The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council has approved a new electronic logbook system, replacing the current system that hasn’t worked correctly since 2020.
NOAA Fisheries relies on an electronic logbook system to track shrimpers activity in the Gulf of Mexico, currently referred to as the Gulf of America by the Trump administration. The system was built to transmit data over a cellular connection and give regulators a continuously updated “shrimp effort estimate.”
“Shrimp effort estimates are used for conducting shrimp stock assessments, estimating bycatch for finfish, monitoring bycatch of protected species, and monitoring the juvenile red snapper effort threshold,” the Gulf Council said in a statement.
However, the 3G cellular network the system depends on went offline in 2020. Since then, NOAA Fisheries has continued the monitoring program by swapping SD cards with stored logbook data via mail, sending out replacement cards twice a year and collecting the old data-filled cards.
“This manual process is associated with less timely data and lower data return rates than automatic transmission,” the Gulf Council said in a 10 April statement.
After years of deliberation, the Gulf Council took recommendations from its Shrimp Advisory Panel and approved a new framework for collecting vessel position data. The new proposed collection program also relies on cellular electronic logbooks, which automatically transmits position data to a non-law enforcement database maintained by NOAA Fisheries.
The framework has been submitted to the Department of Commerce for final approval.
