The South Atlantic Fishery Management Council (SAFMC) considered (but ultimately rejected) instituting a golden crab individual transferable quota (ITQ) program in 2013. In preparation for that proposal, 2010 cost data was collected in fiscal year 2011 via a mail survey. The population included all holders of a limited access golden crab permit (seven individuals owning 11 permits at the time of survey). Because the population is so small, a census was necessary. Questions on per-trip and fixed cost estimates were included. This data set includes survey results merged with individual landings from the golden crab logbook and Florida trip tickets. Summary results and forms can be found at http://www.sefsc.noaa.gov/socialscience/CrossonIJC2013.htm

The Crab Rationalization Program (Program) allocates BSAI crab resources among harvesters, processors, and coastal communities. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council developed the Program over a 6-year period to accommodate the specific dynamics and needs of the BSAI crab fisheries. The Program builds on the Council's experiences with the halibut and sablefish Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ) program and the American Fisheries Act (AFA) cooperative program for Bering Sea pollock. The Program is a limited access system that balances the interests of several groups who depend on these fisheries. The Program addresses conservation and management issues associated with the previous derby fishery, reduces bycatch and associated discard mortality, and increases the safety of crab fishermen by ending the race for fish. Share allocations to harvesters and processors, together with incentives to participate in fishery cooperatives, will increase efficiencies, provide economic stability, and facilitate compensated reduction of excess capacities in the harvesting and processing sectors. Community interests are protected by Community Development Quota (CDQ) allocations and regional landing and processing requirements, as well as by several community protection measures.

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.

Economic data collected for years 1998, 2001, 2004, and 2005 and onward for the BSAI Crab Economic Data Report (EDR). Reporting is required of any owner or leaseholder of a vessel or processing plant, or a holder of a registered crab receiver permit, that harvested, processed, custom processed, or obtained custom processing for rationalized crab in specified Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands (BSAI) crab fisheries during the prior calendar year.

2010-2017 Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data were used from the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement to create this fishing effort dataset for the U.S. West Coast. The dataset was generated using VMS points at fishing speeds to create fishing tracks. Tracks were joined to the BOEM aliquot grid (1.2x1.2 km) to create heat maps of fishing effort for various fisheries based on individual and combined declaration codes.,

The Resource Assessment and Conservation Engineering Division (RACE) of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC) conducts bottom trawl surveys to monitor the condition of the demersal fish and crab stocks of Alaska. These data include catch per unit effort for each commercially important crab species at a standard set of stations in the eastern Bering Sea. This is a subset of the main database. Excluded are certain non standard tows and other types of data collected other than species id, species size category, species catch per unit effort (number per square nautical mile), water temperature and depth.

Fish and invertebrates that are unintentionally captured during commercial fishing operations and then released back into the ocean suffer mortality at unknown rates, introducing uncertainty into the fishery management process. Attempts have been made to quantify discard mortality rates using reflex action mortality predictors or RAMP which use the presence or absence of a suite of reflexes to predict discard mortality. This method was applied to Tanner crab, Chionoecetes bairdi, during the 2010-2012 fisheries in the Bering Sea. Discard mortality in the fishery is currently assumed to be 50% in stock assessment models, but that rate is not based on empirical data and is widely recognized to be in need of refinement. Over 19,000 crab were evaluated using the RAMP method. The estimated discard mortality rate was 4.5% (SD = 0.812), significantly below the rate used in stock assessment models. Predicted discard mortality rates from the 2010-2012 study were strongly correlated with the air temperature at the St. Paul Island airport in the Pribilof Islands. Using this relationship the discard mortality rate from 1991-2011was estimated at 4.2% (SD = 1.08).

This project collects economic data from vessel owners participating in the West Coast limited entry fixed gear, and open access groundfish, salmon, crab, and shrimp fisheries. The data is needed for a variety of applications, such as the Northwest Fisheries Science Center's regional economic model (Input-Output Model for Pacific Coast Fisheries) as well as estimating the profitability of fishery participants for applications such as the Pacific Fisheries Management Council's Groundfish harvest specifications process. Major stages of the project include developing a survey questionnaire, developing a contact list of all fishery participants with available contact information (name, address, phone number), obtaining approval for the survey from the Office of Management and Budget through the Paperwork Reduction Act process, hiring a contractor to field the survey, training contractor personnel on how to field the survey, supervising survey fielding by the contractor, and working with the contractor to obtain an electronic data set containing survey results.

This data set contains summarized pounds of select coastal fish species bought by selected federally permitted seafood dealers in the SE Region of the US mainland. Data was collected 2 times each month and used for quota monitoring.

To enable fisheries managers to comply with National Standard 8 (NS8), NMFS social scientists around the nation are preparing fishing community profiles that present the features and characteristics of such communities. PIFSC has published or is developing four such profiles: one each for Hawaii, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa.