Who Owns the Ocean Part 2: Current users & bad data
Fishermen have been navigating the oceans for over 10,000 years. Before agriculture was invented, humans first found their food by hunting, gathering, and fishing.
The government began actively managing the commercial fishing industry in 1976 with the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. According to the McLaughin-Sherouse list, as of 2014, over 13,200 regulations exist in the commercial fishing industry, more regulations than oil and natural gas extraction (11,955) and pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing (11,505).
Numerous regulations means that the National Marine Fisheries Services is required to manage high volumes of data to manage compliance. And, unfortunately, technology and systems for managing all of this critical data has not kept pace with increasing regulations and reporting requirements. For example, NMFS (and even the Department of Marine Resources) use Excel spreadsheets to manage data. Spreadsheets have inherent and well-documented risk associated with them such as data errors (One report I found stated that decades of audits and experiments have shown 88% of all spreadsheets contain significant errors!); data is easily lost in spreadsheets; there are security issues; and there is a severe lack of proper training in how to use, review, and update spreadsheets.
Some of the issues with using Excel and how NMFS manages data are confirmed in an October 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO was asked to conduct an analysis of NMFS data in order to “prevent overfishing and manage overfished stocks.” In my opinion, this is a curious way to frame this reasoning because it negates the possibility that overfishing is not the issue. Perhaps bad data and poor data management is the issue, and that it is crippling the commercial fishing industry and opening doors to other industries to develop the ocean, and these other industries have the very real potential to severely damage the ocean’s ecosystems and the fish stocks.
The GAO also pointed out in this analysis: “Challenges inherent in collecting fisheries data, along with resource challenges, affected the availability and quality of the data. For example, trawl surveys, which are used to collect fisheries data, are challenging and costly to conduct over large geographic areas. These challenges were a key source of the variability in the number of stocks assessed and one of the reasons why many stocks may have unknown status.”
Recently, a 2002 article about “Trawlgate” from the Cape Cod Times has been circulating on social media. It is a short article that shares the story of when a Cape Cod draggerman noticed that the tow wires on a NMFS research vessel were not even which would not allow it to catch fish in the way that it was intended. In order to fix the issue, NMFS invited commercial fishermen to join them on the boat, but unfortunately, the fishermen only found more issues with the way NMFS was “fishing” to collect data.
Jerry Leeman, groundfish captain on the Teresa Marie IV, owns this piece of artwork that displays just some of the grounds he has covered in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank. Follow Jerry on Facebook.
Fishermen, professional commercial fishermen, understand better than anyone how costly and difficult it is to fish and navigate the vast ocean. They have learned how to adapt and mitigate these challenges in order to make a living. Fishermen have been able to learn over decades of experience and knowledge that has been passed down from generations. But their input is rarely taken into consideration and is deemed “anecdotal” while NFMS data is “the best available science”.
But it’s not just how the data is collected that should be of concern, it’s how it’s managed, too. In their analysis, the GAO pointed out that the way NMFS manages data does not allow staff to easily analyze trends over multiple years. From the report:
In reviewing NMFS' stock assessment and status data, GAO identified issues with the Species Information System database that prevented conducting certain multiyear trend analyses. NMFS has not documented these structural limitations or developed general guidelines for how to complete such analyses. NMFS officials noted that such analyses can be useful for tracking changes in stock status, as well as the frequency with which individual fish stocks have been assessed over time. NMFS is working on two projects to improve the functionality of the database. The plans for these projects do not include key project management elements, such as written goals and timelines. Developing a plan that includes these elements could help ensure completion of the projects and help NMFS conduct additional analyses that could be used to support management measures to prevent overfishing and manage overfished stocks.
The data that NMFS collects is not just crucial to the commercial fishing industry.
Traffic on the ocean has been getting more congested over the past couple hundred years. Offshore drilling began in the late 1800s and the Maritime Administration (MARAD) at the Department of Transportation was started in 1916. The 1960s introduced fashion at a pace that began the phenomenon now known as “fast fashion” that requires containers of cheaply made clothing to be carried by ships from overseas, and the cruise ship industry that we know today also began in earnest in the 1960s. While aquaculture in the US began in the late 19th century, over the past decade its popularity has increased dramatically, especially on the coast of Maine. The latest industry to demand space on the ocean is, of course, offshore wind development. These industries are all relatively “new” compared to fishing and do not make the McLaughlin-Sherouse List of the 10 Most-Regulated Industries of 2014.
For many generations, the ocean has been a relatively well-shared space. Likely in part because no industry or business can maintain ownership of a parcel on the ocean. In other words, fishermen can’t own a plot of the ocean in the same way that a farmer can purchase and own land to harvest. That being said, BOEM (Bureau of Ocean Energy Management) is part of the US Department of the Interior, and they are responsible for all Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) leasing policy and program development for oil, gas, and other marine minerals. So, you can’t own the ocean, but there are a few industries including oil, gas, marine minerals, renewable energy, and aquaculture that can lease it.
BOEM is the lead federal agency responsible for offshore energy exploration and development in the United States. NOAA Fisheries is a consulting federal agency on this matter. The role of NOAA Fisheries, formally known as National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS) is to “minimize the impacts to ocean resources, critical habitats, and fishing opportunities throughout the planning, siting, and development stages.” NMFS consults to ensure requirements of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act are met, ensure requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act are met, to conduct research and monitoring to better understand the impacts of offshore wind energy development, and to “provide baseline data and analysis on ocean conditions and affected marine resources.”
The NMFS data system that was analyzed by the GAO is also used to support development of other industries like offshore wind energy development.
In early December, BOEM and NOAA announced a joint strategy for fisheries surveys aimed at mitigating offshore wind impacts. In the announcement, Janet Coit, assistant administrator for NOAA Fisheries, acting assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, and deputy NOAA administrator said, “Our fisheries surveys allow NOAA to monitor important trends for individual species over time, with the broader goals of understanding marine ecosystems, particularly in the face of climate change, and supporting sustainable fisheries.”
Is that a true statement?
Amanda Lefton, BOEM director says later in the announcement: “We are committed to incorporating the best available science into our decision-making processes as we continue to advance the Biden-Harris administration’s goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030.”
Let’s look at the GAO analysis again: “The number of fish stocks assessed for 2011 through 2020 varied by the six NMFS regional fisheries science centers and that many stocks were not assessed. For example, on average, the Southeast Science Center assessed about 10 percent of the 153 stocks it supported each year, while the Alaska Science Center assessed about 78 percent of its 64 stocks.”
Not only is the data quality poor and mismanaged, but it’s also not really complete either.
Fishermen don’t want to own the ocean. They want their input, expertise, and thousands of years of experience navigating the ocean and catching fish to be used to help confirm whether or not we are using the actual “best available science” to manage the ocean. They deserve that. Especially considering how clearly poor the data is that is being used to make decisions that won’t just impact their business, but the health of the entire planet. Fishermen need the ocean to be healthy for their businesses, and everyone needs the ocean to be healthy so that we can breathe and eat.
This article was originally published in the January issue of Commercial Fisheries News. You can subscribe to the publication HERE. This is the second part of a series, Who Owns the Ocean in my column, Catch-22 that appears in CFN every other month. You can see the first part of the series HERE.
