Under the IFQ Halibut/Sablefish Permit Program and CDQ Halibut Permit Program permits are issued for harvesting and receiving/processing halibut, and non-trawl sablefish. For IFQ Halibut/Sablefish Permits, owners of vessels with specific historical participation in non-trawl halibut and sablfish fisheries were issued Quota Share (QS). Quota share was initially issued to persons who owned or leased vessels that made legal commercial fixed-gear landings of Pacific halibut or sablefish during 1988-1990 off Alaska. QS is transferable to other initial issuees or to those who have become transferable eligible on NMFS' approval of an Application for Transfer Eligibility Certificate. Once issued to a person (at no charge), QS is held by that person until it is transferred, suspended, or revoked. QS permits are authorized at 50 CFR Part 679.4(d). Quota Share holders are entitled to a proportional share of the annual Total Allowable Catch allocated to the IFQ Program. An IFQ permit authorizes participation in fixed-gear harvests of Pacific halibut off Alaska, and most sablefish fisheries off Alaska. The permits are not specific to vessels. Permits are issued annually, at no charge, to persons holding fishable Pacific halibut and sablefish Quota Share (QS); or to those who are recipients of IFQ-only transfers from QS holders. Authorized pounds for annual IFQ permits are determined by the number of QS units held, the total number of QS units in the "pool" for a species and area, and the total amount of halibut or sablefish allocated for IFQ fisheries in a particular year. IFQ permits are authorized at 50 CFR Part 679.4(d). The Western Alaska Community Development Quota (CDQ) Program allocates a percentage of all Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands quotas for groundfish, prohibited species, halibut, and crab to eligible communities. A CDQ permit is required to harvest CDQ halibut. Permits are issued annually and without charge to CDQ groups with approved CDQ plans and directed fishing allocations of halibut.

The Blend was the system used by the NMFS Alaska Regional Office to monitor groundfish catch from 1991 until 2002. The Blend system combined data from industry production reports and observer reports to make the best, comprehensive accounting of groundfish catch. These data were used to manage quotas for groundfish in the Gulf of Alaska, Bering Sea, and Aleutian Islands. The blend catch data were also used as the basis for computing estimates of prohibited species bycatch. Prohibited species include Pacific halibut, salmon, herring, and crabs. Blend data were used for numerous regional and national reports, fishery stock assessments, and analysis of fishery management plans. The Blend system used a combination of industry reports and observer data. For shoreside processors, Weekly Production Reports (WPR) submitted by industry were considered the best source of data for retained groundfish landings. All fish delivered to shoreside processors were weighed on scales, and these weights were used to account for retained catch. Observer data from catcher vessels provided the best data on at-sea discards of groundfish by vessels delivering to shoreside processors. Discard rates from these observer data were applied to the shoreside groundfish landings to estimate total at-sea discards from both observed and unobserved catcher vessels. For observed catcher/processors and motherships, the WPR and the Observer Reports recorded estimates of total catch (retained catch plus discards). If both reports were available, the Blend System selected one of them for incorporation into the catch database. If the vessel was unobserved, only the WPR was available. In 2003, the Catch Accounting Sytem was implemented and took advantage of industry reports at a more detailed level, especially from shoreside processors. The Blend system was based on weekly data from processors and was not capable of accounting for some management programs -- including cooperatives, sideboards, complex seasonal allocations, Harvest Limit Area quotas, and quotas assigned to vessels of a particular size class. The Catch Accounting System replaced the Blend as the tool used by the National Marine Fisheries Service to estimate total catch in the groundfish fisheries off Alaska.

The Catch Accounting System (CAS) creates total catch estimates for the groundfish fisheries in the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands and Gulf of Alaska. Each year, quotas are established in the CAS that match the annual harvest specification tables for federally managed groundfish fisheries off Alaska. The output of the CAS is the total amount of groundfish that is retained and the amount that is discarded at sea. In addition, the system creates estimates of the total amount of non-groundfish species -- both prohibited species and non-target species -- that are caught in the groundfish fisheries. Prohibited species catch (PSC) consists of salmon, halibut, and several species of crab. All the PSC species have economic value in non-groundfish fisheries and therefore cannot be retained in the groundfish fisheries. Non-target catch are species like coral, sponges, etc., and catch of these species needs to be calculated in order to evaluate the impact of the groundfish fisheries on the ecosystem. The CAS uses a combination of industry reports and onboard observer information to provide an estimate of total catch and bycatch. Industry reported data consists of catch (landing reports) and processed product amounts (production reports), and these reports are electronically recorded and submitted to NMFS via eLandings. The observer data are collected by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC) using a stratified sampling design. Other sources of information come from the Alaska Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission (CFEC), which issues permits and vessel licenses, and Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS), which collect the position, time at a position, and course and speed of fishing vessels.

Data collected by the ATLAS Client and transmitted electronically or by fax to the AFSC are loaded into production transaction tables which are the source data for those interfaces used for fishery management, scientific inquiry and fishing activity monitoring by industry.

NOAA Fisheries Alaska Regional Office and Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s Auke Bay Laboratories designed the Nearshore Fish Atlas of Alaska (NFA) to provide access to available data on the distribution, relative abundance, and habitat use of nearshore fishes in Alaska. The NFA is a spatially explicit, unified database of numerous nearshore catch datasets collected by various agencies and organizations in Alaska over the past several decades. The compiled datasets are from dozens of studies with different objectives and gear types (e.g., beach seines, purse seines, and trawls). The online NFA application has spatial and tabular tools for extensive searching, filtering, and downloading fully attributed data.

The Amendment 80 Program was adopted by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (Council) in June 2006. The final rule implementing Amendment 80 published in the Federal Register on September 14, 2007. This action allocates several Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands (BSAI) non-pollock trawl groundfish species among trawl fishery sectors, and facilitate the formation of harvesting cooperatives in the non-American Fisheries Act (non-AFA) trawl catcher/processor sector. The Council adopted Amendment 80 to meet the broad goals of: (1) improving retention and utilization of fishery resources by the non-AFA trawl catcher/processor fleet by extending the groundfish retention standard (GRS) to non-AFA trawl catcher/processor vessels of all lengths; (2) allocating fishery resources among BSAI trawl harvesters in consideration of historic and present harvest patterns and future harvest needs; (3) authorizing the allocation of groundfish species to harvesting cooperatives and establishing a limited access privilege program (LAPP) for the non-AFA trawl catcher/processors to reduce potential GRS compliance costs, encourage fishing practices with lower discard rates, and improve the opportunity for increasing the value of harvested species; and (4) limiting the ability of non-AFA trawl catcher/processors to expand their harvesting capacity into other fisheries not managed under a LAPP. The groundfish species in the BSAI directly affected by Amendment 80 include: - Atka mackerel - Aleutian Islands Pacific ocean perch - Flathead sole - Pacific cod - Rock sole - Yellowfin sole In addition, Amendment 80 would modify the management of halibut and crab prohibited species catch (PSC) limits.

The Catch-In-Areas database integrates catch data from the Catch Accounting System (which has the spatial resolution of a NMFS Reporting Area) into a database that resolves the GIS data into polygons of approximately 7.5 km. In unrestricted outside waters, sixty four grid IDs fit inside one state statistical area. A state statistical area is = degree in latitude and one degree in longitude block. The 7.5 km grid size was picked for two reasons 1) we were likely to pick up at least one 30 minute VMS ping for a vessel running at fishing speed; and 2) the size (.125 degree latitude) is perfectly divisible in geographic coordinates so they fit perfectly inside a state statistical area. The grid polygons are often further divided into smaller polygons by the boundary of state statistical areas, the boundary of state and federal waters, or by the boundary of Steller sea lion critical habitat (broken out at 3, 6, 10, and 20 nautical miles from each of the 154 Steller sea lion rookeries and haulouts). Where confidentiality and mapping is an issue, seven-kilometer polygon are pre-coded for grouping into (3x3) 23km polygons. Each grid-id can queried individually or by sets of pre-coded attributes, such as reporting area and distance from Steller sea lion sites.

These data arise from a field study of groundfish catch monitoring in Kodiak, AK trawl fisheries. Two monitoring components were included in the study: 1) at-sea sampling methods used by observers to sample species composition of catch and 2) shore-side sampling of delivered catch by observers to validate landings species composition reports. The at-sea portion of the study consisted of a side-by-side comparison (two observers) of a proposed new sampling method and the standard sampling method. Observer data were recorded at-sea on paper and transferred to an Oracle database. The shoreside component of this study consisted of observer species composition sampling in plants for later comparison with landings data. The shore-side data were collected by observers in processing plants, recorded on paper and transferred to an Oracle database. Data collection started in April 2011 and continued through August 2011. Third party landings data (NOAA Fisheries, Alaska Regional Office, Sustainable Fisheries Division) that were used in the analysis are stored in an oracle database. Data for both project components (at-sea and shoreside) were collected during normal fishing activities onboard commercial trawl catcher vessels and during normal processing activities in shore-based processing plants.

The Western Alaska Community Development Quota (CDQ) Program allocates a percentage of all Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands quotas for groundfish, prohibited species, halibut, and crab to eligible communities. The purpose of the CDQ Program is to provide the means for starting or supporting commercial fisheries business activities that will result in an ongoing, regionally based, fisheries-related economy in Western Alaska. This was the legacy system for managing CDQ Groundfish from 1991-2007. After 2008, CDQ groundfish was incorporated into the Catch Accounting System.

Diel epipelagic sampling for juvenile Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.), rockfish (Sebastes spp.), sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria), and associated species was conducted in order to identify factors that may affect year-class success of these commercially important species. Sampling occurred in offshore marine habitats of the coastal northeast Pacific Ocean from 10-20 August 2005 and was conducted with a surface trawl fishing the upper 20 m of the water column along transects up to78 km offshore near 58 N. Three habitats were sampled along each transect over a 24-hr period: the continental shelf (<200 m depth), the continental slope (400-750 m depth), and the abyss (>2,000 m depth). A total of 38,747 fish and squid representing 24 species were sampled in 56 trawl hauls. Of the targeted juvenile fish species, a total of 587 salmon, 11 rockfish, and 70 sablefish were captured. Sampling during day (1500-1900) and night (2200-0200) periods indicated that biomass of fish and squid was 2-4 times higher at night at (each?)all habitat types pooled across transects. No distinct patterns between day or night occurrence were noted for juvenile pink salmon (O. gorbuscha), chum salmon (O. keta), sockeye salmon (O. nerka), or coho salmon (O. kisutch), however, juvenile Chinook salmon (O. tshawytscha) were encountered only at night. Catches of juvenile rockfish and juvenile sablefish were quite low in this study, and larger sample sizes of these fish are needed to adequately determine their diel distribution. Diel differences were apparent with forage species such as Pacific herring (Clupea pallasi), capelin (Mallotus villosus), and eulachon (Thaleichthys pacificus) that were almost exclusively sampled at night. The offshore distribution patterns of target species were distinctly different, with the most common occurrences of juvenile salmon over continental shelf habitats, juvenile sablefish over continental shelf and slope habitats, and juvenile rockfish over slope and abyss habitats. Pacific herring, capelin, eulachon, and Pacific sardines (Sardinops sagax) were found over continental shelf habitats, whereas small squid and myctophids occurred primarily at slope and abyssal habitats. The greatest overall catch biomass was of gelatinous species (jellyfish), which was consistently higher than that of all fish and squid combined, usually by an order of magnitude. Individual fish or squid species with highest average weight per haul were pomfret (Brama japonica), adult coho salmon, Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), and blue sharks (Prionace glauca). The occurrence of the latter two warm-water species and Pacific sardines were of interest because this study occurred during an anomalously warm year and the capture of Pacific sardines and Humboldt squid represent northern range extensions for these species. Stomach content analysis of potential predator species of the target species showed that only adult coho salmon were predating on juvenile salmon and sablefish, and only pomfret were predating on juvenile rockfish. Further sampling of the target species is needed in these habitats during more normal environmental conditions to validate these observations.