Let's be casual and curious. Ask questions, interject. It's OK. Fisheries and government science typically uses a lot of acronyms and abbreviations. When I define a frequently used abbreviation, I've tried to highlight with red text.

Under U.S. law, NOAA Fisheries is responsible for managing marine fisheries within the U.S. exclusive economic zone, the 4.4-million-square-mile zone that extends from 3 to 200 nautical miles off the coast of the United States. Individual states are generally responsible for fishery management from their coastline out to three miles. We work with federal, regional, state, and territorial partners to ensure the sustainable management of U.S. fisheries in the EEZ.

• Bonus, which states have EEZs <3 nm? (Florida and Texas, 9mi)

Fishery management plans must comply with a number of requirements, including 10 National Standards—principles that promote sustainable fisheries management. These National Standards address everything from preventing overfishing while achieving optimum yield in fisheries, to reducing bycatch, to ensuring safety at sea.

Under the MMPA, NOAA Fisheries is responsible for protecting whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals, and sea lions. It also establishes a system to govern interactions with marine mammals during commercial fishing.

The ESA protects species that are at risk of extinction and also provides for the conservation of the ecosystems on which they depend. Regional fishery management councils must take both the MMPA and the ESA into consideration when developing fishery management plans.

Scientists routinely monitor fisheries to ensure they are sustainably managed. Stock assessments are critical to this process. This information helps us determine the current status of a fish stock. Stock status determinations focus on the concept of maximum sustainable yield—the largest long-term average catch that can be taken from a fish stock under prevailing environmental and fishery conditions.

From providing additional information for making decisions, to increasing the certainty about the impact of those decisions, EBFM has many benefits. In particular, EBFM:

• Facilitates trade-offs between different stakeholder priorities, balancing social and ecological needs. It accomplishes this by:
  • Addressing multiple legal mandates simultaneously.
  • Maintaining ecosystem goods and services to deliver social, economic, and cultural benefits to society.
  • Addressing cumulative impacts.
  • Increasing stakeholder participation.
• Provides more information to make management decisions, which improves our ability to sustainably manage fisheries. It accomplishes this by:
  • Improving managers’ understanding of the ecosystem as a whole.
• Contributes to an increased ability to predict likely outcomes of management actions. It accomplishes this by:
  • Forecasting pressures and impacts on both single and aggregated components of a marine ecosystem.
  • Providing a better understanding of how ecosystems and their components respond to multiple stressors.
• Ensures that ecosystem-level measures remain stable, which could translate into better regulatory stability and business plans. It accomplishes this by:
  • Being cost-effective.
  • Providing a more effective management framework.
  • Being adaptive.

There are many questions about the best way to manage human activities within a complex and changing ecosystem. It is important to have a range of models capable of addressing these questions. Models built to mimic the behavior of one component of the system may lack the ability to predict other important components of interest to managers. For this reason, it is also important to understand the questions managers have when developing and using multispecies and ecosystem models. Using several different models together to address a question can provide the most insight. When different models agree on an outcome, managers have more confidence in the prediction. This “ensemble” approach is currently used by hurricane forecasters in the United States. Our scientists are working towards this goal.

The first step in developing a mathematical model is to outline key processes and relationships. A conceptual model depicts these relationships. It can be used in various ways:

• As a communication tool on its own.
• As a checklist to ensure that no key processes are missed in further quantitative modeling.
• To outline areas for further research.
• To relate information across multiple scientific fields.

A model is a simple representation of an object or system. Models are used to develop a common understanding of the object or system, and to predict possible outcomes of different changes to the system. At the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, we use mathematical models for research and for management advice. The models vary in complexity, from simple equations to model primary productivity to single species assessment models to models with multiple species to complete ecosystems.

This approach integrates all components of an ecosystem, including humans, into the decision-making process so that managers can balance trade-offs and determine what is more likely to achieve their desired goals. The approach is a NOAA-wide initiative, that provides a consistent national approach but is flexible to accommodate regional needs. It is overseen by the IEA program, which directs the execution of Integrated Ecosystem Assessments within five regions in the United States ocean and coastal ecosystems.

Food web models track energy flow in an ecosystem from primary producers (phytoplankton) up to zooplankton, fish, top predators, and fisheries. They simultaneously account for deaths due to predation and fishing. These models may factor in information including:

• Changes in biomass of a species like production models.
• Track age groups like age structured models.
• Combine these functions for different groups in the food web. Food web models are useful for management strategy evaluation that addresses fishery and predator-prey interactions. We have developed food web models for the Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank, Southern New England, and the Mid-Atlantic. Recently, we used an updated Gulf of Maine model to evaluate the potential impacts of changes in Atlantic herring fishery regulations, along with more detailed species models.