
Improving data quality from the Alaska pollock trawl fishery has been a high priority for industry, National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) for many years. Since 2018, there has been a massive collaborative effort between the pollock industry and NMFS agencies to test the use of EM for compliance monitoring in this fishery. Now in 2025, the pollock fleet is finally seeing the hard-won results of this nearly 7-year pilot program as the pollock Trawl EM program (TEM) begins its first year as a fully regulated program. Although the TEM pilot program was operating under a single Exempted Fishing Permit (EFP) up until regulatory implementation, actual project management was handled by the three separate industry partners representing the Bering Sea (BS), Central Gulf of Alaska (CGOA) and Western Gulf of Alaska (WGOA) in order to fully capture the nuances between these pollock fisheries.
For the WGOA portion of the program, the Aleutians East Borough (AEB) and Peninsula Fishermen’s Coalition – with funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) – spearheaded a project team which included the WGOA under 60’ trawl fishermen and processors, Saltwater Inc. (SWI), and Chordata LLC. The WGOA project was designed around the particular characteristics of the WGOA pollock fishery which include very remote ports (i.e. King Cove, Sand Point and False Pass), extreme weather, local small vessel trawlers (under 60’), and the use of tender vessels to deliver catch to shoreside processing plants. In addition to the core mission of testing EM for at-sea compliance monitoring, our team wanted to explore ways of leveraging EM technology to improve data quality or other aspects of fishery operations. We had the opportunity to broadly outline these goals in a 2021 article published in EM4Fish, about halfway through the project. With the TEM program officially under regulation, we wanted to highlight the process of developing an eLog for the WGOA.
Electronic Logbooks (eLog): Origins and Impetus
As part of the TEM program all vessels were required to operate under Maximized Retention, and as such, needed to supplement EM video and landings data with self-reported discard information in logbooks – some species, primarily sharks and skates, could be discarded at-sea under certain circumstances, and pollock might have to be discarded in heavy weather for safety reasons. Under the EFP, the WGOA fleet had the unique opportunity of piloting an eLog in lieu of paper logbooks, because at that time there was no regulatory requirement for under 60’ vessels to use logbooks of any kind. We saw this as a chance to modernize a process that was notoriously complicated and prone to human error. It was also a key to collecting near real time data for our Fishermen’s Data Portal (“data portal”), which we developed to give fishermen more ownership of and access to their own data.

With direction from the WGOA fishermen, problem-solving from SWI and Chordata, and the invaluable NFWF EMR to fund innovation, we started to create an ET ecosystem. SWI and Chordata developed an eLog that could be integrated directly into the existing EM hardware to save space and cost. The eLog auto populates repetitive fields like vessel name, permit number, and also some data fields that are captured by the EM system, such as the vessel’s latitude and longitude. The eLog submissions are then integrated into the data portal where the EM system’s position reports and logbook data are linked with eLandings fish tickets to generate in-season PSC hotspot reporting for bycatch avoidance. When an eLog is submitted, it automatically generates a discard report email to the associated processor for input into eLandings. Then the portal compares the eLog against the eLandings data and provides processors with a discard discrepancy report alerting them to potential errors. This has improved data quality and reduced the amount of time needed to follow up on errors and ensure corrections have been made.
From a management perspective, the eLog has allowed NMFS to receive effort data as well as recorded at-sea discards much more rapidly than in the past, has provided a data set that can easily compared to the EM data for each trip, and it has reduced the backend work and issues inherent with paper logbooks (key punching, typos, illegible handwriting, etc.). Currently, all vessels submit their encrypted logbooks to the portal at the completion of each trip, which are subsequently submitted to NMFS in batches by the portal. At the outset, that data was copied onto a USB drive by the skipper and transmitted by the processor, but during the course of the project many vessels have installed satellite broadband and can now directly submit their logbooks to the portal over the internet. In the future, vessels will likely submit directly to NMFS and the portal simultaneously. Regardless of these changes, the eLog will continue to provide timely access to effort and discard data for both fishermen as well as NMFS.
The eLog was implemented at-scale in 2023 and 100% of the fleet has been using it which improved the accuracy of the data and made reporting easier for both fishermen and processors. And because the eLog is integrated with a vessel’s EM system it avoids a second layer of cost, hardware, and software that would be required for a separate electronic logbook.
Course Correcting
As the final year of the EFP came to a close in 2024 and we began preparing for the first year of regulatory implementation, we were confident our eLog had been sufficiently tested and the fleet was well-versed in its use, and we would transition effortlessly into the regulated program. There was only one problem…we had unintentionally developed eLog in a vacuum. Our eLog was tailored to the needs of piloting EM, but had not been adapted to life outside the EFP where it needed to satisfy requirements beyond ground-truthing EM video.
These are the inevitable growing pains of coalescing multiple nuanced projects into a single regulatory package for one of the largest fisheries in the world. Despite everyone working towards the same goal, each fleet and NMFS agency had varying needs, tools and resources available, and were operating on slightly different internal timelines. In our case, for the same reason the WGOA was uniquely situated to develop eLog, that also meant we were the only ones ready to use it. We were on a slightly accelerated timeline relative to NMFS who has been concurrently developing the infrastructure needed to accept eLogs from catcher vessels — current NMFS eLog implementation only supports at-sea processors with a flow scale (i.e. catcher/processors and motherships). And with so many competing demands on NMFS resources, the technology and regulations hadn’t yet caught up with eLogbook on catcher vessels.
As currently written, the decades old regulation requires vessels to have paper copies of logbooks available on demand in the event of an at-sea boarding, plus a few other small details to ensure eLog satisfies the requirements of the Daily Fishing Logbook (DFL). Aside from the logbook form itself, the permanent NMFS Application Programming Interface (API) which is used as the digital pipeline to receive eLog data was underway but not finished; a dedicated EFP to formally test eLog was on the horizon but couldn’t happen until the API was complete; regulations couldn’t be amended until the EFP was done. This is the reality of making change in our industry, and sometimes you have to get creative to work within these constraints.
Clearly communicate needs, understand what’s possible, find a solution
With less than two months until the start of the regulated program, we had to have some tough conversations within our team and consult with NMFS to see if there was a way forward. We didn’t want our fleet to struggle in the first year of the regulated program by completely changing the reporting process, not to mention losing all the work we had done to implement eLog. So together with the NMFS Alaska Region (AKRO) staff who oversee the TEM program and the Office of Law Enforcement (OLE) staff, and we looked at the logbook regulations and got to work. We started by identifying what each party absolutely needed from the logbook process, i.e. our fleet wanted continuity and to maintain the stream of data to our fishermen’s portal; AKRO needed to verify we were collecting the right data; OLE needed data that was legally enforceable and in a format that was familiar and readily accessible during boardings. We outlined any discrepancies between our eLog and DFL requirements, identified the key logbook-related regulations, and discussed what (if any) modifications could be made to our eLog to satisfy those regulations.
![]() The modified eLog with fields to match DFL requirements. |
![]() PDF output of an eLog in DFL format displayed on the EM computer. |
By the end, we found compromise in a relatively simple solution – modifying the eLog to produce a “printable” DFL in PDF format. Both AKRO and OLE found ways to be responsive to our needs so long as we could make modifications that would meet the explicit requirements laid out for us. With less than a month until the start of fishing, we embarked on an iterative process of our software developer Chordata reengineering the eLog software, Amy Hadfield the AKRO Fishery Management Specialist (and resident logbook guru) providing guidance and feedback on DFL requirements, and OLE’s Compliance Analyst Liaison Alex Perry facilitating the review of compliance necessary to issue individual vessel Electronic Logbook (ELB) authorization letters.

Now more than ever, federal fishery managers are balancing shrinking budgets against growing priorities. The burden of innovation often falls to industry, who are trying to answer the call for improved efficiencies and reduced bycatch, while desperately maintaining their livelihoods in a volatile seafood industry. The point being, we are all in a precarious situation one way or another. It is in the best interest of industry and government alike to find common ground, use resources judiciously and common sense in decision-making. When that happens, more often than not, solutions can be found. Here we are with one of the first approved eLogbooks in use for catcher vessels in Alaska.
A rising tide carries all boats
What first looked like a wall was actually a door that opened an opportunity to expand eLog into the Kodiak fleet. The Alaska Groundfish Data Bank (AGDB) represents the vessels based out of Kodiak and served as one of the Principal Investigators for the TEM EFP. AGDB is no stranger to hotspot mapping and has been using in-season monitoring of Prohibited Species Catch (PSC) for years to reduce bycatch. Currently, this information is collected from individual vessels, compiled and then reported back out to the fleet manually by AGDB staff. While effective, it is a time consuming and laborious task. Because our WGOA team had already developed a data portal that could automatically pull eLandings data and combine it with position data from EM systems to produce hotspot mapping, it makes sense to extend integration to the Kodiak vessels. The main concern is that the Kodiak fleet has a mix of EM service providers, and our eLog is only compatible with SWI EM systems. Fortunately, during the last year of the EFP our organizations joined forces under a single NFWF grant. This meant we could reallocate unspent funds to AGDB to work with their EM service provider to finish developing an eLog that is compatible with their systems but still has the potential to feed into our data portal. And because we had already worked with AKRO and OLE on how to make eLog work under a regulated program, it was relatively easy to expedite this process for Kodiak, which may otherwise have taken another year or two.
While eLogbooks alone are not particularly interesting or novel per se, they are a critical step in data modernization that can pave the way for more e The process of seeing an idea through to implementation can be a long and sometimes frustrating one, but developing partnerships across industry and agency based on clear communication and transparency has been the key to our success.
Many thanks to Eric Torgerson (Chordata LLC), Nancy Munro (Saltwater Inc.), and Chelsae Radell and Julie Bonney (Alaska Groundfish Data Bank) for their contributions to this article and their work on behalf of Alaska’s fishing industry.
Charlotte Levy is Fisheries Analyst for the Aleutians East Borough. She welcomes your comments and questions by email.