Electronic monitoring has been part of the West Coast groundfish fishery for more than fifteen years. Fishermen have spent those years doing what fishermen do: adapting. They installed cameras, changed where and how catch is handled, learned new reporting systems, troubleshot equipment, and worked with managers and providers to make the program function on real fishing vessels. The program has not adapted at the same pace.
Early days – program design
My family has fished commercially out of Half Moon Bay, California, for five generations, continually adapting our business as conditions, markets, and regulations have changed. In 2010, my brother was one the first to install cameras on board, in an early effort to test whether electronic monitoring could be used for compliance. That work expanded into a Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission project running cameras and observers side by side, followed by a broader Exempted Fishing Permit (EFP). I coordinated feedback from participating fishermen, managed the California Groundfish Collective’s EM exempted fishing permit, and later served on the Pacific Council’s Groundfish Electronic Monitoring Policy Advisory Committee. I have watched this program develop from the boat, from the EFP process, and from the management table.
Fishermen have proven that they are willing to change their behavior to solve a problem. The question now is whether we are still solving the same problem, and whether all the work vessels are required to do is helping solve it.When this work began, the West Coast groundfish fishery was in a very different place. Several stocks were under rebuilding plans. Some catch limits were highly constraining. The catch share program was new, and there were legitimate concerns about whether individual vessel accountability could be maintained without an observer on board.
Those concerns shaped electronic monitoring from the beginning. They shaped the sorting rules, the vessel monitoring plans, the camera views, the logbooks, and the level of video review. Starting cautiously made sense. We were testing a new compliance tool in a fishery carrying the weight of rebuilding stocks and a new management system.
Today’s fishery
But that is not the fishery we have today. The stocks that drove much of the original caution have largely rebuilt. Harvest specifications have increased, but the trawl fleet is leaving an extraordinary amount of that sustainable harvest in the water. In 2025, several IFQ categories were used at less than two percent of the amount available. Across the non-whiting IFQ categories, roughly three-quarters of the available quota went uncaught. Yet vessels are still sorting and presenting catch to cameras under requirements built around concerns from 2010. Reviewers are still being paid to document events down to an individual fish. The fishery changed. The management problem changed. Much of the program did not.
The basic EM model has worked. Captains record catch and discards in their logbooks, and video is used to audit that reporting. Years of work on the West Coast have shown that vessel logbooks and video review can produce reasonably close estimates across the fleet. Pacific States looked directly at whether every minute of every trip needed to be reviewed. Its 2019 analysis found that sampling video could substantially reduce review time without dramatically changing fleet-level discard estimates. It also recognized that species creating greater management concern could receive different treatment, and that the list of those species could change as conditions changed. That work needs to continue. We have enough experience and enough data to move from proving that EM can work to determining how much review is actually necessary and where greater scrutiny is still justified.
The need to evolve – the fleet pays for inefficiencies
EM vessels receive drive reports after their footage is reviewed. These reports can be useful. They identify equipment problems, blocked views, missing information, and catch-handling issues that need to be corrected. Feedback is part of how fishermen and the program improve. But these reports also show how far review can drift from a management purpose. Many reports sent to vessels include images of single fish that were accidentally put in the wrong basket or that fell overboard during normal catch handling. These events are regularly identified, documented, classified, and reported to the vessels and NMFS.
This is a waste of everyone’s resources. It is not the reviewer’s fault. Reviewers are doing the job they were given, reviewing footage against the vessel’s monitoring plan. But those plans can run 25 pages and dictate, in extraordinary detail, how vessels handle catch and how reviewers document what they see. After fifteen years, both the plans and the review requirements need to be evaluated against the management needs we have today.
The issue is paying someone to watch, capture, and report accidental events involving negligible amounts of catch. What management decision does that information support? What conservation risk does it address? What changes because that single fish appears in a drive report? When the fleet is catching 0.2 percent, 0.3 percent, or 1 percent of the available amount of some species, what risk are we managing by paying someone to document every accidental fish that crosses the rail? Seeing something on camera does not make it meaningful. Electronic monitoring produces an enormous amount of information. A good program identifies the information needed to manage the fishery and reviews footage at the level necessary to produce it. It does not turn every visible event into paid work simply because the event can be seen.
This matters even more now. Vessels have been advised that the congressional appropriation supporting EM review may not cover the full cost and that some portion of the shortfall could be passed on to them. This is not an acceptable outcome in the West Coast bottom trawl fishery, where participation and attainment are low and operating and monitoring costs are astronomical. Fishermen understand that accountability costs money. They have paid for cameras, service, catch monitoring, operational changes, lost fishing time, and years of program development. They are willing to pay a fair share for a program that works. A fair share cannot mean accepting costs that have never been evaluated against the problem they are supposed to solve. If vessels are expected to pay more for review, managers need to be able to explain what is being reviewed, why it matters, and why that level of review is still necessary. This is basic cost control. It is also basic program integrity.
(Mis) Alignment with national policy
The timing is critical. Executive Order 14276 directs federal agencies and regional fishery management councils to reduce unnecessary burdens, promote domestic seafood production, improve profitability, and use better and more cost-effective technology. The West Coast trawl fishery has sustainable fish available, a fleet catching only a fraction of much of it, and a monitoring program adding cost to vessels for information that may have little or no management value.
That reality is directly counter to the goal of making American seafood more competitive. Electronic monitoring is one of the strongest tools available to advance those goals, and we should be maximizing what it can do for both accountability and fishery productivity by making sure it’s efficient. In smaller ports, where observers are in short supply and bringing one in can involve additional travel costs and delays, EM gives vessels the flexibility to fish without waiting for a human observer to become available. That flexibility is real and remains one of EM’s greatest benefits. Realizing its full value requires looking beyond the cameras themselves to the cost and burden of the entire monitoring system, including equipment, operational requirements, and shoreside review. EM is cost-effective only when the whole system is designed around the information managers actually need and the realities of operating a fishing vessel in a way that is not only compliant but also efficient and productive.
Lessons to share
For fishermen and managers considering EM in other fisheries or other regions, the West Coast experience offers several lessons.
First, define the problem the program is intended to solve. “Accountability” is not specific enough. Which catch needs to be accounted for, at what level, for which management decision, and at what cost?
Second, decide at the beginning what success will look like and what will change when the program succeeds. If accurate logbooks, reduced review, or lower costs are part of the promise, establish the evidence needed to make those changes. If some species require greater scrutiny, explain why and revisit that decision as stock status and harvest opportunities change.
Third, do not mistake fishermen’s ability to comply for proof that every requirement is reasonable. Fishermen will move totes, reposition crew, change deck procedures, troubleshoot cameras, and complete another logbook because they want to fish and they want to follow the rules. Their ability to make an awkward system function does not mean the system is well designed.
Fisheries management is very good at adding protections when concern is high. It is much less practiced at removing them when the facts change. That may be the most important lesson from the West Coast experience. A mature monitoring program must be able to do both.
Final thoughts
The good news is that EM works, and the technology continues to improve. Together, fishermen, managers, reviewers, and service providers have built a program that provides accountability. Fishermen have tested the technology and adapted their operations. Reviewers have demonstrated what cameras can capture, and the reporting has confirmed that the system can provide reliable information. We can now use that shared experience to make EM more focused, affordable, and useful. The opportunity ahead is to continue improving the program in a way that strengthens accountability while giving fishermen more opportunity to harvest sustainable fish, support fishing communities, and feed Americans.
Lisa Damrosch is part of a five-generation commercial fishing family that has operated out of Half Moon Bay, California since the late 1800s. Lisa has been involved in the development of electronic monitoring on the West Coast since the earliest compliance trials, coordinating feedback from participating fishermen, managing the California Groundfish Collective’s EM exempted fishing permit, and serving on the Pacific Council’s Groundfish Electronic Monitoring Policy Advisory Committee. She currently serves as Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Association and on the board of Seafood Harvesters of America.
