Miss Van Dort, a scaled image of—. What are we talking about? How big these sensors that are so cumbersome to, um, to work with? I was trying to get an idea of— I think I saw a— there's one, an, like, a, a graphic sort of, but I was just curious if Are we thinking the mechanical sensors?

That the— yeah, let me show you. It's hard to see, but I can— let's see.

So the— actually, I've got a picture of myself holding one of them. This—. Let me go back. That's exactly what I was kind of looking for. I was—.

Yeah, what they look like and how large they were. And oops, sorry. Here, this is a good image.

It's not super responsive on the laptop, but so that the one on the bottom, that one uses a tilt sensor to measure the angle in relation to the seafloor. So you can see that fun trigonometry there. But that rebar, I can't remember, it's been so long, but it's probably about yay big. And then the box is like maybe about yay big. So that's pretty tiny.

The issue with that one, it's nice it's small, it's limited a bit by the rebar length. You can only get so much clearance based on that, the rebar. If it gets too long, then it becomes a bit of a hazard. But the issue with this one especially is the way that you clip it on, because it tends to get bound up and because it, you know, if it doesn't wiggle right, I guess, is a— and it's so light that the currents that tend to flow below the gear end up kind of pushing it back. And so when the sensor is just hanging down, it means it's fully off bottom, but then the currents, that bottom current will push it back, and so it will look like it's on bottom when it's not because of that current.

And then the one up top, that's probably about yay big and a bit heavy, maybe 20, 30 pounds, something like that. Was that?

Yes, right. And that, thank you for that. The one on the bottom is recorded data, so you wouldn't have that in real time. You'd record it, download it, and then process the data. And then my second question is, in talking about how you modified the foot rope, that's great for the foot rope.

I'm just curious, how does the cod end perform when it's full? We don't see any effects. Honestly, the captains are kind of like, it's, it just kind of feels like it's the same. The only thing is it sinks a tiny bit slower. But they haven't seen any effect in the cut end so far away that we don't see any impact that far down.

So there's no contact with the bottom aside from the foot rope? Oh, for the gear you mean? Yeah. Pardon me, through the chair, Ms. Van Dort. No, there's no contact made there with the cut end.

This is just looking at the foot rope. Yeah, thank you for the clarification. Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, Miss Kimball.

I had, I had one. Thank you through the chair on the, um, if there's anything more to say about the echo sounder, like that acoustic. I'm looking at slide 25 on the acoustic dead zone, and I mean, we have acoustic surveys that then do they also have this problem with the dead zone where they don't know how far off the bottom they are because there's just no data in that portion, or is that different for surveys versus a fishing operation? Through the chair, Ms. Kimball, thank you for the question. This is an issue.

The paper that you're seeing that I've taken this figure from is actually from the NOAA survey team who are reporting this dead zone, which is why there has to be that kind of pairing with the bottom trawl. Again, this is getting better and better with improvements in technology. The dead zone has a lot to do with pulse length, which is sort of the size of that sound wave. And as you reduce that pulse length, it does become easier to get finer scale resolution. However, as an anecdote, when we were working with one of our captains, we made sure that the sensor— the company who makes the sensor— went in and optimized all of the parameters to reduce the pulse length and kind of set it up for best case scenario.

And I was like, oh, hey, see, you know, see how low you can get to see where your foot rope is. And in the conversations with him, essentially it would go down and down and down into about a fathom and a half. And then he's like, okay, I see it. And then he's like, it's the weirdest thing, all of a sudden it looks like the foot rope just drops and merges in with the seafloor. And I called our gear manufacturer to make sure I wasn't completely missing something.

But we're pretty confident that as it gets down to about a fathom, it just starts blending in with the seafloor so that you can't see that resolution.

Yes, Ms. Dandor. Last question, and it's to your, your final slide on 37 in your summary. Just so that I'm clear and was tracking you correctly, your first bullet there, sensors to measure, do not work for our purpose.

Sorry, what do you mean by that specifically? Are you bringing into the efficiency, you know, factors? What do you mean for our purpose? Uh, through the chairs, thank you, Miss Sandra. That's a great question.

Um, and I didn't, I didn't clarify that very much. That's really helpful. Um, essentially when we're thinking about bottom contact, we're trying to understand how close we can get in order to reduce bottom contact. But because the fish are so tight down on bottom, I think maybe Dr. Harris had mentioned this as well, sometimes they're just found so, so far down, the captains call them carpeted, like they're so far down. And so thinking about trying to measure clearance that's that small and trying to get really close but not touch, it's really not possible with these sensors.

So the sensor is that sort of error, like we basically want to fish within that error. And so we can't really get that information. So these sensors, like for example the mechanical ones from a bottom trawl survey, those are really like, is the trawl, you know, did things go well or was there some like big thing that happened? Um, that the sensors work for that purpose. Or some of these sensors that, you know, oh, I've read papers like, oh, we're trying to see like, are we, you know, within like 4 or 5 meters?

But when you're trying to get that close, it becomes very challenging and the tool doesn't really the need, if that makes sense. Please, Shannon. Yeah, and through the chair, just to elaborate, it goes back to sort of how I framed the purpose of this project, which is really to focus on reducing contact, maintaining efficiency, and getting at the issue of unobserved crab mortality. And so using sensors alone to either say you're on or off bottom doesn't get at those. It can impact negatively the other two to things that we're trying to get at, which is catch efficiency and reducing unobserved mortality.

And so what we're trying to do is create an engineering solution that, that does all of those things. And having a sensor alone isn't, isn't sort of the, a singular approach to do that. You have to have gear innovation and engineering solutions to it. Yeah. And I think just to add one thing to thinking about about this, the size of the foot rope and that variability, as well as the sort of a Herculean task of processing the data and whatnot.

Thank you. We'll go to Mr. Carpenter.

Yeah, just something real quick. I mean, I think we heard a lot today from Dr. Harris and now from you all, and a lot of the conversation obviously surrounding this topic is about how close to the bottom can we get and be efficient and be practical all at the same time. And it's pretty clear to me that the head rope sensors, there's some limiting factors about how, how it can read that information. There's also a practical sense of how can you deploy and retrieve these trawls and put them back on a boat in an efficient manner as well. But is there anything in the works or is there any type of technology technology that is currently being developed to where some of this, something could be incorporated into the foot rope that would maybe solve both of these problems at the same time.

A, being able to bring them back on the vessel in an efficient way. B, being able to deploy them without having to stop the operation, especially in horrible weather and cumbersome nature in which, but also gather that information. Is there anything at all that's in the works.

To the chairs, Mr. Carpenter, we did submit an NPRB crab disaster funding proposal to see if there was a way that we could work with the company to develop something along these lines. It was not funded. But that being said, when I think about where energy could best be spent, I do think that that would be a long road and would be very challenging. To my knowledge, there's probably nothing that could necessarily just go over the net reel. It would be probably something you'd still have to attach.

But for our purposes, we were thinking about developing something more for research rather than like a commercial operation. I feel like that would, that would take quite a bit, and I'm unaware of anyone looking to develop something for that purpose. It would be very, very niche to, to this fishery. And I think to the, the point of this project is to, to show that you can create a design that cannot exceed a certain value of bottom contact where you don't have to have a sensor to, to prove whether you're on or off bottom or whether the net can be fished in a way that's counter to how it was designed. So under the slide that showed assuming full 100% contact, it's a reduction of 96% plus, and that's at, you know, maximum value.

I think it's important to recognize that there's no fishery that has zero impact on the seafloor or the habitat, and I think the way the council's approaching it is that they're not looking to mandate zero contact. They're looking to minimize uncertainty with regards to unobserved mortality and seafloor contact. And so, So sensors are a way to approach that, but there are other ways to approach it through gear design, and you can have performance standards that don't require technology to enforce. A good example is the amendment 80 sector has a performance standard of elevated sweeps that have to be, I think it's 2-something inches off the seafloor. That was done and validated through testing and gear design and made such that that gear design could be be looked at by an enforcement officer on deck and be enforceable, but there's no sensors that enforce that performance standard.

So I think that's important to just make— get home. Just a quick follow-up to that. Thank you for that clarification. I look—. I think the modifications that you all have come up with in regards to reducing that footprint and the efficiency, if it's still being able to be maximized, is a great accomplishment.

I think considering some of the information Dr. Harris presented to us earlier about the cataloging of these trawl designs, I'm not sure if the, if this information with this modified foot rope has been put into those calculations yet, but that would also be something really interesting to look at in the future. So appreciate the information. Through the chairs, Mr. Carpenter. Yes, that's definitely a plan, and I think, as Dr. Harris said, it's a— it definitely is a time and cost-saving thing to have those models to be able to look at other designs. We have— we don't believe that this is the only design that one could come up with, especially like I said, the foot rope really is meant to spread that weight across to counteract the spread.

And so I think that could be done in a lot of ways, and I'm really excited about someone else coming up with some cool way to do that. I think also I want to, you know, just give a shout out to Trident too, because having the vessels and the captains being able to participate in this, I think we were able to accomplish this in a very pretty rapid timeline. But I do think that that's not accessible to everyone. So this model will certainly be helpful and help us understand even how this performs even better. Thank you.

And Mr. Wood, you have. Okay, thanks. In my brain, I now, I kind of equate this to avalanche safety. You know, you have a beacon and everybody goes out and buys a beacon, but that in itself doesn't keep you out of an avalanche. And you've gotta do snow science and terrain analysis in order to really depend on keeping yourself outta hot water.

And I'm just wondering, like having, just having that piece of equipment, how useful is that to determine the bottom, especially when somebody has to go back and look at it and potentially do enforcement? And how practical is it, like if in the modeling, if it's a very flat bottom and a very flat ocean, it might work, but when you have severe seas and waves and terrain on the bottom, wouldn't there be a fair bit of bouncing and just Like how, like how efficient would that even be? Like, just to clarify your analogy and what we're talking about, are you, when you say tools, are you talking about the sensors that she talked about or the modified foot room? Mostly the sensor, I guess. Like I've tried to put a lot of thought into like the practicality of that.

And then of course the enforcement part, which is another thing altogether. But, uh, through the chairs, Mr. Wood, I love your analogies. Um, yeah, I don't know a lot about avalanche safety, but I will say that, um, I think you're pretty spot on. Um, the, the challenges are, are, are real. Um, even just how noisy the data is.

Um, little complications that we found, like I said, those bottom currents and having the— even for the mechanical one, being kind of thrown off, um, and having it look like it's on bottom when it's not. And we also saw that in Brianna King's master's work, where we asked the captain to tell us when he was on bottom, and we wrote the time, and then we validated that with camera footage. And oftentimes they were not on bottom when they thought that they were, and that was based even on the, the acoustic sensor. Um, there's just— it's very complicated, it's very noisy, um, and beyond, um, kind of having erroneous or noisy data thinking about programs like EM where you have to have systems in place for, you know, protocols, processing the data, data ownership, things like that, it becomes even more challenging in my opinion.

Thank you. And Ms. Van Dorr. Thanks. So back to the foot rope modification, and I guess I'm just wondering, Shannon, you referenced the math, the 96% reduction And that's just the kind, you know, the area, right? What you're essentially proposing is going from a shovel to a rake.

And so I'm curious whether or not there's a methodology that you're considering as you continue this project for measuring actual impact versus just area.

So the chair, Miss Mador, do you mean as far as like impact, the result of the contact?

Right. We are not currently planning to look at the result of the contact, but we are going to be doing some video review and quantifying different things that we're seeing to get an understanding of kind of interactions, sediment cloud, those types of things. So we'll be processing video footage that we've collected to understand that. But I think Shannon has something to add for as well. Yeah, to the chair.

And I think it's more of a broom versus a rake, but that's where Brad's work comes into play. But also all of that is what was presented on in terms of EFH analysis and fishing effects modeling. And so this, if this EFP were to become legal under regulation and used, then it would be integrated into Brad's work through the, his team's work through the fishing effects model, and then ultimately into Jodi's work on the EFH analysis. Analysis. So, um, we do have, as Noel mentioned, we really want to explore the interactions with, with unobserved mortality on crab in the Bering Sea because that's really the issue that this design was formed around.

And we are hoping to, um, you know, explore some partnerships with the Bering Sea Research Foundation and others. But, um, beyond in terms of habitat impacts and fishing effects model impacts, that's all going to be done through NOAA and the Fishing Effects Model team. Thank you. And that's super encouraging. And I think a broom is a much better analogy.

Thank you for that.

Thank you very much. Yeah, I just—. It is really important to remember, and I think what we heard earlier is that under our, you know, existing process in modeling very precautionary and conservative effects of, of pelagic trawl gear that are— we're not, we're not receiving a signal of concern or meeting a threshold by which we're required to initiate management action or changes. And so the, the focus— and we'll be talking about this in the next presentation— that the focus of the council is the continual improvements. And I think that this project has been really responsive to that and minimizing risk associated with unobserved crab mortality.

And so that is, I think, really important to— I know there's a lot of focus on, on contact. And as we heard from Dr. Harris, and this is something that took me a while to really grasp as well, that there's a whole different process that really translates that contact into impact. Through our EFH process. And so the 96% initial estimates of reduction based on status quo gear configurations is pretty significant. And running, you know, and I really look forward to seeing it run through the fishing effects model and the outputs associated with that.

But I think the next presentation will really walk through kind of of how the council is taking in all of this information and trying to analyze different pathways forward for that continual improvement and supporting your innovation efforts like this, as well as other ways to look at reducing and minimizing impact to habitat where we have closures for non-pelagic trawl, but non-pelagic trawl So thank you very much.

Miss Marinan. So after Miss Marinan's— this final presentation, we will begin public testimony. And I haven't seen how many people we have signed up. 18, 16. So we'll have to limit public testimony to 3 minutes.

Minutes to make sure that we're able to have some meaningful interaction with the public and some wrap-up discussions amongst the committee. Thank you.

Good afternoon, committee members. Again, for the record, Sara Marrinan, Council staff. So this is the last part of the presentations, Part 5. In this section, I'm going to share some of the recent motions and ongoing actions from the council, as well as highlighting some of the rationale points that were spoken to by council members in this direction. Um, we have a few members here, so, um, members are welcome to chime in if you have additional questions about some of these motions.

All the motions are attached to your e-agenda as well if you want to see the language of them.

The first topic is consideration of the pelagic trawl gear performance standard. At last week— at this week's council meeting, there was a prioritization discussion and it was agreed upon as one of the council's top priorities. The motion came at the June council meeting. The council requested a discussion paper to assess the viability and enforceability of regulatory mechanisms to reduce bottom contact of pelagic trawl gear in areas is currently closed to non-pelagic trawl gear while still meeting the legal requirements such as maintaining optimal yield for the fisheries and minimizing salmon bycatch. The council stated its focus in the purpose of this action was working to prevent and reduce uncertainty around unobserved crab mortality from interactions with fishing gear.

This is in light of depressed red king crab populations and changing ecosystem conditions. The council stated that its focus is not on benthic cat effects, as was just spoken to, but also because Fishing Effects Model remains the primary peer-reviewed tool used for evaluating fishing effects on essential fish habitats in Alaska. And the most recent review concluded that adverse effects on fishing activity on EFH are no more than minimal or temporary. So the next step for this topic is to use the upcoming staff analysis to develop new management tools to look at ways to measure and to reduce bottom contact by pelagic trawl gear. The Council also endorsed continued research on pelagic trawl gear innovation, including the Pollock Industries experimental pelagic trawl gear modification and research on crab habitat and distribution to improve understanding of fishing interactions with crab resources in support of future management decisions.

Maybe we'll pause right there and see if any council members have anything to add, or if there are any questions on this particular issue that the council is looking at.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, so in the meantime, in consideration of crab and unobserved mortality for crab for both this year, 2026, and for 2027, the Council requested the Pollock Fishery establish and report back on a system of dynamic spatial closures in and around the Bristol Bay red king crab savings area. You can see on the slide, this is the green box to the west of the Bristol Bay trawl closure area. This area prohibits non-pelagic trawl fishing, was established in 1996, as a crab protection measure. At the June meeting, the council received presentations from the pollock industry representatives on these dynamic spatial closures that were used for crab avoidance in the 2026A season inside and outside the Red King Crab Savings Area. The council made a second motion in June requesting that similar measures continue during the 2027 pollock A season while articulating that salmon bycatch avoidance remains the highest priority.

I'll pause there to see if there's any questions or points.

Yes, Ms. Kimball. I guess I'll offer a little something. Obviously, the green area in the slide is the closure area to non-pelagic trawl, and the council is slow and it takes a long time to do regulations, so this is kind of like an in-the-meantime measure is what I was is how I was interpreting this, is that in the meantime, if we're concerned about crab, and even though this area has been closed based on information from decades ago, I think the Crab Foundation still tries to do a lot of work showing that it's important to crab, and crab are still in that area. So the council's only option then in the meantime, absent regulation, is to request the industry to put something together to avoid areas in which we're concerned about crab, or crab habitat that's important to crab. And so that's what that kind of request is.

It's—. We can't force anyone to do that absent a regulation, but it's a request that we put out there saying this is pretty important to the Council. And so that was done in 2026 and will be done again in 2027 in the A season in particular, since that's where there's overlap with the fishery. So I hope it, it makes sense to folks why it looks like a request. I really feel like it's an in-the-meantime measure while we work on something that could be in regulation.

That Sarah just spoke about. We've also done a lot of analysis on this area and the potential kind of maybe unintended consequences of closing this area to Pollock. And so it's, it's a lot more complicated than just let's close the area and be precautionary.

Ms. Van Dort, is there a similar sort of analysis or thought process around groundfish bycatch? Just a crab.

Bycatch of other groundfish in the particular spatial area? Well, in the fishing area, not just that one that's depicted on the slide. Are there other areas that are specific to groundfish that are sensitive as is depicted by the green box for crab? No, I wouldn't, I wouldn't characterize it that way. We just have limits on incidental catch in target fisheries and bycatch in other fisheries.

Are there areas that are of particular interest or concern for groundfish?

No, maybe I'm—. Okay, thank you. Coral areas, yeah.

And then all of the salmon closure areas are obviously dynamic spatial closures, so they're not fixed boxes like that.

Okay, Madam Chair, I'll move on to the next motion. So the next, the third motion I'm highlighting here is in consideration of Kodiak Tanner crab. In June of this year, the council modified alternatives for management measures to protect Gulf of Alaska Tanner crab around Kodiak Island and requested a second initial review analysis process for return for further consideration. The council's objective with this action is to further conserve and protect Tanner crab around Kodiak while minimizing negative impacts on groundfish fisheries, as both crab and groundfish fisheries are important to harvesting, processing, and support sectors in the community of Kodiak. Um, the June motion is linked.

It considers implementing a closure on the east side of Kodiak Island applicable to one or more one or multiple groundfish gear types. It's looking at seasonal or year-round closures.

Specific objectives for the proposed closure areas under this alternative are to minimize groundfish interactions with Tanner crab where high densities of Tanner crab are known to occur during life stages in which available information indicates that Tanner crab are most vulnerable to fisheries interactions. I can pause pause for any questions on this motion.

Okay, and then I just wanted to highlight, Dr. Pirtle already spoke to this, but the Essential Fish Habitat review is ongoing. The next review is officially scheduled for 2028, but this is a process and components of the review are presented to the SSC and the Council in steps, and it's my understanding that the next step is being scheduled for February 2027, and so some, some components of that review, the EFH fishing effects progress updates, are intended to be presented to the SSC at that time.

And then committee members, I'm not intending to present the rest of the slides. There's a couple of slides at the end We provided you a lot of information by PowerPoint today. There's no summary document for everything, so we just highlighted some summary points from throughout the presentations that have been provided, and they're available for your reference in the last couple slides in this section.

And with that, I, I can wrap it up and happy to answer questions. Thank you very much, Ms. Marrinan. Are there any questions on this presentation?

Thank you very much.