NOAA Fisheries is accepting public comments on a proposal to switch over more commercial fishers in the Gulf of Mexico – currently referred to as the Gulf of America by the administration of President Donald Trump – and South Atlantic Ocean from traditional, paper logbooks to electronic logbooks.
If approved, the change would apply to all federally permitted commercial fishers harvesting Gulf reef fish, Gulf or Atlantic coastal migratory pelagic species, Atlantic dolphin and wahoo, and species in the South Atlantic snapper-grouper complex.
The Gulf Council, South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, and NOAA Fisheries have been pushing to update its commercial fisheries to electronic reporting forms to improve both the accuracy and efficiency of data collected from federally permitted fishers.
“The collected data would be available sooner to fishery managers once submitted through the electronic platform compared to the same data collected on the paper forms,” NOAA Fisheries said. “Paper logbooks are sometimes difficult to interpret by analysts, and the analysts often need to contact the submitter for clarification or correction with several days or weeks elapsed from when fishing occurred. This need would be reduced if the logbook were electronically submitted because logbook validations built into the electronic software could prevent some errors, such as a trip start time being recorded as occurring after a trip end time.”
As with the current paper forms, commercial fishers would still be required to submit their electronic report within seven days of a trip.
The switch would also include the addition of six data fields, the removal of three others, and the modification of two more to directly integrate the information collected on paper logbooks into the Atlantic Coastal Cooperative Statistics Program (ACCSP) database.
NOAA Fisheries noted that the ACCSP software is free, and it is currently testing a downloadable application that would work on either a phone or a computer.
Comments will be accepted on the move through 25 June.
