The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC)

An integrated ecosystem assessment success story (in progress)

Diverse stakeholders agreed that an ecosystem approach was necessary. Developing and implementing an ecosystem approach to fishery management was done in collaboration between managers, stakeholders, and scientists.

Mid-Atlantic Council Ecosystem Approach

• 2016 Ecosystem Approach to Fishery Management (EAFM) Policy Guidance document: http://www.mafmc.org/s/EAFM-Doc-Revised-2019-02-08.pdf

• Mid-Atlantic EAFM framework¹:

  

  https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2016.00105/full

Mid-Atlantic Council risk assessment framework

Clarify exactly what we are assessing and why

• What are we measuring? → Risk Element
• Why are we measuring it? → Risk Definition
• How are we measuring it? → Indicator
• What is the risk? → Risk Ranking Criteria

Iterative process starting with the Council workshops

• Council staff and scientists create examples based on Council input

  ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ...

• Council discusses, clarifies, revises with public input

Risk assessment paper¹: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2018.00442/full

Council-defined risk elements: Ecological

Risk elements: Economic, Social, and Food Production

Risk elements: Management

But where will the risk assessment indicators come from?

State of the Ecosystem Reports!

See the SOE update presentation

• Originally based on the 2017 SOE, the risk assessment was updated and published in 2018¹.

• The Council received updates in 2019 and 2020.

Risk assessent indicators and ranking criteria: Commercial revenue

This element is applied at the ecosystem level. Revenue serves as a proxy for commercial profits.

Ranked moderate-high risk due to the significant long term revenue decrease for Mid-Atlantic managed species (red points in top plot)

Risk assessent indicators and ranking criteria: System productivity

This element is applied at the ecosystem level, and ranks the risk of not achieving optimum yield due to changes in ecosystem productivity at the base of the food web.

Four indicators are used together to assess risk of changing ecosystem productivity: primary production, zooplankton abundance, fish condition and fish recruitment.

Risk assessent indicators and ranking criteria: System productivity

Ranked low-moderate risk due to the significant long term trends in zooplankton abundance for major species (top right plot)

Risk assessent indicators and ranking criteria: Climate

This element is applied at the species level. Risks to species productivity (and therefore to achieving optimum yield) due to projected climate change in the Northeast US were evaluated in a comprehensive assessment¹.

Each species ranked according to position/color in the plot on the right

EAFM Risk Assessment: 2020 update

Management elements updated from original 2017 risk assessment; added risk rankings for chub mackerel and unmanaged forage fish.

Decreased Risk (5)

• Regulatory complexity risk for summer flounder decreased from high to med-high due to increased consistency in recent years
• Technical interaction risk for commercial scup decreased from med-high to low-med because no accountability measures have been triggered
• Allocation risks for recreational Atlantic mackerel, commercial longfin squid, and commercial spiny dogfish dropped from high to low due to changes in management approaches

Increased Risk (15)

• Bluefish status went from not overfished to overfished
• Increased discards (5), reduced management control (4), allocation (3), other ocean uses (1), regulatory complexity (1)

EAFM Risk Assessment: 2020 update

Species level risk elements

Ecosystem level risk elements

EAFM Risk Assessment: 2020 update

Species and Sector level risk elements

How is MAFMC using the risk assessment? What's next?

• Final conceptual model and supporting information at December 2019 Council meeting

• Council to proceed with management strategy evaluation (MSE) using the information from conceptual modeling as a basis. Topic: addressing recreational fishery discards with EAFM

New England Fishery Management Council Update

Mid-Atlantic EAFM next steps: management strategy evaluation

• Spinning up in 2020-2021. Stay tuned!

• Also embarking on a climate scenario planning exercise

New England EBFM

• Annual State of the Ecosystem reporting

• Draft example Fishery Ecosystem Plan updates ongoing

• Communications/outreach for the eFEP in progress

• EBFM MSE in the future

Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission

• Ecosystem Reference Points for Atlantic menhaden

  • Using single species assessment and a suite of multispecies models
  • Passed peer review, additional analysis in May

Conclusions

Integrated ecosystem assessment is a valuable framework for the general implementation of ecosystem approaches to natural resource management

• The Mid-Atlantic’s rapid progress in implementing EAFM resulted from positive collaboration between managers, stakeholders, and scientists. Collaboration is essential to IEA and to the success of EAFM.

• Ecosystem indicators and reporting can be tailored to specific regional objectives.

• Risk assessment is a rapid, familiar, scaleable, and transparent method to move forward with EAFM within a real-world operational fishery management context.

• The Mid-Atlantic process highlights certain species and certain management issues as posing higher cumulative risks to meeting Council-derived management objectives when considering a broad range of ecological, social, and economic factors.

• Conceptual modeling links the key factors for high risk fisheries and scopes more detailed integrated analysis and management strategy evaluation.

If you want all the details

• Mid-Atlantic Council EAFM paper

• Mid-Atlantic Council Risk Assessment paper

• Mid-Atlantic Council Summer Flounder conceptual model, support tables

  • model and support tables page source code
  • management questions and model page source code

• Mid-Atantic April 2020 EAFM updates, including SOE

• New England April 2020 State of the Ecosystem

• Atlantic States February 2020 Menhaden Summary

• Slides available at https://noaa-edab.github.io/presentations

  Scroll down to WGNARS

Appendix: Why an ecosystem approach?

"We rebuilt all the stocks, so why is everyone still pissed off?" --Rich Seagraves

in 2011, the Mid-Atlantic Council asked:

And many people answered, from commercial fishery, recreational fishery, environmental organization, and interested public perspectives.

Visioning report:

http://www.mafmc.org/s/MAFMC-stakeholder-input-report-p7b9.pdf

Common themes among all stakeholder groups:

• There is a lack of confidence in the data that drive fishery management decisions.

• Stakeholders are not as involved in the Council process as they can and should be.

• Different jurisdictions and regulations among the many fishery management organizations result in complexity and inconsistency.

• There is a need for increased transparency and communications in fisheries management.

• The dynamics of the ecosystem and food web should be considered to a greater extent in fisheries management decisions.

• Stakeholders are not adequately represented on the Council.

• Pollution is negatively affecting the health of fish stocks.

Visioning report, p. 3:

http://www.mafmc.org/s/MAFMC-stakeholder-input-report-p7b9.pdf

How did MAFMC develop their ecosystem approach?

Visioning Project → Strategic Plan with one objective to develop

"A non-regulatory umbrella document intended to guide Council policy with respect to ecosystem considerations across existing Fishery Management Plans"

Details, including workshop presentations and white papers: http://www.mafmc.org/eafm

Web-based conceptual model presentation