PowerPoint: What You Get for What You Pay
Accurate catch monitoring is critical to successful management of output controlled fisheries. Since adopting such a system with the implementation of catch shares in 2010, monitoring in the New England groundfish fishery has been conducted with at sea monitors. These human observers use multiple methods to estimate kept catch and discards leading to varying levels of data quality. As New England transitions from agency to industry funded monitoring programs, additional scrutiny has been placed on the costs of collecting these data. In an effort to explore potential cost savings, pilot programs have used cameras, GPS and sensors to electronically monitor catch. We analyze the cost efficiency of numerous monitoring strategies accounting for differences in quality of the data collected. Incorporating the relative bias and precision associated with different monitoring strategies and coverage levels allows us to better understand the trade-offs of various catch accounting systems.
