 Good morning and welcome. Thank you to those that have joined us on the line for this first in-person meeting on the committee to assess the distribution of fisheries management benefits. I wanna welcome everybody on the line and those in the room as well. And I'll just get us started with a few housekeeping items before I turn it over to our chair, Tom Miller. So to start, for those that have joined us in the room, just a quick note about emergency procedures. If there is an emergency and we need to exit this room, we'll go straight out the two doors behind me. To your left, once you hit the landing area, there are two large wood doors that will head to the west side of our building. We'll use those as an emergency exit. If you're wanting to enter or exit the building, not in an emergency, you'll use the Constitution Avenue or the C Street entrances. And restrooms are, if you go out this direction to the landing area, you'll make a right. And when you see a hallway on the left, you'll make a left and restrooms are on the left as well. For those that are joining online, thank you for doing so. We are, the committee is meeting together in person with a few additional guests. But we are largely also represented on Zoom. So we will try to make sure that you can hear and see us when we're speaking. And just a couple of housekeeping items for those on the line, we will be using the raise hand feature to respond to requests to speak. And also we will be recording this session. So please do use the raise hand feature if you'd like to chime in and we'll call on you in the order in which we see the hands online. I think with that, Tom, I can turn it over to you. Thank you, Stacey. Good morning, everyone. My name is Tom Miller and the chair of this committee. I'm a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences Chesapeake Biological Lab. This is our fifth committee meeting, as Stacey said. It's the first one that we've had in person. I'm still surprised to see that my fellow committee members have body parts below about this level and they're actually in 3D. Our task in this committee is to help the National Marine Fisheries Service assess equity and the distribution of fishery management benefits to help them understand the data and information that is available and how they can assess the distribution of primary benefits to which National Marine Fisheries Service think of as permits and quota. This is our fifth meeting and we've already heard from a lot of different people involved in the fishery and this morning we're going to begin hearing from people from regional fishery management offices around the nation who have particular insights into economic and socioeconomic aspects of National Marine Fisheries work. With that, I'm going to ask the other committee members to go around the table and introduce themselves. I'm going to start to my immediate left with Kailin. Okay, great, thanks. So I'm Kailin Kretz. I'm an assistant professor of environmental and resource economics at ASU School of Sustainability and let's see, I'm also on the North Pacific Scientific and Statistical Committee. Jim St. Kirikow, professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California at Davis and a member of the Ocean Studies Board. Good morning, I'm Steven Seifers. I'm an associate professor at the University of South Alabama in the School of Marine and Environmental Sciences and Sociology and I also serve on the Gulf Council's Scientific, Standing Scientific and Statistical Committee. Good morning. My name is Rachel Donkersloat and I manage a small research and consulting firm in Aniac, Alaska and my background's in understanding the social and cultural dimensions of our fishery systems in the North Pacific and I currently serve on a task force set up by the North Pacific Council that's looking to better include an account for local and traditional knowledge in our fishery decision-making. Good morning, I'm Lisa Campbell. I'm a professor at the Duke University Marine Lab, a chair in Marine Affairs of Policy and I'm also a regular member of the Ocean Studies Board. Yeah, hello, everyone. My name is Grant Murray. I'm also at the Duke University Marine Lab where I'm an associate professor of marine policy. Good morning. I'm Matt Reimer, associate professor at UC Davis in the Agriculture and Resource Economics Department and a member of the Science and Statistical Committee at the Pacific Fishery Management Council. Thank you, Matt. Stacey. Thank you. Stacey Karris. I am a senior program officer with the Ocean Studies Board, staff at the National Academies and I am the study director for this committee. Leanne. Hi, my name is Leanne Martin. I am an associate program officer on the Ocean Studies Board, helping with the study. Eric. Eric Inesco, program assistant on the Ocean Studies Board with the National Academies. Thank you, Eric. This morning we have two presentations. First, Michael Travis from the southeast region, followed by Min Yang Li from the northeast region. Each speaker has been allotted 30 minutes. There will be questions of clarification immediately following the presentation and then we've set aside a 45-minute sort of discussion panel in which the committee members can ask more overview questions or broader questions leading from the presentation. So Michael, can we turn the gavel over to you please for your presentation? You most certainly may, but it will be only on a verbal basis because unfortunately I'm not in the office today and my camera on my laptop is not working this morning so you will hear me, but unfortunately you will not be able to see me. And thank you for the staff for bringing up the presentation. Again, my name is Michael Travis. I am an economist, but I am also the social science branch chief here at the southeast regional office. We want to thank the National Academy of Sciences for giving us the opportunity to present on this very important topic. Next slide please. So in addition to myself, I want to thank Matt McPherson, who is a social science branch chief at the Science Center, Christina Package and Ed Glazier who are anthropologists here in the regional office and Christopher Biza, an economist in the Science Center for all of their assistance in answering the questions that the panel sent to us. We received seven questions that we are supposed to address in this presentation. We have chosen to answer six of those questions and I will cover those in succession here shortly. But I did want to point out that there was one question that we did not feel comfortable addressing. And I've noted that on this slide. It's the question that asks, are there types of socioeconomic data related to equity that the council or councils is using, relying on in decision making? We kind of felt that this was asking us to get into the heads of council members. And we, you know, we did not want to try to do that. So we are recommending to this panel that that question be posed to either council staff or even better yet, ask the council members themselves directly because they really are the best ones to answer that question. Next slide please. Okay, so the first question, which is where we had the most information to provide. So what initiatives if any related to new socioeconomic data collections have been undertaken within your region? So in late 2017, Southeast Regional Office began collecting certain demographic data, specifically race, ethnicity, and sex on our commercial and for hire vessel dealer and operator permit application forms. We can also discern age information from the data collected on those forms. Now we also decided to add a section for permit holders to identify the industry that they are primarily involved in and whether they are a small business according to the applicable small business size threshold. Now that information is then to be used in analyses that examine whether there are potential disproportionate effects between small and large businesses. We think that that is relevant to equity considerations. Now provision of this information because it's on the permit application forms has been mandatory and that is exactly why we added the questions to those forms. So this is our attempt to try to get census level information for this kind of data. Next slide please. Now in general, crew members here have mostly been ignored by the fishery management process and that has been at least partly due if not largely due to a lack of data on crew members. However, the science center is currently working with captains of commercial vessels in the Gulf of Mexico to conduct a survey of crew members. This survey covers the commercial sector of all federally managed fisheries in the Gulf. So this is a first. We have never done anything like this before. The survey is collecting data on demographics, the nature of crew work at sea and what we'll generally call other human aspects of fishing operations in the Gulf. Now the current plan is to expand the survey to crew on commercial vessels in the South Atlantic next year subject to funding availability and that's a big asterisk there because we don't currently have the funding but fingers crossed we're going to get it. Next slide please. Also recently we have started and this is a joint effort between the center and the regional office. We've initiated a large scale project to examine equity and environmental justice or what we call EJ issues among people engaged in or impacted by NOAA fisheries services in our federally managed fisheries. The focus group meetings are going to be conducted in order to interact with and identify people from historically underserved populations who have experienced barriers to equitable participation in NOAA fisheries services. These focus group meetings are intended to elicit information on barriers to engagement and the ways these people have adapted to these barriers. The information that we collect from these focus group meetings and the subsequent analyses will be captured in our Southeast EJ implementation plan and that information will also be used to inform our social impact analyses in our regulatory documents. Next slide please. Another program is our NIMS social indicators program where we continue to aggregate data generated by the Census Bureau for use in assessing EJ issues in our fishing oriented communities in the Southeast. Currently the program is focused on development and application of three basic indices for examining local vulnerabilities to various forms of social and environmental change. And those three are personal disruption, population composition, and poverty. There's a lot more to this particular program that we don't have time to discuss in this presentation but I provided a link so that those who are interested in all the details can go to that link and find that additional information. Next slide please. Another program is our NOAA Fisheries Voices database. Now this database includes oral histories gathered from fishermen and members of fishing communities. Fortunately, this work is no longer being funded. That was a recent decision we just found out about. But some of the relatively newer contributions to this collection include oral histories on the history of red tide events here on the west coast of Florida which is a recurring and rather important problem. Interviews in the greater Tampa Bay area with commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen, and fish dealers. Interviews in Cortez, Florida which is one of our better known fishing communities with various members of that community. We have also done interviews with fishery council members throughout the southeast. And a number of interviews were done that focused on the effects from the deep water horizon oil schools of disaster. And again, lots more information on this have provided a link where you can find additional details on this particular program. Next slide please. In addition, the center routinely collects economic data and somewhat more recently has started to produce economic reports for most federally managed fisheries in the southeast. These data and the results apply to vessels in each fishery. So a commercial fishing business not to individuals. This data is used to measure the distribution and monetary benefits of cost within the harvesting sector of these fisheries. So this program is limited to the harvesting sector does not extend beyond that. Now these annual data and reports are available for our South Atlantic and Gulf of Excusion fisheries, the reef fish and separate group of fisheries as well as our macro fisheries. Now smaller fisheries are assessed on an ad hoc basis every few years. So I'd say generally like three to five years as funding allows. So some of our recent efforts have included the rec fish fishery in the South Atlantic which is managed under 90 Q as well as commercial fisheries in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Now in Puerto Rico, we rely on what they call a fisherman's census that collects information on participants in their commercial fisheries. And again, that's a periodic data collection. Now the center has also attempted to collect basically the same economic information for the four hire sector. But these efforts have generally been ad hoc and the most recent trip level survey was back in 2017. So it's getting a little dated. We also added limited economic and social questions to the new Southeast for hire log book data collection program or what we call CIFIRE and that started in January of 2021. Next slide please. So what issues or lessons have we learned as a result of these new initiatives? So after the first six months the regional office determined that the small business section of our permit application forms was not easily understood by our permit applicants. We got a number of complaints and questions building more phone calls than I can recall. And that unfortunately led to some poor compliance and poor data quality in those first six months. So we worked with staff, we talked to permit holders and that section was reorganized and we have had much higher compliance and much data quality since that question or that section was reorganized. We also at least initially encountered resistance from some of our permit holders and even from some of our own staff to asking for demographic data. So we basically had to engage in some outreach and education where we had to verbally explain the purposes for collecting that data to a lot of our permit applicants and our own staff and that has again led to improved compliance and improved data quality at least for a few years. Unfortunately, a few years later we ran into some additional complications as the permit's office chose to gradually shift from paper based application forms to online electronic application forms. And as a result of that gradual shift we started to lose some demographic data related to various permits over about a two year time period. Thankfully, this issue has been largely addressed or was largely addressed as of August of 2021 when a new permit database came online. Next slide please. Now the regional office also attempted to add the same demographic and small business questions to our Gulf IFQ shareholder account application forms in 2021. And the reason that we decided to do that is that in a recent review of those programs that we did we determined that we were not getting any demographic data from shareholders who did not possess permits. If you don't have a permit then you're not being asked the questions from the permit form. So it seemed logical to try to fill that data hole by adding these questions to that particular form. Unfortunately, our request to add those questions to that form was denied by OMB. Further OMB informed us that they would no longer approve any mandatory data collection efforts for demographic or small business data by our agency. So our current approval for these questions on our permit application forms is expiring early next year and we expect to be denied to continue to include those questions at least on a mandatory basis on those forms. So OMB has advised us that what we should do is we should separate those questions from the rest of the permit application forms and indicate their response to the demographic and small business data is purely voluntary and we will probably take them up on that offer even though we strongly suspect that our response rates are going to go down exactly how much they're going to go down and how that will affect the quality of the data is to be determined but this is what we've been told. In addition, regardless the structure and content of our race and ethnicity questions will change next year because OMB has already proposed changes to those questions under a recent federal register notice that I think came out I don't know January or February of this year and so they're basically giving agencies two different approaches to asking for race and ethnicity we will choose the simpler version or the simpler option there. I've provided for those who are unaware a link to that federal register notice that lays out their proposals we would imagine that those new standards will be in place probably early part of next year. Next slide please. An earlier attempt to survey crews only in the Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery did not succeed that effort we tried to voluntarily enlist randomly selected vessel owners in helping to deliver a mail survey to their crew members we ran a pretest as we are required to do and that pretest indicated that most vessel owners were not going to participate or cooperate. So in light of those difficulties that is what led to the current commercial crew survey effort and that was developed over a number of years to identify and enlist a network of fishery stakeholders including dealers port agents vessel owners and commercial fishing associations to identify where and when potential interviewers could intercept crews docked. Next slide please. Lack of dedicated funding we've learned that that's I think we probably already knew but that's definitely hindered our collection of social data on fishery participants particularly with respect to crew and also with respect to the employees of seafood dealers and processors. In addition the Southeast has a very small staff of non-economist social scientists stretched across three council regions. So remember we cover the Gulf Council, South Atlantic Council and Caribbean Council. In general a lack of resources has precluded us from significantly expanding our socioeconomic data collection programs. However some progress has been made with a relatively small but permanent increase in social science budget and staff numbers in the science center. I would like to say that's true in the regional office but it is not true in the regional office. Another issue that we've encountered is and this has become worse in recent years is that the length of time it takes to process a data collection request particularly a new request through OMB under the Paperwork Reduction Act has also limited our ability to effectively collect data in a timely manner. So typically these days and maybe Min Yang will speak to this because we've all run into it I would say minimum of six to nine months to get a new data collection effort cleared under PRA through OMB. Next slide please. Next question are there socioeconomic data collection efforts that have been tried and failed? We're going to interpret failed a little bit broadly here. So I already mentioned the shrimp crew survey effort and how that didn't work but how we adapted. I should also mention the Gulf portion of the CFIRE program was recently invalidated by an unfortunate court decision and so we need to rebuild that entire program. The South Atlantic portion of the program is still in place. However, in both cases compliance with reporting requirements has been relatively poor in the first two years the program and that's not just with respect to social and economic data but just in general it's been poor. I will also mention that we did collect demographic data on participants in the Gulf Supertile Fish IFQ program as part of our first five-year review of that program. However, that data was limited to just grouper and tilefish fishermen and so the Gulf Reef Fish fishery has a number of species beyond grouper and tilefish. So that survey did not cover red snapper rather importantly other snappers gray triggerfish greater amalgam etc. So unfortunately that data was a limited applicability to other research and analyses. Also that particular survey took a lot of time to collect the data and generate a report and since we are now almost 10 years removed from that it's likely that data is probably not of current use particularly given all the turmoil that we've seen in Gulf fisheries in the last several years. We have had for those unaware we have had a number of fisheries disasters in the last several years in the Gulf particularly with respect to landfall and hurricanes. Next slide please. Are there groups of people that you think are not being considered in current efforts but should be? So regional office intentionally did not include a question regarding household income of individuals associated with a federal permit on our application form. What we had noticed from previous survey efforts is that surprisingly household income is often seen as a more sensitive question than recent ethnicity. So at the present time we do not have data to determine which or how many individuals or households affected by our regulatory actions may be low income and that that is a hole in our information with respect to a number of mandates that ask us to look at effects on low income people. Also we have not yet planned on an effort to serve a crew on four higher vessels but again we are hoping to do so in the future subject to funding. Next slide please. We also do not require permits for private recreational anglers at the present time and so again we do not possess demographic data on recreational anglers. Now currently the Gulf and South Atlantic councils are considering such a requirement at least for certain species. So we're hoping that there may be an opportunity in the future to collect that kind of information. It's also the case that workers at seafood processing businesses and seafood dealers have also not yet been characterized in social and economic terms. We have not done any surveys for them. Economic data on seafood dealers and processors is currently very limited particularly compared to our harvesting sector. All we have for them is total expesial production and value for processors. We do have some additional information on number of employees and whether they are full-time or part-time. Point being is that consideration of effects on those particular entities from our regulatory actions is still pretty limited. Next slide please. Are there types of data in our analyses related to equity that council is requesting? So we did struggle with this one a little bit. In all fairness the Gulf and South Atlantic councils were the ones to ask us to initiate the economic data collection program for the commercial sectors of our fisheries many years ago. So that is thanks to them. The councils also requested that we collect a limited amount of economic and social data for the four higher sector. From their perspective at the time that they asked for these data collections the purpose was to evaluate changes in economic performance over time due to changes in management or other factors. It can be used for other purposes but that was their main purpose. Now the Gulf and South Atlantic councils have also requested that we update our willingness to pay estimates that we use to estimate economic value of recreationally harvested fish as admittedly a number of those are very dated at this point. And although not requested the five-year reviews that we've done of our catch share programs always provide genie coefficient estimates showing how the distributions of landings and revenue for IFQ managed species have changed over time both at the vessel level and at the entity or the business level. However importantly these estimates have not been used to inform management decisions at least not yet that may change soon. Next slide please. Now the councils have also occasionally asked staff to determine whether the economic effects of regulatory alternatives being considered for particular action are proportionally different. This has been particularly important with regard to a number of sector allocation decisions that the Gulf and South Atlantic councils have made in the last several years. So for example they're asking us to look at what are the percentage changes in economic value or net economic benefits in each sector or component of a sector across the alternatives being considered. That is a common question. Based on our observation if they are about the same the councils seem to consider that to be equitable. If they differ greatly the councils seem to consider that to not be equitable. However there is no guidance on how to make that determination either for analysts or for council members. And I say that I'm not trying to point fingers I'm just saying this is something everyone has recognized. There are a number of mandates that require us to consider equity in decisions. The regional administrators previously talked about that in their presentations but the fact of the matter is there is no guidance for the council members or for the analysts on how to decide what is or is not equitable. Next slide please. Last question I believe are there differences in data information needs for initially setting up a permit or allocation system versus monitoring changes in a fishery over time? Our general answer is no we don't think so. Programs to collect economic and social data should be in place for all federally managed fisheries and definitely prior to setting up a new what you folks call the permit or application or allocation system. Otherwise it's very difficult to determine the economic and social effects of implementing such a system or program and similar difficult to determine how economic and social performance is likely to differ under proposed alternative management approaches. So this was in fact the rationale for including a handful of economic and social questions on the four higher log book program and those were limited to number of crew, number of pink passengers, fees collected, price of fuel and fuel used. So five questions and yet those five questions led to a lot of fishermen dissatisfaction even with a lot of outreach and education that went on and then ultimately that dissatisfaction led to the lawsuit and as I mentioned we unfortunately lost that lawsuit in the Gulf. I'll also point out and this is my last comment is that this same issue was also addressed by another National Academy of Sciences panel and in a report on limited access privilege programs and mixed use fisheries. So this is a common question and concern and that's all I have. Thank you very much. Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you very much, Michael. I'll just ask the committee if there are any questions for clarification. Jim? I'm not sure what the right order like I'm supposed to raise my hand put it on Zoom or whatever. Thank you so much. That was incredibly valuable. Lost a ton of information. I have a gazillion questions but I'm just going to go back to your crew survey and when you guys were thinking about implementing that I could see why the vessels might be concerned because there could be questions or they might assume there might be questions about crew satisfaction about being on their vessel. So you can see how that might create some issues with labor but when you were asking the questions did you think about trying to build out an idea of how long individuals were crew to sort of distinguish between you know if you just do a snapshot you're going to get a set of crew but you wouldn't necessarily know this person's been around for 20 years in the fishery as a crew member versus this one just came out of high school and was there for a week. So how did you guys sort of think about disentangling those issues in your surveys? So I am not one of the leads on the crew survey. Matt McPherson and Christina package board have been more closely involved with that so Matt I think I'm going to defer to you and Christina on this one. Okay so the failed effort that Mike referred to was a crew survey that we attempted to attach to the to the shrimp survey that we sent out and to ask vessel owners to distribute that to their crew and have them fill it out and that didn't work but we currently have a crew survey that's in the field right now. It's more of a we are collaborating with some vessel owners but it's not systematically being implemented with vessel owners it's more of an intercept survey. We asked all of those questions about how long how long crew have been working as fishermen. We asked about different fisheries. We've asked about their all their demographics. We asked about their income so it's a fairly extensive survey it's somewhat based on I think I imagine Min Yang will mention this survey in his presentation but it's based on a crew survey that was done initially started initially up in the northeast and so we had PRA clearance for that survey and we meant to initiate the survey back in 2019 and we were interrupted by COVID so that's why we're we're doing it this year but we're actually in the field right now implementing that survey in the Gulf of Mexico. And my understanding so far we've been very successful in terms of our response rates. All right thank you. One more question from the Committee for Clarification Grunt. Yeah I'll add my thanks for that presentation. I also found that very informative. I had a question about another survey that you mentioned a large-scale survey that I believe is in the conceptualization stage. The phrase I wrote down was people engaged in or substantially impacted by NOAA Fisheries Services and I was wondering if you had any information about how that was defined or conceptualized. Have you moved towards thinking about how you would sample that how you would define what groups would be included in that anything you could add to that would be helpful. So again I'm not the lead on this one either Christina I would appreciate it if you would answer this one. Sure thing. So we're involved in doing focus groups throughout the Gulf South Atlantic and Caribbean and we have I believe is it 21 planned and we're currently trying to find participants at all locations but basically trying to find participants that are involved in fisheries as well as protected resources and habitat and I don't know if you have anything to add to that Matt but we're basically using contacts like Sea Grant agents and our council partners to find participants or suggest participants. No nothing to add other than the fact that this is you know this is a series of focus groups you know throughout the region so it's not it's not a survey their focus groups to learn more about you know the underserved populations and you know how they've been differentially impacted by you know fisheries and fisheries regulations. Any other questions from the committee? If not Michael and your team thank you very much I hope you'll wait around for the 1115 panel discussion where I think we'll get into broader discussions but I want to thank you all for a very very clear presentation that certainly really helped me understand the efforts in the southeast region and particularly some of the constraints you face from national decisions that probably aren't motivated by fishery resource quite quite questions but clearly make your life more challenging so thank you very much all right our next presentation we go from the southeast to the northeast and Min Yang Li is an economist with the northeast fisheries science center Min Yang over to you great thank you so much are my slides coming up? They are yes they are oh my goodness they're not in the presentation mode I don't there you go they are now all right all right it is nice to go second so I took some of Stacy's questions more as a suggestion than a requirement certainly more of a suggestion than Mike did our group works with the regional office and the two fishery management councils in our in our region I'm an economist I'm going to do my best to represent our entire group I'm a little bit outside my element for a couple areas though Greg Ardini Trish Clay Matt Cutler Patricia Pinto De Silva and Sam Werner were really helpful in putting these slides together let's see but I'm hoping that advanced I do want to be very clear that the words in blue here are my opinions and my conclusions I think they're kind of reasonable maybe I'm overstepping a lot but I couldn't resist you know so what what data do we have in general in my opinion we don't have enough we're all right on on some of the economic things and a little the opposite of that I'd say in some of the sociocultural arenas in my opinion this is because we just haven't been investing in in it as an agency it's some of these these these data these these metrics are not well understood by leadership particularly the sociocultural ones and even more particularly the qualitative ones they're not really well understood by folks who would use this information and they're you know they're not well communicated out by our group so you know there's 65 social scientists and economists of fisheries that's that's not a lot there's far more economists and social scientists and economists you know historically have not done a great job with equity stories so that I think that's that's my kind of read of of the situation we have lots of data that is collected by the regional office I understand Mike Penthany talk to you about a lot of these and so I'm not going to talk about them very in much detail that's up to know that you know on the crew information side we don't have a crew registry we don't have crew identifiers so we don't have crew demographics that makes our crew serve a difficult we do have captain information or operator permits we have very minimal demographic information on that front we have male female we have data birth we have a photograph but no ethnicity race or household status and we have a little information on firm ownership so we'll have a firm name and and person's name we do or we are fortunate to have quite a few purpose built socioeconomic data collections in our region we have a cost survey that's been implemented three times a crew survey that's implemented three times both of those last two are the cost survey just just finished on the crew surveys currently in the field we have an owner socioeconomic survey that was implemented about 10 years ago now which makes me feel a little old we have about six recreational valuation surveys and we have the NOVA Voices Oral History Archives that the mic talked about there's also the a seafood harvesters marketing survey that's going out in the field and a wreck expenditure survey I believe those are both national projects was not planning on talking about them but I did want to make sure that they were on your radar so the cost survey cost survey was implemented for the third time this year it is a voluntary mail and internet survey of firms that own at least a one fishing permit they may have more than one permit but they answer vessel level questions and this gives us a better understanding of firm level profits because we can collect things like information on insurance on repair on crew payments one of the issues is low response rates and survey fatigue hey another primary data collection is our crew socio-economic survey also for the third time it is a voluntary in-person intercept survey it is super labor-intensive to implement and it's designed to assess social and economic well-being of crew it's in the field right now it is one of the few ways we can collect some ethnicity information from from the folks in our fisheries I guess it's not new anymore so we also implemented an owner socio-economic survey in 2013 it was designed as a copy of the crew survey but for owners collected things like landing port mooring port some household demographics like marital status age education race and language at home there has not been a follow-up since 2013 and I don't believe one is planned we've done I believe about six six recreational surveys over the past say 12-15 years the population there are the licensed recreational anglers in the northeast that would target a particular species our sample frames are typically built off of the state angler registries so we work in heavy collaboration or in collaboration with states to get this done our goal here is to figure out how changes in the number of fish that are caught will affect angler participation and we use this pretty extensively to set regulations in a couple of our fisheries we do collect a little bit of demographic information mostly things that are related or there are things that our economists think are related to willingness to pay for wreck fishing income education age that sort of thing and I will say one of the issues here is that they're always focused on these like hot fisheries for management purposes either it's politically and culturally important like ground fish or wreck has a really large fraction of the overall fishing mortality like straight bass Mike talked about the voices of oral history program it is a national program but I did want to highlight it because it is kind of run out of our our office it seeks to document the human experience as it relates to the coast and information has been collected has been collected has been used in a variety of ways from including understanding equity and environmental justice for minority groups disaster access as Mike talked about and I will say that again as Mike mentioned the office of science and technology is discontinuing voices funding after 2024 that is the end of my tour of the socio economic the primary socio economic data to get to some of these questions that Stacy forwarded on socio economic data efforts that have been tried and failed in the most recent version of the cost survey vessel owners had really strong negative reactions to the demographic questions and so those demographics were removed this is a voluntary survey and you got to do what you got to do to ensure that your response rates are good we had a social capital survey that we tried to implement a few years ago and that was not approved by office of management and budget and we did think about implementing a higher frequency cost survey all right groups of people who were not include who we who we are not including in our current efforts this is certainly food for thought I feel so unconfident in these answers because I mean it's like what's the edge of what you know anyway crew you know we are not we definitely are considering them or to the extent that we should frequency is fairly low frequency a shore side infrastructure firms and labor at those firms in the northeast folks who work there are frequently is the wrong word often maybe is a little better are often undocumented they are often non-Hispanic South American women don't speak English don't speak Spanish they have really tenuous labor relations and it's hard to encourage those people to share those their stories and hard to amplify their stories we don't consider consumers that often and the same goes with the tribal and and indigenous groups in our region another slide on who's not considered you know this this future generation's story you know how will how will future fishermen be able to afford to buy access rights from those who currently hold them how will groups who typically have poor access to capital markets how will they find financing to buy those rights thinking about people and groups that do not qualify either you had no fishing history or you had no documented fishing history perhaps you were fishing well or your group was fishing well before the the you know industrialized fishing era and and stopped before 1990 I suppose when when things were were allocated I would like to point out subsistence rec users who are likely to have a lower income likely to a little more than at least compared to in our region compared to the fun recreational users likely to be lower income likely to minority not likely to benefit much from these trophy kind of measures that are sometimes in place and then of course you know people who don't show up to council meetings that either can't afford to take time off from work or just don't see the benefit in going so economic data related to equity that the council is using and requesting so we we typically provide analysis of things like revenue divided out or broken down by port or by gear by vessel size certainly by community and certainly during IFQ or catcher reviews for out analysis of non qualifying firms we have a limited ability to provide more kind of disaggregated metrics the council has certainly asked us what we are doing on the equity and environmental justice front we do have an EEJ strategy but it is unclear how we're going to do it and and and where we're going to find resources to do it so I kind of pulled together some of our common issues and obstacles I do think we're under resourced we have an occasional crew survey you know three and about 10 years we have occasional cost surveys and the one year funding cycle is really tough for this the voices project at least funding is being discontinued by science and technology we have three three staff in our region with socio-cultural training we do have more economists but you know economists are not the best at equity and certainly not the economists that are in our group are not I think the importance of the of socio-economic data particularly qualitative socio-economic data is not well understood perhaps by leadership perhaps by councils and this leads to the sentiment that you know no one's going to use this information anyway or it's not going to really factor into the decision-making process which has real impacts for our response rates and I think in particular with respect to qualitative information it's hard to compare a crew survey that's run three times in 10 years with a bottom-troll survey that's got you know bajillions of data points and a 60-year time series and I think it's not it's not been trusted there's a bumper sticker that's you know on many many trucks and in the region it says you know National Marine Fisheries Service destroying fishermen in the community since 1976 and again it it is hard to collaborate and to it's it's hard to kind of win back that trust and that leads to this kind of feeling or this perception that you know if I is a fisherman or someone related to fishing answers your survey this information is either not going to be used or it's going to be used against me somehow and how that somehow is is kind of nebulous but it sort of points at this like there's no upside for me in answering your survey and that that's something kind of have to battle with more issues as Michael alluded to the PRA process is pretty onerous incentives aren't permitted and that that's certainly tough the short term funding the one-year funding cycle is really difficult too these surveys crew cost are difficult they're really difficult and so we we worry and we are concerned about survey fatigue the cost survey was rates have gone from 32% to 24 to 7 and I believe hopefully up to the 20s in 2023 so the survey fatigue is real they're voluntary data collections and you know they take a long time to do the questions are really sensitive they ask difficult things and sometimes they're hard to answer right a question about how much should you spend for this boat on repair costs over the last year well maybe you got the the top of your mind maybe you need to ask your bookkeeper pay your bookkeeper to look it up for you and certainly representativeness so on on the one hand we have you know something like language barriers for for minority populations and if if we're not doing everything we can to reach the folks who are hard to reach we may not be representative but also that our scientific staff certainly may not be diverse enough and this is certainly a problem in economics and if I and and you know our our group in SSB in the northeast is fairly homogenous and this means that we maybe don't have the life experiences to ask the proper questions or maybe we aren't interested in some of the questions that are really relevant to certain groups of people and also we're I think we're a little bit less diverse in training too I don't think we I think we you know we have three socio-culturally trained staff in our group and finally you know our regional data streams are regional and that means that we at least for the existing data collections we have a pretty good handle of you know fishing revenues when you send out a when you when you fill in the the dealer part the vessel logbooks for our region but you know do we know where captains go for the months out of the year where they're not fishing in the northeast are they fishing in different parts of the country but also are they working on you know these are things we don't quite know I'm going to skip the slide as I've just said don't forget about costs and I will I will end there thank you to the folks who helped us out or helped me out and putting this presentation together thanks Min Yang thank you for a very honest and frank presentation I thoroughly enjoyed it I'm going to open the floor to questions of clarification from the committee members sorry while I'm trying to manage my screen Lisa yeah thanks that was really really interesting and I appreciate your candor I'm really interested in the oral history project that's been discontinued but the specific question the clarifying question is you talked on a slide about how it had been used to inform understanding I think that was sort of you know broad understanding but there was one point there where it actually looked like it informed a management decision or a take I just missed the last point on that slide you had understanding the role of gender but it looked like there was actually a management yeah oh so to parameterize the stock assessment models it if Matt McPherson is still on I believe this is the southeast that he might be able to chime in on this and if not we can I can answer your question yeah I'm still on that is the the best example that we have of the use of the oral histories to actually inform a management decision and the we you know we we conducted oral histories of people's experiences of red tide you know throughout their careers in the Gulf of Mexico and asked them for the locations and relative severity of the different red tide events and that was used by the stock assessment process to basically evaluate how or sort of compare the the severity of the 2018 red tide events to some of the previous red tide events that you know that we'd had earlier I think 2004 and and whatever and so it it was used in you know more of a qualitative way to to give them you know an idea of how to evaluate the risk to the red group or population that that red tide event represented and there are a couple publications out that describe you know how that information was used in that stock assessment process thank you thank you Matthew Jim you were next up sure thank you very much that was great you mentioned you know data efforts to collect information demographics and others on vessel owners crew and through the rec survey but I didn't hear any I mention of a report or anything that tried to synthesize the characteristics of all of them together like what is the overall picture across the groups that you are collecting demographics versus sort of one off reports on each like here's the crew snapshot and the vessel owner snapshot and what would be a vehicle to do that sort of overall picture and give you a sense of that the true community associated with the fisheries at least didn't what you're collecting information on thanks Jim I think you're correct although I confess to be only being only an advanced amateur in this knowing what our group is working on and I can certainly find out if there's something that's kind of been pulled together that speaks a little more holistically Grant microphone please Grant sorry thanks for me as well I had a question about the comment you made that the Northeast Council had asked what is happening on the EJ front and I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about what they asked for if there was more detail on that or what the context was for that request in the vein of I will I know Matt Cutler and Rachel Feeney are both on on this call if they feel like they could answer that I think they would be better positioned to did I unmute you can hear me okay yeah I'm not sure if Rachel's on she could probably speak of this as well but basically she and I are coordinating on how to integrate our efforts stemming from the national level strategy no officially strategy on equity and environmental justice which was just released which is now moving to a sort of breakout of regional level implementation plans and that's sort of how it'll be implemented but as Min Yang suggested you know staff availability and resources are tight to say the least and so at this point it's been basically just myself and Rachel in communication Rachel's at the New England Fisheries Management Council I'm the social sociologist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and we're just just just starting to think about how to reach out sort of do in reach first so you know make all of our staff aware across all of the branches and divisions and the council that we're trying to address this and then and then begin to engage with communities to to hopefully draw up a regional implementation plan and then to actually implement that plan and so yeah at this point the council has been basically just right in the council represented by Rachel has been asking me for information about kind of where no fisheries is at in terms of the implementation of our strategy but we've yet to actually kind of move forward on any particular projects however I will say that you know in our work at least for myself I can say and I know for Rachel as well but she can speak this as well I incorporate I've begun incorporating in my social impact assessments a section on equity environmental justice using you know the best available data which is basically you know some data from our crew survey that I lead but also the social indicator project at the national level the community social vulnerability indices that are basically census data combined with fishing industry data looking at dimensions of of social vulnerability at the community level those are a useful source of information to sort of indicate where there may be equity and environmental justice concerns but those aren't you know those are community level data don't really speak to lived experiences very well you know just aggregate level poverty indices and things like that so anyway I'll defer to Rachel to sort of end out if I missed anything Rachel please go ahead Hi all I'm Rachel Feeney staff at the New England Fishery Management Council glad to be listening in today I'll just add from the prior comments that about a year ago all of the councils submitted comments or responses to the the draft national EEJ strategy I can provide a copy of our letter to your staff if that would be helpful for your group to have that and that you know we were I guess I would say that was the only formal request or response of the council itself other than the staff to working together as Matt just expounded on and in that you know we were asking for more for help in identifying underserved fisheries management and and consider equity more better in the council process I'll dig out that letter and send it in Thank you Rachel I see in the chat box that several people having problems finding the raised hand function as guidance I find mine under the reactions button if you don't see a reactions button try looking under the three dots that say more and if you raise your hand I'll certainly call upon you we're at that point in the agenda where I would like to broaden the discussion out to to more general questions um and I'll start off and this people from the agency may feel is above their pay grade but Min Yang you mentioned about the lack of a senior scientist for for social sciences and it's clear from my experience that that for example Jason Linker senior scientist for ecosystem based approaches played a major role in moving ebm or eba fm I think as it is within through the agency are there discussions about such a role for behavioral and social sciences yeah let me be clear there is a economist at that level right Doug Doug Lipton Lipton serves in that role yep um and I I believe we were thinking even of the level above that and way above my pay grade other questions for our panelists don't be shy Jim and then Matt um both of the presentations discussed OMB and OMB's role in data collection the paper reduction act and so maybe can you elaborate a little bit because one of our tasks might be for example to recommend data sources or collection of new data and so be very valuable to get your impressions about the OMB process and what that kind of recommendation might run up against so just maybe talk from your experiences with OMB the paper reduction and collecting this kinds of data so I I guess I'll I'll tackle that but Jim just to yeah this is a tad uncomfortable of a discussion even though we raised it so we opened the door so fair question um I mean I think you know the bottom line for us is we can only collect what OMB says we can collect so they are the final arbiter and these these types of decisions um you know in terms of what I said in my presentation about mandatory collection of demographic and small business data that from their perspective I cannot speak on behalf of NIMS NOAA DOC in terms of what our perspective is I'm not sure that we have a finalized view on this but their position is we do not have the legal authority to require fishermen to provide that information they were very strong in their feelings on this with regard to demographic data and I think that their general position is that only the Census Spiro has the ability to require anyone to provide demographic information so that thus I don't want to say that they're not supportive of us collecting it but they're saying we're only going to be allowed to collect it on a voluntary basis and you know it's I think we're all aware of the pitfalls of you know requesting information on a voluntary basis particularly when it's sensitive information and folks are not really wanting to provide it or they understand the purpose for which it's going to be used or they don't understand it and it makes them you know reluctant to provide the information I mean we you know we actually had a couple of calls with them I think they very much understand why we want it but the purposes that we want to use it for for from their perspective do not outweigh the fact that they say we don't have the legal authority so that's you know where do you go from there I don't there is nowhere to go from their perspective the decision has been made and they're they're not going to move from that and in terms of the time delays I think there are a lot of reasons for that you know it's generally related to staffing you know not just within our agency and and the department but actually at OMB as well because of course they're not just reviewing PRA packages and not just for us but for the entire you know federal government and then they also review all of our rule makings as well so I think that the delays there's not much we can do about the delays because I think it's partly due to staffing particularly on their own and not sure if that really fully answered your question but thank you Michael Min Yang I just want to offer you the chance to follow up seeing that you also talked about OMB and I assume that's why your hand is up it is thank you I will say one of the frustrations for the economists is that we've not been able to provide incentives for participation which is like that's what science says you should do for some of these things and it really it makes our response rates lower it makes the survey more costly it seems like a you know unnecessary self-inflicted you know thing I would like to kick it over to to Matt Matt's got the crew survey in the field and he may have some some thoughts to Matt Cutler might have some good thoughts to share on this too sure thing thanks Min Yang yeah just quickly the crew survey generally makes it through the PRA process although we get some pushback sometimes on the types of questions we're asking and why they need to be asked but this makes me think about a social capital community social capital survey I was trying to field a few years back and you know social capital being a a key dimension in terms of vulnerability for underserved you know populations and wasn't able to field it and in one of my calls with the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs folks the question was raised you know kind of why why does no fisheries need to collect this information why couldn't this be collected by another another agency or or an external group you know university research outfit or something like that and I didn't have a great answer at the time but I think you know that's something to reflect on it's it's I'm not saying that I necessarily agree I just I think that's a question that that gets posed to us when we put up for information collection request is you know justify why no fisheries needs this information and I think it's clear now I mean at the time we weren't as heavily involved in equity and environmental justice sort of strategies as we are now given the executive orders but you know I think that um yeah yeah if I were to resubmit that I'd have a better answer for them but um that that's one of those questions that comes up thank you Matthew McPherson were you hand raised in a similar response? well I wanted to comment on a number of different things I'm not sure if this is the time if it was in response to Jim's question please go ahead if not I'll go there are others the specific question was about OMB and and PRA yeah yeah yeah so my my comment there is you know it's it is possible to get approval to you know use incentives we are um providing incentives for example for the focus groups for EEJ we are um it does look like we're going we were approved to provide incentives for a survey that we're implementing on recreational fisheries um so if you have enough time you can get things through PRA the issue with PRA is it makes it extremely it's a very extremely slow long and tedious bureaucratic process to get approval for any kind of sociocultural data collection and just an example of that is that we get hit with disasters and we're mandated to do um you know disaster assessments within a short period of time the laws changed a little bit so that might not be quite as relevant as it was before but there was no way to get any sort of rapid PRA approval to do you know surveys to be able to assess you know what economic damages were and things like that it easily takes a year or more to get any sort of approval to do any kind of a of a survey so you know you can hammer your way through it and keep going back and forth and waiting and so forth and eventually it shows up but it just makes it really difficult to the I think you know the the current EEJ situation is also an example of that where I mean it became a priority it would be great to be able to get some surveys out in the field but to get that through PRA you know could take us you know it's it's it's been a huge battle even to be able to do focus groups let alone put together some sort of a quantitative survey and get that approved so that's been the experience you know that we've had with dealing with OMB and PRA all right thank you very much I'm going to turn back to members of the committee Matt you were next in the queue yeah thanks I actually had a my my question was similar in vain to Jim's and I guess I'm just trying to update it here now that I've heard some responses but I guess I'm wondering to what extent could NOAA and their data collection efforts be linked to other data collection efforts by other agencies like census BLS IRS and so forth so it wouldn't be NOAA collecting that information directly but at least being able to link it to other collection efforts and I guess that's a question to anyone who can speak to that Michael Michael Travis was that in response yes so I'm going to preface my response by saying I am speaking on my own behalf and my response may not sit too well with some of my colleagues that I'm going to say it anyway so here's the issue that that idea has been in the works for at least a couple of years now and I understand it conceptually in practical terms for those of us who for many years have attempted to merge datasets in one way or another particularly multiple datasets over a period of time and it gets and that's just within the agency it's difficult it's very difficult to merge different datasets collected by different parts of the agency different offices different management structures that the whole thing when you start talking about datasets across agencies uh that to me is not a winning proposition um it is it is going to be very difficult to merge or an example demographic data because demographic data is at the individual level right so you're trying to merge information about individuals across multiple datasets across multiple agencies in order to do that you have to have a way to do the linking the best choice the the best unique identifier for you know individuals is going to be a social security number but social security numbers are PII that it's probably the most sensitive piece of information whether it's us or census or whoever that we collect and not every NIMS office actually collect social security numbers on their permit holders so I understand that there are projects that are trying to look at this I personally am not having high hopes that it will be successful but again just my opinion and I'm sure others will disagree so they can speak to their view thank you Michael Clifford Hutt was your hand up in response to this um hi yes this is Clifford Hutt with uh Noah Fisheries Office of Sustainable Fisheries so one thing I wanted to bring up and it was kind of related to this as well some of the other things we were discussing earlier a lot of these issues aren't just associated with PRA but they are associated with the Privacy Act which OMB is keeping close in mind to their PRA approval process now much more now than they had in the past and most of these questions of demographics and all are kind of protected under Privacy Act and there's specific language in that Act that basically says all these collections are voluntary unless they may may be listed as mandatory if the person is required by law to provide the data and the person is subject to a penalty for refusing and we've got a lot of language and magnets and about requirements for providing fishery specific data but nothing specifically to demographics so I think that's kind of the issue there so that's just one thing to keep in mind and you know there's a lot of regarding this question of data sharing there's a lot in the Privacy Act about sharing of this kind of data in between agencies or outside of the federal government and so there's just a lot of layers of approval that have to go on to just make getting that information difficult I also want to mention something about incentives that's something that we have been looking into for because of recent rulemaking and we've gotten a lot of feedback from on that from our general council basically the thing is is they have to be fairly small you know it's difficult to get approval for providing incentives of significant amounts especially if you're proposing to do things like random drawings to determine who gets it because that's too similar to a lottery which the federal government is not allowed to do but one case where they were improved and one of our approved for one of our economic data collections with the was out of the Southwest Fishery Science Center they eventually got approval to provide literally two dollars in cash in every envelope for their economic survey that went out because they did a series of pilot studies that took a couple of years to complete that basically demonstrated that it was cheaper to conduct the survey if they stuck two dollars in every envelope because it increased the response rate that much versus just sending out envelopes with no cash but that's what they had to do to get approval and that it took it took a couple of extra years to the PRA process to get that approval so yeah and that wouldn't even get your cup of coffee at Starbucks anymore Lisa first of all Cliff thanks very much for your comments Lisa you were up next yeah I'm gonna change gears a little bit and I'll just preface this by saying that I'm a social scientist sympathetic to qualitative methods so both of you talked about the oral histories it sounded to me I don't want to read too much into it with some regret that it's not going to be funded any further there's the focus group process going on and particularly Min Yang you talked about the difficulties of using qualitative data and integrating it into the management process and I guess I would love to hear more about what how those particular types of data collection efforts that look quite different than the other ones how they get started what people see the value of or how the value is conceptualized from the get-go what is the purpose of them when they start if there is this sense that is there an ambition to influence management or are they seen as different things I guess I'm just getting wanting to elaborate a little bit more on like what's the logic of them in the first place are there ambitions to influence management yeah not well articulated but I think you know what I mean let's go first to Michael Travis seeing you were the first one to bring the Noah Voices project up and ambition in that data collection series to feed into to management or a broader goal of simply describing the state of affairs so again since I am not one of the people who write social impact assessments I'm going to defer to Christina and or Ed if they would like to speak to this issue yeah sorry Christina go ahead I mean I think we can definitely use you know the oral histories that we've collected to inform like our understanding of fishing practices things like how recreational fishing is done day trips things like that as well as I mean Matt mentioned you know the red tide interviews specifically and that feeding into management but I don't know if Ed wants to expand on that or even Patricia Pinto de Silva if you're on here too Patricia I'll invite you to respond Patricia you're on mute still thank you thank you I'm happy to talk a little bit about how oral history serves the fisheries management process as it relates to equity and environmental justice and I think you know a lot of people have said that there's a lack of data which there is there's also a lack of training and understanding so some things aren't just like oh I can create a graph out of this and pull it into a social impact assessment part of it is capacity building our offices are in places that aren't co-located with underrepresented communities the individuals that we are we're not necessarily in the field we don't know people we're not asking questions we're not at the kitchen tables this is an opportunity from anybody from a brand new person walking into their new job at NOAA fisheries to our AA to listen learn and reflect just and raise awareness of who are our stakeholders what are the realities how might they be impacted by changes in management decisions so it's not just about like how can we package this and then put it in to serve decision making it's more how can we learn from this to make better decisions and then we can also use it to write better impact assessments if we're only reliant on counting the number of things it's like you know having a library but not being able to read the books these are the books these are very intimate descriptions of let's say a processing worker in new bedford what their life is like not necessarily talking about impact assessments but then you can look at what's about to change in the pathway of their work and have a much better sense of how that person's life might be impacted you understand their you know ability to speak english you understand their background religion culture values etc in a way that we just can't get from the other types of information that we have thank you patricia that was a very helpful answer lisa follow up or visit your hand then steven you're next on my list of speakers steven skyfus thank you so I have two questions one was motivated by min yang's presentation and really what I'm curious about builds upon the the question that lisa just asked and and some of the responses but we've heard a lot of terms around port or community or place-based elements and I was curious you know generally how some of the various datasets that have been mentioned like the noa social indicators that are very spatially explicit might interplay with some of the the more survey or permit application type information collected so if you're collecting information on you know principle port or landing support if you could just talk a little bit about how those data may ever be described spatially or any challenges you know that you run into with saying something about a particular place from both you know the large-scale social indicators that were made for that type of scale versus some of the other datasets that that you guys are collecting directly through permits or forms or surveys yeah so our logbook data contains where where where fish were landed our dealer data contains where both where fish were landed and where the dealers are located our operator permits I believe have a mailing address so all these things can be used to attribute fishing activity stuff to a geography on land I know we talked about mailing the panel has heard about the mailing addresses versus you know home addresses issue so that certainly is one right not every mailing address is a home address and so that's that's kind of the state of play one of the one of the frustrations or the one of the difficulties is that we've historically collected you know port information is kind of like write down what you want and in New England there are lots of names for various little geographies so someone just to give a case in point might write down Woods Hole which is kind of in the same town as Falmouth they might also write down I don't know McGeants at Harbor or something like that and these are all kind of within a couple couple miles of each other and so figuring out what is a how to define the place on land has always been a little challenging we also have fishing location information so we can talk about communities at sea Kevin St. Martin has done some incredible work in that in that front I think that's how we are for or where we are in terms of geographies Stephen follow up if if I could I was going to ask a second different question I didn't know if any of the southeast folks hands were up to respond to that first one Matthew McPherson was that in response yes so we have a I think you know Minyan covered it pretty well but we have you know vessel monitoring system information at least for the Gulf of Mexico our spatial information isn't nearly as good for the South Atlantic or Caribbean regions but for the Gulf of Mexico we can connect you know fishing locations to specific communities and right now we are in the process of doing that we're doing you know working on kind of a communities at sea you know process and we're we're definitely trying to link up the social indicators you know at the community level with actual you know fishing activities in areas you know at sea in the Gulf and we're gonna do our best and the other in the other regions thank you Michael Travis was your hand up in response to Stephen's original question now it was actually in response to an earlier question is it okay if I respond to that previous question sure so and I and I honestly I apologize I don't recall who raised this issue but but someone asked about basically is there a repository of some sort where all this information that Min Yang and I and others have been talking about can be found and stored so it's not you know haphazard is the only word that comes to mind where you know little bit of information here a little bit there a little bit there a little bit there and then it's just this huge process of trying to pull it all together and you know one at least in theory place where that could be done is in safe reports on you know safe reports are intended to be a repository for all sorts of information whether it's social economic biological but then again in theory could be used when we are pulling together our management documents and I can't speak for the northeast I don't know what the northeast is currently doing or what it did in the past we used to do safe reports in the southeast many years ago I bet it's been at least 15 years since we did a safe report and again this is this is an issue of staffing and resources where safe reports particularly when you need to do them for every fishery across three councils is a huge undertaking and you know the decision has been made that we just we don't have the resources to pull safe reports together on a regular ongoing basis it's unfortunate but that is the situation as it stands right now I will mention the South Atlantic Council is interested in starting them back up but whether the council is in the best position to be pulling lots of information from lots of sources together for that purpose I question that somewhat since MIMS we're the collectors and managers of the data so we'll see how it goes but they're going to take a stand at it thank you Michael Steven that you had a second question I will hold my second question to pass to other committee members thank you thank you Steven Rachel you're next yeah thanks to you both and everyone on the call for walking us through so much valuable information Michael I thought I heard you say in your present I wanted to kind of tease apart the difference here and get your respective reflections on the difference between collecting information on permit applications or vessel based information and quota holders and I thought I heard Michael say that IFQ holders weren't covered by the permit application form so they were so you're kind of delving into that now and I wanted to get Min Yang's reflection on that well do you guys feel you have adequate data on quota holders and what does that data look like right now so I'll I'll jump in on that just to clarify a few points so it's a mixed bag with regard to our quota shareholders for those shareholders who still have permits they are covered by our data collection on the permit application forms but over the years because of various regulatory changes that have been made you can now be a shareholder in our IFQ programs but not actually be a fisherman so you don't you know you don't have to fish anymore which means you don't need a fishing permit and so that that the percentage of shareholders that do not have permits has increased over time and so that's when we realize we now have this much bigger hole in our data with regard to are these shareholders who are not permit holders you know what are their demographics are they small businesses and as I mentioned we wanted to add those questions to the shareholder account application form and we got denied so it's still we have demographic information small business data on the shareholders who are also permit holders we do not have it at all for the shareholders who do not have permits so it's that's not a a good situation and as a quick follow-up to that Michael do you know which do you know the percentage of photo holders that don't have permits like is that is that a known I'm gonna I'm gonna try this off the top of my head and Christina if you remember better than I do but I want to say it's about a third so it's about two to one I think about two-thirds still have a permit or somehow associate with the permit and about a third are not but of course it's not so much I mean yes the proportions are important but there's no way for us to say at least I haven't been able to come up with one you know how applicable you know let me put a different way how different the shareholders without permits are in terms of demographics from the shareholders who do have permits they could be very different in terms of their demographics but there's just no way to know that at this point so I have not been willing to apply any of the information that we collected on those who are permit holders to those who are not I just I don't think there's a basis for doing that thank you Michael I'm gonna go to Kaelin next great so my question relates back to the OMB process and I'm thinking back to the presentations and I'm pretty sure that there was a point made that the southeast survey was of crew was based on the northeast version of the crew survey and generally here I think something we're wrestling with is more of a place-based process something that is specific to the fisheries that or the participants that may be being surveyed but then I'm wondering if there's a trade-off and if that trade-off is with the speed of OMB so I'm wondering if folks on the call can talk a little bit I saw there was a comment in the chat that I thought was really interesting that there was a generic clearance process and folks thought that made things go faster and so if maybe people could comment a little bit on whether they think there would be utility to developing more generalized sort of set of questions that could be asked across different regions and if that's underway or not Matthew was your hand up in response yes so the question the answer to that question is yes that that's exactly what we've done the southeast crew survey was inspired by the northeast survey we've matched up the questions of course there are some there are some differences you know and you know that require that we ask certain questions differently in the different regions but for the most part there we combined efforts in terms of putting together a PRA renewal package and so the surveys that cover the you know the east coast as well as all the south Atlantic are all under one you know PRA clearance and there are a set of questions that you can select from you know in order to put together you know your survey for you know a crew survey basically at least for our different regions so you know we did that both because we want to have a common set of metrics that covers you know this whole large area of the United States to be able to compare and understand you know how crew you know are similar and different in different areas and we also did that strategically to expedite the PRA process Danica Kleiber was your hand up in response to this question yes good morning from Honolulu you should also related to that question in particular there's also an attempt with NOS so this is a a NOAA level attempt to create a wider question bank it's ongoing it's been taking several years but there is an attempt to get some of these basic questions as a as a whole package thank you Danica Kevin follow up yeah I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the stage of that work and if if that's something that we could get a presentation about or if there's any sort of written documentation of what that list of questions might be as of today sure so Daniel Shortsman of NOS one of their head economists would be the one to ask she's been leading this effort it does include demographic questions because I wrote them it also includes sociocultural questions and in particular there was a section on EEJ because we knew this was coming down because it's NOS there's a lot of questions related to access to beaches etc but there are fisheries related questions as well so Daniel Shortsman would be the one to contact and Danica can I just confirm that was Daniel Shorts Shortsman Shortsman thank you very much Matt Matt Reimer yeah so I've got a question that's probably not likely easy to answer but it's been highlighted in it was highlighted in both Minyang's and Michael's presentation and it's a challenge that as a committee we've been grappling with and it's with respect to the fact that all data collection efforts right now are based on people or individuals or communities that are currently engaged in fisheries and when it comes to equity one thing that we're usually thinking about is opportunities to participate in fisheries or particularly issues with respect to access and so what that means is that we're missing out on would-be individuals or communities who would be participating in some counterfactual world and so I guess I'm wondering how you guys think about that in terms of the scope of people impacted or could be beneficiaries to fisheries when thinking about your EEJ strategies and you thought it was appropriate to say might be difficult to run I think people are shooting to leave that hot potato but it has been a question we've really struggled with and it's a question of how it fits into our charge if at all and we recognize this is one of the most challenging parts of the charge that we have is what would fisheries look like through a more holistic equity lens if we were starting with a blank canvas rather than the canvas that we have all right so now we've got some responses time to think hearing new voices Edward Glazier first Hi folks can you hear me and see me yes we can okay okay yeah that's a great question and it was philosophically difficult one but I and I think it is an empty slate at the moment empirically but we're just kicking off these EEJ focus groups and some related conversations with folks underserved populations so I think we may have something to say there eventually that literally we're just getting off the ground I've got to do some interviews in the next couple weeks and I think we could touch upon that in some of the conversations these are open-ended conversations associated with focus so is that in a specific specific region or targeting specific fisheries right we're getting ready to do some more in rural North Carolina so we're having a little bit of a challenge identifying participants but and getting them to agree to come to distant meetings but I think we're going to succeed to some extent and that that issue would certainly be a useful one to pursue thank you very much thank you Matt Cutler and then Christina Package will Matt sure thank you yeah just to the question of opportunities so there's a couple of ways to answer it so one would be in the equity environmental justice national strategy we definitely outline this as a goal to sort of widen the net and find out who we've been trying to sort of answer the question of the unknown unknown like who we've been missing in our data collections and this might help speak to if we can actually address that and and actually implement that with some projects that can get out in the field and and actually find folks who who either lack opportunities or are connected to folks who might lack opportunities that would that would be one way to try to begin to answer that but then also I wanted to mention that in my sort of ongoing travels for the current crew survey that I'm fielding in the northeast region I've spoken to a number of crew who have mentioned it's a common sort of refrain when we have a question regarding whether or not crew would advise young folks to get into fishing and whether they would do it if they had their life to live over again and and they say you know I don't know I don't know that I could I don't know that anyone young or or new to the industry could even conceive of getting into it because you either have to know you have to be well connected or you have to have tons of financial capital to to to begin to you know buy a vessel and and get permits and and get invested in the fishery so they feel as though opportunities are just you know off the table for a new quote-unquote generation of of fishers and that's something I hear all the time Thank you Matt Christina I was just going to mention that in addition to the EEJ focus groups that we're doing in the southeast we're also doing a series I think of eight IFQ focused focus groups and these are looking at creating a tool I guess that would provide access to purchase shares and allocations to some sort of marketplace tools so that is specifically looking at access but it is the focus group members will include folks that are already involved in the IFQ process but the idea is to give them better access to purchasing shares and allocation Thank you Christina Matt does that give you enough to be going on with or do you want to That's good Jim wanted to follow Jim Yeah thanks I appreciate the unknown unknown comment I think that makes it every single meeting I've attended in Washington DC over the last 15 years or 20 years since Rumsfield said it but what about the the known unknowns a lot of these IFQ catch share programs for example exclude individuals early on like the ground fish snapper in the southeast or the Gulf there was a lot of vessels that removed from the fishery prior to the catch share allocation has anybody done studies to understand how what happened to those individuals that were not part of the catch share but were actually operating in the fisheries prior there were more small scale operators of course but do you guys have some examples of that maybe in either your regions Minyang Yeah so for the IFQ scalp fishery as part of the five-year review there was some detailed analysis of folks who did not qualify for IFQ scallops so we looked at what vessels and firms were doing you know what were they fishing for and that kind of activity but that was on the the firm level and did not go down to the people level anyone else have questions Rashid welcome yeah there's so many of them right yeah I have to learn and yeah yeah thank you for giving me the flow and sorry I had to get got here late I mean I was supposed to be in DC yesterday and flight problems so at least I'm here yeah and when I came in I was a lot of talking about the obstacles and the barriers you know what I did this privacy issues the one we're talking about the O and B and I was sitting and thinking my god how do we I guess the committee will have to really struggle with how to tackle some of these obstacles but I thought you guys have been thinking and working with this forever right for a long time so what are your ideas of the going through all these barriers you know the silos the privacy issues and all that any any ideas you can share with us on your thoughts on how to deal with this you know difficult Patricia hi great question Rashid and I think I'm also speaking to the question that came just before about blank slate and opportunities and possibilities and I would just encourage the committee to think about whether or not the current council system is a system that is a just system that is focusing on the distributional benefits of fisheries to society the definition of national standard one optimum yield is the benefits to society in terms of food production and recreational opportunities we've been focusing here a lot on the underrepresented communities that are engaged in the supply chain process but not the but that don't really participate and we don't have enough information on but there's also those benefits and who's not benefiting where we have so much of our fish being landed and turned into exports immediately it raises to question who is not benefiting from this extraordinarily unique and nutritionally rich food source that we are giving away you're not giving away we're selling but it raises equity questions that I'm not hearing being considered here about food deserts food sovereignty food security access to fresh fish and the choices that we make as a society more specifically as a regional council in how our fish is used and I think that a lot of people people on this call might say well the council doesn't decide that but they do make decisions that impact what fish can be used for once it's landed it impacts the shape and form distribution of where it's landed and how it can be used so if I were to had a blank slate I would think about the ship that we're on and think about how we might be able to redesign the ship in a way that is more equitable and more likely to achieve those national standard one benefits that we want Thank you I just want to take a moment I thought maybe there was going to be a little bit of a gap while people were determining whether or not they wanted to respond to that last question I wanted to just remind folks that you know we do have this discussion session we will also have another one after we hear from some more of the science centers so I I first want to thank the folks that have joined us this morning particularly those that presented and also those that have clearly joined us from further west as well I know for some of you this is exceptionally early in the morning and I want to just you know send my appreciation for you all being on the line and also ask that you all give some thought to some of these questions that are being asked now because they will likely be raised again in our later discussion session with some of the other presenters so I just wanted to sort of remind folks that there is that opportunity to to resurrect some of these discussions later on our agenda as well and also thank the folks that I see following along with us from from pretty far out west given the time difference so I won't keep us we've got a a few more hands raised and I know that we are getting up against our agenda time so I will turn it back to you Tom yeah thanks I'm not sure if this is a an obnoxious question or not so I apologize in advance but you know hearing the very real barriers to collecting this type of data at the federal level is there any opportunity or has that has this already been explored to leverage or partner with state departments like state collected data I'm thinking like workforce development type data is that I hear the concerns around trying to merge these federal datasets but has that been explored at all or is there any opportunity within your regions to kind of push on that Clifford your hand was up remarkably fast as Rachel asked that question so I'll I'll go over to you there is a lot of sensitivities about PRA and working with folks that the PRA doesn't apply to you know it's a federal statute it does not apply to state agencies but we could certainly use the data they get but the issue comes in when we start talking with them and making suggestions about what to collect like commonly with academic researchers if we put out an RFP and say we're looking for proposals on subjects A, B, and C and someone submits a proposal to do a study and as part of that study they propose conducting a survey and we didn't specifically say we need you to conduct a survey in the RFP but that was their proposal that survey doesn't need PRA approval if we fund it so long as we don't then go in there in the contract and stipulate that this survey must X, Y, and Z and give them too much input you know we just kind of have to let them do their thing and it doesn't have to worry about PRA but if we try to put out an RFP where we specifically say we need you to conduct a survey and it needs to collect this kind of data well now that survey needs to be PRA approved so there's just all kinds of legal sensitivities with that and depending on what lawyer you talk to they may tell you even if you fund say one of those proposals where it was the researcher's idea they may tell you if you want to avoid PRA then you can't even talk to them about what they're going to ask they have to just do it completely independently but you get different level of advice on that it gets to be a bit of a gray area but one thing I put in the comments if you're really interested in getting into PRA difficulties and where a lot of the bottlenecks are Adrienne Thomas is the NOAA PRA coordinator so she sees all the PRA difficulties we have and she's the one who's always interacting with OMB coordinating with them on all these she could be a wealth of knowledge for those questions although she might be very sensitive about how she answers certain things but she sees kind of really all the issues that are where we're having snags with PRA at the agency because they all go through her every one of them Thank you Clifford and I'll give the last question to Kaelin Yeah I wasn't sure what we're putting in the chat versus asking out loud and I appreciated Patricia's point is she did she drop off though is she still there well so my more general question was about the broader sort of flow of benefits that Patricia raised and I just wanted to follow up and ask her if there were particular papers or other types of written products where she feels like that type of consideration has been done because that's something that we're thinking about what are the different potential categories of beneficiaries and potential flows of benefits from fisheries so for her or anyone else on the call if if there are particular references that would be helpful for us to have a look at Fortunately I don't see her on the call yeah Michael your hand is up is it in response to Rachel's question because I'm sorry come up that time Yeah that that is correct and Rachel I I wanted to clarify exactly what you were asking it sounded like you were you were wondering if there is state collected and managed data that we can make use of that maybe we aren't making use of at this time but I wasn't quite sure what what kind of data you were thinking about but I'll make a few general comments about state data because we have a very different situation particularly between the east coast and the Gulf of Mexico so there are cooperative data sharing agreements between the agency and the states on the east coast we do get a fair amount of data collected from the states or managed by the states when it comes to you know trip tickets you know which is your basic landings and revenue data and some effort information we get individual fishermen licensed data we can get boat registration data and all that can generally be obtained via ACCSP which is the Atlantic Coastal Cooperative Statistics Program in the Gulf it's not that simple the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission although they do hold state triptica data they do not maintain fishermen licensed data from the states they do not maintain boat registration data from the states it's just not the same kind of expansive data repository as what we have on the east coast and I know from personal experience it is you know you talk about OMB and the PRA clearance process you know going to each of the individual states in the Gulf to ask for data that they don't share as a matter of due course is another lengthy and difficult process and I mean I'm not aware of them collecting anything like demographic information and I think if we were to go beyond the state fisheries agencies I doubt if we'd get anywhere with other state agencies it's hard enough pure procuring just basic information from the state fisheries agencies and some of them have reported to me that they have difficulty getting you know information they want from their fellow you know other state agencies so I think I understand your point conceptually but again it just sounds like a very laborious process because the data sharing infrastructure is really not there particularly in the Gulf hopefully that addresses your question all right well I'm going to draw a line under this morning's discussions I want to thank all who participated remotely on Zoom for a very full and candid discussion I want to thank the committee members for their insightful questions we're going to break for lunch we will be back at one o'clock in this room with presentations from Dale Squires from the Southwest Fisheries Science Center and Lee Fanderson from the Northwest just been hospital from Pacific Islands and Brian Garber Jons from Alaska so we have a full afternoon starting again at one o'clock the Zoom link is available on the National Academy's website for this committee and I again want to thank all of you for your participation today if anything springs to mind please don't hesitate to contact Stacey the program director who will serve as the conduit to getting information to the committee members themselves so thank you all very much and we'll adjourn for lunch thank you and this is Tom Miller chair of the committee we've got about a minute to go to a one o'clock start if anyone needs to test their audio particularly if any of the presenters want to do an audio check before we start this would be a good time to do it Aloha this is Justin Hospital can you hear me okay thank you Justin yes we can it's all wonderful thank you hello Brian Garber Jons here can you hear me thank you Brian we can hear you as well thank you all right good afternoon ladies and gentlemen it is one o'clock my name is Tom Miller I am chair of the Academy's consensus study on assessing equity in the distribution the fishery management benefits this is our fifth meeting as a committee although our first one in person we are going to start the session by just going around the committee members and allowing each to give a brief introduction and then we have four presentations this afternoon between one o'clock and 305 we will build a break into the schedule before the panel discussion at 305 and then we'll come back for the last sort of 45 minutes or so for this broader panel discussion so thank you all for joining us starting the introductions with myself my name is Tom Miller I'm a professor at the University of Maryland's Center for Environmental Science Chesapeake Biological Lab we're going to need a shorter name at some point than that I'm a fishery scientist by training I serve on the Mid-Atlantic Council's Scientific and Statistical Committee and I'm also a member of the Ocean Studies Board Caitlin great thanks Tom I am an assistant professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at Arizona State University I'm in the school sustainability and I'm also on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council's Scientific and Statistical Committee and I so sorry I left I didn't do my video but I can see everyone on the big Rashid you next please same thing no no video yet so I'm Rashid Sumaila professor at the University of British Columbia jointly appointed at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and I'm an economist by training but this is I call myself an interdisciplinary oceans and fisheries economist yeah just to to to show that I enjoy working in groups like this where many of us come together pull our minds together to try to solve a fisheries problem thank you thank you Rashid Jim St. Kierco Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California Davis and a member of the Ocean Studies Board Steven Hi I'm Steven Cypers I'm an associate professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences and Sociology at the University of South Alabama and I'm on the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council's SSC Rachel Good afternoon Rachel Donker My background's in Cultural Anthropology and I work and live in Alaska in the North Pacific Thank you Rachel Lisa Yeah good afternoon I'm Lisa Campbell I'm a social scientist and a professor at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, North Carolina and I'm also a member of the Ocean Studies Board We're on Yeah greetings everyone Grant Murray also at the Duke University Marine Lab on the marine social scientist with training in Anthropology and Sociology Matt Good afternoon Matt Reimer at University of California Davis in the Department of Agricultural Resource Economics also a member of the Scientific and Statistical Committee for the Pacific Council Thank you Matt Stacey Thank you Stacey Karris I'm a senior program officer with the Ocean Studies Board and staff with the National Academies and the study director for this committee Thank you Stacey Leigh Ann Hi my name is Leigh Ann I'm an associate program officer with the Ocean Studies Board and the National Academies and helping with the study Thank you Leigh Ann Eric Thank you very much So as I said we are welcoming a number of people from different science centers around the nation to talk to the committee we've given them five sort of guiding questions that hopefully help them structure the kind of information we were looking for We heard from Michael Travis at the southeast center this morning Min Yang Li from the northeast center we will hear from the other science centers this afternoon and we're going to start in the southwest with Dale Squires Dale Tom I'm not seeing Dale on the line just yet we've sent him an email to see if he's having any difficulty joining Okay We see leaf is on let's give Dale just a minute or two and if not we'll change the order around so we don't lose too much time I will say while we're waiting for those on the Zoom audience if you wish to respond to comment or a question from someone on the committee please use the raise hand feature which on Zoom you can find under the reactions tab feel free also to use the chat function the meeting is being recorded and so your chats will be recorded as well it's sometimes helpful if there are particular reports or particular people you think the committee should talk to to have details of those in the chat so that we don't misspell someone's name or get the report wrong so feel free please to use those features of Zoom as well and while we're waiting for Dale to try and join in summary of this morning's sessions we heard a lot about the challenges of collecting socio-ecological and economic data related both to the practical difficulties related perhaps to the paperwork reduction act on privacy act but also the sort of scientific challenges of designing surveys and collecting information particularly of those who have not traditionally been involved in the fishery management process questions of how do you identify such potential participants how how do you build trust with those communities to gain the kind of information that the agency would need to make an assessment of the extent to which the distribution of fisheries management benefits is equitable so Stacy I'm going to suggest given that we're eight minutes past that we shift on and move to the second person on our agenda if that's okay with you yeah I think that would be greatly if you're ready and available to go ahead we'll put you now and then we'll have Dale next if we're able to give them on the so then now first agenda is leaf Anderson from the Northwest Fisheries Science Center leaf if you could give us your presentation I would appreciate it thank you very much yes absolutely can everyone hear me yes we can okay and your presentation is up but it is not there it is it's now in false screen mode thank you very much yes excellent thank you so let me preface this by saying that I am one of the two social science leads at the center unfortunately Dan Holland could not make it and I've also been in this position leading our group for a relatively short amount of time so if we have in-depth questions on some of the data collections or issues I might have to admittedly follow up with you all later so my first thought here is that I did have an initial question about the study baseline or one might refer to as a counterfactual so two of the four sort of aims here very specifically call out the benefits of fishery management rather than perhaps the benefits of fishing under current fishery management and I and maybe it's a semantic question and maybe not important for the purposes of this discussion here but I did want to acknowledge that there's a difference between those two framings and I and it wasn't exactly certain which of the two we were supposed to take but I think we're leaning more on the benefits of fishing under current fishery management but I guess it depends on me the particulars of the questions being asked so I will say leaf that the committee has struggled with duality as well so we will be interested in answers however you've decided to respond to it thank you understood okay so the and I was going to take the the approach I think that the southeast took and it's a pretty direct question and answer from the from the question prompts that were that were raised so the the first question was what initiatives if any related to news socioeconomic my emphasis there data collection had been undertaking within your region and there are there are none specific to equity and there are also no new data collections that also haven't been fielded before so the the latest data collections that we are administering right now are new iterations perhaps but there's a service that have already been fielded so the first of those that seems to have some potential relevance to this conversation it's called the quota share owner survey so this is a survey of all quota share owners within the ket share ground fish fishery and relative to some conversations and questions that were raised earlier it does get at inactive in other words quota holders who are not actively fishing their quota quota owners and then the other of these two data collections that's just being fielded I believe it went out in June was the west coast fisheries participation survey and this is a fishery of sort of excuse me a survey of permit holders that ask questions like self-reported incomes membership and ownership communities perceptions like impact of fishery management interventions and representation in the fishery management process and and that one is just being again that's been fielded twice in the past and it's just being fielded the third iteration right now what issues or lessons have we experienced with these current initiatives so one of those and I'm going to expand a bit here in the answer beyond just those two data collections that I just referred to but one of the big ones is that we don't have a sample frame for anything other than firm vessel or permit owners on the commercial side on the recreational side we have no license holders licensed anglers and also vessel and permit owners on the charter side but importantly we're missing groups like vessel crew or processing crew so we don't have a sample frame with which we can use to to collect information on those groups so we'd be much more rely on things like snowball sampling approaches it's et cetera and for the current data collections all current data collections the unit of observation is the vessel or the permit owner so we don't have any information on any new information relatively new information on crew whether that's on the the charter side or the the commercial side and I think that to me at least that precludes somewhat of a more meaningful assessment of the distribution benefits across demographics and so for most of our surveys we just collect very little demographic information continuing this theme we don't have this was also a theme that I heard in some other groups presentations we don't have dedicated funding for many of these data collections we do have a general pot of funds from that we get from headquarters to do cost earning surveys of either voluntary or or sorry of the open access survey or the fixed gear survey and on the west coast we don't have dedicated funding streams for the charter survey we don't have any dedicated funding for what we would like to do a crew survey we do have dedicated funding for the catch share cost and earning survey as well we refer to that as the economic data collection but again from from most of these we don't have dedicated funding one other issue that I think should probably be brought up is for the recreational fish surveys that we have conducted we have not provided any translation and so we we know directly that we're excluding some groups right off the bat and that would be also likely to be an issue on any crew studies that we that we'd want to conduct next question was whether any data collection efforts that have been tried but failed and I guess the direct answer is no but and the but is there is some concern that we just would not get approval I mean this has been a theme you've heard throughout the day so far but just getting approval through OMB particularly with related to some of these demographic type add-on questions the feeling is that some of those just won't get approved in on earlier studies on the recreational anglers we've also had some pushback on adding more more demographic information on to those and even um early on many years ago we had some pushback on offering translation which I thought was puzzling and then the biggest one here is if if funding and staff constraints qualifies a cause of potential failure then then we have failed because we've been very interested in doing a survey of vessel and processing crew but we just haven't had the funding and staff to to finish that the next question was are the groups of people you think are not being considered but should be and the biggest one here is crew members and processing workers we are very much excluding them from consideration here also related industry participants so whether it's vessel repair and maintenance net and gear suppliers we're just not we're not including them in our in our data collection efforts we do so within all of our studies we try to break things down by geographic area as small as as possible to provide information on particular ports and communities that might be really dependent on fishing and although we do try to provide that information inclusion can be complicated because of confidentiality reality confidentiality restrictions so if we have just a few like if we have one one processor in a port or community then we essentially can't provide information at that level and so that becomes challenging and then another group that I don't think we are including but we should be our subsistence subsistence users and the next question was asking for the type of socioeconomic data that the council is currently using in decision-making related to equity and so this is pretty generally revenue data from fish tickets are heavily used and again we try to break that up by region port gear and target target species group you know as long as confidentiality restrictions don't get in the way of providing that information cost and earnings surveys we conduct cost and earnings surveys of all of the commercial the federal commercial fisheries in our region the biggest of those would be the catch share fishery and so we've referred to that cost and earnings survey as the economic data collection it's a very generic term that's very specific has a very specific definition to us and then we conduct voluntary cost and earnings surveys of the open access survey the limited entry fixed gear survey and also a bit more irregularly the charter owner survey for for the on the recreational side that the the council also relies on our model economic impacts or contributions from the model known as IOPAC that our group produces the quota share owner survey that I mentioned and historical first fishery participation data have been used to just establish a baseline for dependence council also uses perception measures from that participation survey that I that I hinted at recreational kitchen effort are generally used on the rec side I guess as opposed to more measures like revenues or if we can measure profits and those are often aggregated by mode so to the level of charter versus private versus shore and and again we we try to break those out by geographic region if possible the other one we the other piece of information that the council is currently using here catcher or quota share ownership and then a little bit of quota share and quota pound trading information and that's so far that's been used to try to establish that the existing linkages and dependencies among different actors in the in this fishery are there types of data or analyses related to equity that council is requesting so community social vulnerability measures have been requested at the scale of port groups we don't have that information yet they have requested information on vessel and processing crew and they I guess I'll say here that the council is just beginning to develop an EEJ strategy and so far they haven't identified specific data needs at this time but likely that will need new information and one more thing to point out here is that likely this will require a more careful analysis of tribal benefits and needs I feel like our data collection and information on that side is is somewhat lacking but the last question here was are there other differences in data information needs for initially setting up a permit or allocation system versus monitoring changes in the fishery over time and in this one I wasn't exactly sure what this meant but in general our answer our groups answer was that permit systems tend to require data at the individual level whereas monitoring if we're talking about general changes in the fishery over time is usually conducted at higher levels of aggregation I'm not exactly certain that's what was being asked for there so might be a little bit off base but we can follow up and then I have some source slides here that were hidden in presentation modes that I can share that are basically just the sources of all those data the data collections that we conduct at the center so if anyone has more information we can I can offer those to dig into more more carefully but I did want to bring up one upcoming study that might be of interest so the ground fish cut share program when that was first established set aside 10% of quota for what was called adaptive management and so currently how that works is it's just being passed directly to existing quota owners but one of our economists at the center received some money to conduct a study to examine alternative uses of that 10% quota using more of an equity lens so what could be done with it and again I don't have results to share of that study but it will be kicked off in about two months so I just thought I would mention that and that is all that I had prepared thank you very much Leith I'm going to pause for questions for clarification from the committee let me just pull my zoom screen up so I can call on people Matt your hand is up yeah thanks I just wanted to follow up on that last point do you know what alternative uses are being considered for that set aside in the study it's probably still in the scoping phase of that study and so I think it's a really open question in particular if this group has ideas that they would want to share with us that would be useful to explore we would be very open to that so all ears Matt I'm going to ask a question as chair's priori GTIF you gave a list of types of socioeconomic data that are used in management and I wonder whether you could give some examples perhaps of a few of them of how those data are used are they background information to management or are management decisions or alternatives selected among based upon those data that's a great question as economists applying the information we'd like to assume that the information are being used in a way that might affect the actual management options that are chosen I don't know the extent to which that is actually true I mean I think that's it's somewhat of an open question we do provide you know for example revenue data profit type information related to different alternatives that are being being considered when the council does like the ground fish specifications process for example if the question was the extent to which those data actually influence the options that are chosen I don't I don't actually know that answer but we do provide we do provide information related to the competing alternatives great thank you very much Leif Jim I saw your hand up momentarily ago and it well it was your question so that was a great question I thought so as well but I was actually going to ask it with specifically to the Fisher participation survey because that seems outside of the traditional way that we would influence decisions with quote allocation so has that survey itself how does that feed into the council process I wish I had a more informed answer here Jim and that this is why I wish Dan was on the line with me today since that is that's you know his study among other collaborators and I don't know I guess maybe I'll honestly leave it there I think every any other answer that I would would add on top of it would be too much too much too much speculation I think on my behalf I know that it's provided I guess I know that it's provided the councils very aware of it all the staff the council are very aware of it the council economists are aware of this information um I don't know how it's been used to influence any particular management decision though I wish you had your hand up yeah so Dave thank you for the talk you mentioned that um many of your surveys almost all please correct me voluntary right voluntary surveys is that true and if that is true how comprehensive our voluntary surveys in your view yeah so the only I'll start with the only exception the only exception is what we refer to the economic data collection so the council mandated that all participants in the west coast ground fish catcher fishery have to fill out our economic data collection survey again this is only the vessel owners and the processors right so we don't get into the crew members at all but but those participants have to by by regulation fill out that survey the rest of those are very much voluntary surveys and we've we've generally had decent response rates I mean on that you know 40s and 50s percent of our participants who we try to we sample um well on sorry and that's on the commercial side but we we've also had what I think is this fantastic contractor that we work with and she's extremely personable she she'll she'll meet with individual participants take them out for coffee and get the information and so I think she's got sort of a unique take on what it takes to get people to respond to these types of surveys and and she's been fantastic um so I think we owe some of our potential success in the voluntary um response rates there to her and her approach um but but we're admittedly we're we're I mean with all voluntary surveys that don't achieve 100% response rate we're we're certainly missing some folks um and our best way to characterize those is based on you know existing information that we have on those potential non respondents and those data are pretty limited I mean we we know their vessel size for example we might know their revenues so we can we might know what other fisheries they've participated and we certainly don't know their demographics um or anything like that so so um I'm a bit curious was there any pushback from the quota people who where you have mandatory data collection was there any pushback or they just accepted it there I think there was pushback I wish I had a little bit more of a better historical perspective I wasn't involved in those council discussions um at the development of the program it was my like predecessor's predecessor and so I I have I've I've heard that yes there was pushback but um it was it was recognized that many of the objectives of the catch share program were economic in nature and to be able to characterize those and determine if you know the the program was meeting its aims then they just admitted that yes they would have to collect economic information um and didn't think that the voluntary approach was going to be um sufficient and and I guess I will say that there's been a little bit of pushback as you know we're now more than 10 years into this data collection and every now and then we do get pushback on do we still need these information do we still do we still need this and in general participants are still willing to provide us this this information and and see the benefit in it in fact industry participants are the big reason that we actually have that quota share owner survey they in in council discussions they made it apparent that they thought that some of the um we were missing some of the potential benefits and costs associated with the program and they wanted to be able to characterize the the quota share owners who were not active fishermen Rachel you have the next question yeah um thanks Leif is I just had a specific question about the historic fishery participation data is that captured at the community level or um vessel participation how's that we would have vessel level information there um and so it's it's it's a little bit of both I mean I think both have been used um so I guess it depends on the the question being asked but but we do have essentially um a way to track you know where their vessels are and have been participating in particular fisheries or not throughout the years and would it be the mailing address or the the home residence uh yes um what is in the permit database um that is a great question I don't actually I don't remember I I I don't know that I know there's some difficulty in assigning a geographic location a fishing location to those data um so it's it's probably exactly what you're hinting at with the question there we do know we we would be able to know where those that the vessel though landed um so we we would we do have that information through the pacfin database oh okay so it's the port yeah we would have information at least at the landings level of the port yeah okay gotcha thank you all right um Leif I think those are the questions for clarification we hope you'll be able to stay on for the panel discussion later on yes um thank you I don't yet see Dale we're communicating with him via email right now I think we should continue with the agenda um this point all right then um next on our list a little bit earlier than advertised is a presentation from the pacific islands fishery science center uh Justin hospital Justin yes let me get set up here can we see everything okay on my screen no I'm still seeing a black there we go now I see everything in glorious color thank you Justin all right hello hi everyone my name is Justin hospital I'm a supervisory economist with the pacific islands fishery science center Honolulu I lead our socioeconomics program at pips I've been with the center since 2006 I've led our research program for about eight years now and I really appreciate the opportunity from the committee to talk with you today about our region and our program I missed uh the earlier presentations I would say mine is a bit more of a narrative approach so I guess I'll thank you in advance for your patience so I would like to begin the talk with a few acknowledgments firstly I want to highlight our pips social science research team these are the stars of the show today these are the folks getting the work done pushing our science board and advancing new initiatives it's a really great team to work with I feel very privileged I'd also like to acknowledge upfront and the slides will go here yeah so I'd also like to acknowledge upfront that we really could not realize any success at all within our region without the support of key regional partners and collaborators these include our regional fishery managers western pacific fishery management council and the pacific islands regional office cooperative research institute academic partners local fishery management agencies across the region community and industry organizations as well as popular press social media and radio we're really fortunate to work in such a supportive region so before I get into our program I do want to set the stage with some quick regional context I know you've heard some of this before so hopefully it's not too much of an overlap but I wanted to spin the globe a bit orient us to the world from our perspective the pacific islands regional exclusive economic zone is approximately 2.2 million square miles just about half or just over half of the U.S. domestic EEZ we currently have four marine national monuments in our region covers about 53 percent of our regional EEZ most of this area but not all prohibits domestic commercial fishing in total 49 percent of our EEZ is closed to commercial fishing we have some proposals in the work that would raise this to about 61 percent and there's also additional areas outside of the monuments within the EEZ that are prohibit domestic long line fishing we're comprised of one state Hawaii two territories American Semoan Guam and one commonwealth the commonwealth of the northern mariana islands we have five pacific remote island areas and we share the region with 15 other island nations pacific rim countries you all know this region was settled by voyagers that relied on the ocean marine resources for their voyages in search of new lands for sustaining early island communities and fishing and seafood were and continue to be integral to local community ways of life in our region taking a closer look at our communities many islands in our region about 20 or so are populated I've got some population estimates here individual islands range from the islands of ofu and olosenga in American Samoa they each have a little bit less than 150 people ranging upwards to our lovely island of Oahu with over 950,000 people you know for utilize the NOAA climate and economic justice screening tool we find 14 and 16 percent of communities and I think this is at the census track geography in Hawaii and Guam respectively are considered underserved whereas over 70 percent of communities in the CNMI and 100 percent of communities in American Samoa are defined as as underserved communities and I'll note that the the NIMPS equity and environmental justice strategy has identified all US territories as priority underserved communities so unfortunately we have relatively high percentage of our communities living below the US poverty line between a quarter and a half in our territories and a disproportionate number of native Hawaiians at 20 percent 27 percent in the state of Hawaii in thinking about regional fisheries in blue font there Honolulu the number 10 ranked port in value fishery value for 2021 due to its high quality fresh fish market supplied by our msc certified tuna and swordfish long line fisheries and in American Samoa pongo pongo was number 16 ranked port in landings for 2021 which was down a bit from number seven in 2020 I think it's unique in pongo pongo it's home to the starkest tuna cannery the only US tuna cannery operation of about which I think 85 percent is supplied by US flag per se vessels and the msc certified American Samoa long line fishery cannery is the largest private employer in American Samoa about 15 percent of the total labor workforce it supplies nearly 400 million dollars in can tuna exports to the mainland US and another interesting benefit of the cannery is that given its scale of operations and monthly energy usage it's estimated that effectively subsidizes the utility cost of the island as much as 30 percent lastly in terms of political representation I just had some notes there we obviously have two representatives in the house for the state of Hawaii and obviously two senators but just worth noting that within our territory communities they are each represented by one non-voting delegate in the house of representatives across the pizzerian region we live and work in a social cultural and economically diverse region these colored circles I'm sorry if they're not great colors but they just represent the breakdowns for ethnicity across our major island areas outside of American Samoa which is predominantly Samoan most islands have a wide range of diverse languages culture traditions customs it's really an exciting and amazing region to live in and work okay so we're here talking about benefits of fish and fishing and so I just wanted to kind of go through a little bit of that Justin I'm sorry to interrupt you but your sound is coming in and out I don't know if you're a little bit further away from the microphone or there's some electronic issues behind it but if you could if you are a little bit further from the microphone if you could move closer we would appreciate it thank you for letting me know early and I will stand closer and talk more deliberate so the Magnus and Stevens Act recognizes the value here's a fish and it recognizes the value in terms of revenues or economic contribution or food or recreational experience however when we talk to island communities we hear a lot of different values and benefits for this fish prestige is one that comes up maybe this is a big fish a rare fish a seasonal fish we hear about tradition and knowledge you know we hear about cultural obligations you know many fishermen provide fish to the village chief or the wider village or community events elders in the community graduations weddings maybe this was just what was out on the water today there's likely plans to share this fish with the community and that speaks to tradition and culture you know local fresh fish is a is a healthy source of protein and the social cohesion around all of this supports community well-being and then in terms of sacrifice it costs a lot of money time and risk of health and safety to go out on the water and come back with fish we often talk about the uniqueness of our region but I think these diverse values and benefits hold in in some form everywhere across the venation and benefits and distribution of benefits we risk vastly underrepresented them without a proper accounting of all these diverse benefits okay so that's just a little background I would like to get into our our programs we have three broad flavors of socioeconomic data collections in our region they are all voluntary we conduct structured surveys in the form of continuous cost data collection programs episodic cost earning surveys we have non-commercial fishing expenditure surveys and we do some select knowledge attitudes and preference surveys we utilize secondary data sources contributing to the nymphs community social vulnerability indicators enterprise and we employ qualitative approaches such as semi-structured interviews or histories and then we we have a series of regional fishing directories that we use to better understand our fishing communities try to account for supporting industries and help to ensure our work is representative of those who may benefit from fishing this is simply an overview of the coverage of our cost data collection programs the solid darker colors reflect our ongoing trip cost data collection programs the point here is that I think we have relatively good coverage across all of our federally managed fisheries our continuous trip cost data collections cover fisheries responsible for about 90 percent of fishery revenues in the region and our cost earning surveys are every seven years or so subject to funding subject to OMB PRA clearance to conduct the surveys our cost earning surveys are rather in depth perhaps more than in other regions the focus and the primary motivation is clearly on fisheries economics operating costs fixed costs and levels of investment but we really design these to be integrated socioeconomic data collections that cover operational aspects of the fishery I mentioned economics but also touching on some of the social and cultural aspects important for our region including fisher demographics what people do with their catch classification attitudes and preferences we've made efforts to standardize questions over the years across fisheries to improve consistency and comparability over time and across the region we try to disaggregate our results to the extent that the data allows while maintaining confidentiality common categories that we present data by island by whether an individual sells fish or not various fisher motivations primary target fishing boat ownership vessel size ethnicity again wherever we can and we regularly try to present fisher demographics in the context of the general population with census data where available just to give a little sense of what our fishing communities look like relative to the general population so this slide I just wanted to touch on kind of three critical themes that are really relevant to considering the benefits of fisheries in our region that we regularly collect these data we document them with our cost turning survey for one it's the idea of fishing motivations outside of our regional long line fisheries the msa definitions of commercial and recreational fishing are problematic at best from the perspective of the fishing community and in terms of behavior so this is a recent survey of commercially licensed hawaii fishers that left our left frame and this is just their primary motivations for fishing and we found while they are commercially licensed only about 45 consider some form of commercial fishing either part-time or full-time as their primary motivation for fishing kind of an aggregate really these are subsistence fishers fishing for fun with some fish sales to recover the cost of fishing and then fishermen in our region also have diverse social and cultural obligations for fishing here's some results from American Samoa and we asked fishers what they do with their catch and we see that you know upwards of 50 to 60 percent of catches is either consumed at home or given away with higher shares in the outer islands of Manua and these findings are pretty consistent across our region the overwhelming majority of fishermen indicate that they feel that they're highly respected by the community as someone who fishes they associate with fishing as an identity and consider fishing a vital aspect of their culture and again these findings are very consistent across most fisheries in the region and then finally food security is a critical theme value and benefit for our fishing communities and this is just a quick snapshot from a survey in the Marianas where upwards of 80 percent of the fishers consider the fish they catch to be an important source of food for their family across different species groups and we often will collect data across the region to inquire if there are any species specific level targeting for say home consumption versus sales versus sharing fish in terms of secondary data to understand community participation we do participate in the CSVI program we compile American community survey data and regional fisheries data limited to the state of Hawaii due to data constraints we have published two regional pieces utilizing this framework one exploring fishing engagement specific to Hawaii fishing communities and we sort of took a look at the framework in the context of our region as well challenges for Hawaii our non-commercial fisheries data is rather coarse we don't have the nice geographic scale or even sort of a full accounting of catch as we do with the commercial data so it's a little difficult to work with existing frameworks and in taking these applications to the territories we're in a very data poor environment we do not have the American community survey data the fisheries data again is not really at the geographic and species scale that we can that we can work with and also some of the social indicators lack context for the territories for one poverty is kind of a difficult measure particularly in some of the outer islands in American Samoa as census data would highlight very high levels of subsistence activities in these communities and then lastly from a methods perspective I just want to talk on qualitative methods as these are really a key tool in our region as they offer a flexible data collection approach to support timely and regulatory driven research and really to kind of get at those under representative communities a few select exams I'll briefly talk about when the Mariana's trench marine national monument was designated there were questions about historical use in the island's unit which are way up north so we don't have we didn't have any existing data so we did some oral history work to support that and we were able to piece together a really interesting picture of past fishing efforts in this area in 2010 the Hawaii Long Island fishery had a closure due to international big eye quotas and we hit the docks hit the markets and really uncovered that the bulk of the burden from this fishery closure was actually felt by the wholesalers and marketers the harvesters actually did quite well and so this was sort of an example of an underrepresented group that we were able to capture through these qualitative approaches in American Samoa researchers have documented the dimensions of cultural fishing to support cultural considerations of council actions in response to litigation we've also done some recent work exploring the role of gender and gender-based social systems in American Samoa and of course during the pandemic researchers we were able to provide near real-time descriptions and tracking of COVID-19 impacts to many diverse fishery sectors utilizing our community connections and qualitative approaches so these may limit our ability to make broad differences but they're often the best or only methodology to reach underrepresented groups I think you know so the work to date I think we've been very successful in our region we obviously need to tackle each effort differently but I did want to touch on a few kind of key strategies that we have used in our region so our work relies heavily on strong collaborations with influential members of local fishing communities you know I feel like we have a lot of respect in our region but we also recognize that respect is is hard to earn and very easily lost so this really ensures that we stay on our toes and always highly focus to foster and maintain relationships we pay strong attention to customs cultural practices in first languages our long line fishery trip cost forms are in first languages Vietnamese Korean as well as English we generally well we do provide surveys in first languages when we do work in American Samoa surveys in the Mariana's are translated into Chamorro and Carolinian and we often partner with fishing communities in the territories such that local community members can coordinate and conduct in-person surveys and that's attentive to customs attentive to cultural respect and as well as first languages as needed we promote active to a conversation sharing with the community we regularly produce research brochures put things into popular press literature to really make sure that we're closing the loop and that we're collecting information but providing information back to the community we actively participate in the council process all of our staff are involved in some way shape or form be it the ssc plan teams social science planning committee or offering regular presentations to advisory panels council committees and fishers forums and this really helps to maintain relationships and also ensure the community gets timely updates on research efforts and lastly we ensure that themes meaningful to the community so those ones I touched on earlier classification the flow of fish through food and social systems food security these are really important to the community so we make sure we include these in the research designs that we can provide data of interest and support our fishing communities of course we face challenges unique challenges every time we do something there's some new opportunity to learn but communicating research objectives and outcomes to underserved communities across diverse fishing motivations languages culture and customs is challenging collecting data on socioeconomics fishing cultural behavior is inherently sensitive information so that's just sort of part of doing business I think in terms of groups that we might miss access to select immigrant populations is probably a notable gap given given language and community entry barriers the U.S. person fishery is an internationally managed fishery I think more work research could be generated to support a better understanding of the economics of this important fishery in our region additional work with marketers seafood vendors wholesalers that could provide valuable insights on benefits of fisheries gender roles a lot and a tremendous amount of benefits a crew and shore based near shore and local jurisdictional waters so sort of outside of the federal realm but I think some added up an emphasis where it makes sense in the future to provide capacity and support local fishing agencies in this would would go a long way to understanding the full benefits of fisheries implementing surveys is difficult we don't really have very robust licensing and reporting requirements I think the state of Hawaii is really the only one with any long term now things are evolving in the region and moving in the right direction but really all the work we do in the territories or non-commercial fishing in Hawaii relies on non probabilistic sample designs network sampling so that sort of adds some uncertainty about the scale of underrepresented groups and participants you know we often check our results with the community but that's it's really all we all we can do balancing information needs is important as you can imagine our surveys are are quite long and do in curse and burden but to be able to fully realize a lot of the information relevant to the fisheries it takes it takes a lot of effort I think we've heard and probably enough about paperwork reduction act but that is an ongoing challenge getting surveys approved seems to be a concern and at least in the short run we've made efforts to streamline this I'm not sure we've been as effective as we'd hoped and lastly funding to build capacity we're really the only shop in town in our region aside from universities doing social science work it's expensive to do work in our region and somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy you know the farther away you are the smaller the community the more underrepresented you are but it's inherently more expensive to get there so the less likely we'll be able to support work to go there it's kind of hard to imagine a viable solution without more dedicated financial commitment to the region so just as an example the one week trip to American Samoa we just go to Tutuila the main island that's about $4,000 a one-week trip to the Marianas say four nights on Guam three on on Saipan in the CNMI that's about $5,500 two days to a neighbor island in the state of Hawaii is about $1,500 so difficult from a research funding perspective but I think equally as important from the burden and the constraints on the fishing community if if they want to participate in the council process it's it's a little bit challenging from a financial standpoint last slide here I think on to new initiatives we have begun to contract social science liaisons with the language and cultural knowledge to reach deeper into fishing communities we worked with somebody in American Samoa last year we're currently working on with someone on Guam and next year is the CNMI you know we also have a fisheries management specialist with social science training and expertise with a territory focused position description we've recently begun to develop economic contribution analyses for the territories we're trying to model this off the fisheries economics of the united states which is very in-depth limited to states right now and trying to come up with something comparable to provide valuable information on economic benefits and distribution of benefits across the region and thinking about council uses we produce socioeconomic modules for our council safe reports inclusive of inequity in environmental justice section which just debuted this year and these modules really house all of the survey data that we've collected that fisher demographics island community descriptions cost of fishing catch dispositions it's really a one-stop shop for thinking about the benefits and the distribution of benefits for our region the inaugural EEJ section provides some thematic feedback from some meetings we held in the communities last year and based on council recommendations future iterations will likely seek to focus on disproportionate burden and distributional justice issues relevant to regulations we've got a new fisher observations process which was spearheaded by the fishing community and we kind of work with council staff and advisory panels to solicit input from the community document on the water observations and benefits from fisheries we we summarize this work and we publish them as data reports from our science center and we're also advancing research into looking into frameworks for defining culturally important species lastly we do have a pacific islands region equity environmental justice working group that has spun up and is active they have excellent plans for internal trainings to ensure fishery managers are aware of the contributions that social science can provide in measuring benefits and equity in fisheries management and as a center we're working on articulating some plans to enhance community engagement to make sure our work is adequately representative of our island communities so that's all I have for you today I appreciate your time um sorry for the sound I hopefully that cleaned up as we went along and that's all I have thank you Justin thanks very much I I always love hearing from the west and pacific it puts in sharp focus um some of the read some of the issues that that the agency has to deal with and the diversity of issues that it has to deal with I'll open the floor up to questions of clarification from the committee Jim your hand was pretty sharp up there sure thanks Justin that was great let me put my video on could you please do me a favor could you go back to that uh diagram that you had that was sort of expanding on thinking about benefits let me see are we able to am I still sharing benefits yeah you should have a nice little flow chart or that had the different characteristics of what fishery benefits are forget we're working our way back sorry for these transitions no that's fine just yeah yeah just it was back towards your beginning and the reason I'm asking is that I like that idea of thinking about how to break down and the different dimensions there it is uh for benefits what would be great would be is if you had example fisheries for some of these so like you know if you took one of the pelagic long line fisheries what would be some of the categories that would be highlighted for that particular species because exactly because you know one thing I was thinking of you know how much of this is outside of federal fishery management that these are near shore reef fish fisheries that maybe hit all the different bubbles but some of the pelagic fisheries maybe they hit three of the four or three of them or something um well so if we wanted to just brainstorm here if we wanted to talk about the long line fishery I think um I think our dollar value would hold I think food would hold I think sacrifice community well-being I think um knowledge and tradition I think um pretty all encompassing for a lot of these fisheries and and you did touch on that sort of differentiation of near shore reef fisheries but pelagic fisheries are are a big deal for everyone across the region and most of them do you know those are federal waters not exclusively given the the diverse um you know geology of the area and the islands but um you know tradition like if we if we had on that last slide there was an interesting I hate to be jumping around slides you go to the last slide here but this is an example from our bottom fish fishery in Hawaii of a traditional wedding fish presentations that red fish in the middle so that is that's very tradition culture well-being that's a that's a wedding fish and and that's a traditional way of of preparing that in the state of Hawaii and there's different variations of that um I mentioned how we try to document sort of other specific target species bottom fish is is a big one for the island areas for culture for sharing for prestige but maybe we should put some thought into um sort of an overview of our various fisheries and and which of those elements speak to them thank you Rashid you are next so thank you very much for the talk and uh a little high level when you were talking I kind of after hearing the other ones earlier I kind of felt like the pacific island fisheries management you guys you probably are closer to the kind of things we are concerned about here what you are doing and the kind of values you are taking about around and so on and so so I just feel like maybe the committee has a lot to look to to learn actually from what you have done and how we can incorporate that so that is one you the number of things that I noted which interests me a lot you talk about poverty line and no poverty above and below poverty line right you have figures so I felt like that could be one of the ways we could cast the distribution of benefit how much goes to those below poverty line and how much goes to those above and similarly to income levels also right so maybe we can say if you take the population of the fishery or the quartiles right how much of the benefit actually goes to the lower 25% and so on and so forth so things that just came to mind as you were you were talking finally on traditional valuation and the the picture you like I like it too right I mean and I've been doing my group we've been doing something with first nations in British Columbia they came to me and my group saying that most of the time on the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Canada that's valuation it's almost always about the total catch and the money and they say to them there are many other values which is what you show there so we created a very simple valuation approach that they could use in order to turn all these things into dollar values so when they go to Ottawa people will listen to them more because they so again this is really interesting and there's a lot we can learn from this I think thank you thank you Rishi um Justin this is Tom I have a very simple question for you and it reflects my lack of knowledge you talked about the qualitative data that you collect through sort of engagement with the community and discussions what when you undertake a qualitative data collection program like that is it subject to the same constraints that were you to deploy a formal survey so does that have to go through the same OMB process or in some senses are you freer doing that qualitative approach than a quantitative survey yeah that's an excellent question I do think the way that I phrased it in the conversation today it is a more flexible approach but with that flexibility um offers limitations there's only so much you can do we can't um they're generally semi-structured structured open discussions so conversations can go in various different ways and it requires a lot of effort in going back and doing some grounded qualitative coding to highlight themes but we generally can't make any major inferences about that it's not in a probabilistic framework um so there are some constraints but from a flexibility and from a timeliness it's often a very valuable tool for us to to tackle issues as they arise I think we're all familiar with the the scale of fisheries management relative to the scale of research and academics and those are generally um quite far apart thank you one more question from Carolyn great thanks so I'm thinking back to your presentation and you mentioned that there a lot of your social data is featured in the safe documents so I must is that the economic safe or and I'm just trying to relate this back to msa and I guess off the top of your head or more than anything I would love to have a link to the document or doc or one of the documents that you're thinking about to take a look at how that information is being included yeah excellent so these these go into our annual stock assessment and fishery evaluation safe reports for the council we have a socioeconomic module is what is is how we the terminology we use and it does sort of bridge the economics and the human dimensions aspects I'd be more than happy to share um some links with with the committee and and our council has done some excellent um efforts to kind of make the documents transition them from 500 page pdfs to interactive data portal so um I'll be happy to share some links both the big chunky pdf as well as um the interactive tool for you to look at and I we would love some input Justin thank you very much again I hope you could stay around for the broader question and answer that follows um I want to move on to our next presenter in this afternoon um representing the alaska fishery science center brian garboyance brian sorry about that I'm muted right now we get started so I want to start uh by uh thanking the committee for the invite um and for having the opportunity to talk about some of the things that we've learned uh in our experience in alaska um and do you want to note that that I've had virtually no time to prepare for this I only learned that I would be participating basically on friday uh so um hopes to prepare a presentation over the weekend and out so I'm just going to be uh making verbal comments um brian I also want to note that um that my colleague uh marijus and koyak will be participating in the next set of meetings in august and she will be talking about socio-cultural issues um when we clarify that I'm a research economist at the alaska fishery science center um for the last 15 years I've been running our economic data collection programs uh and those are largely what I'm going to talk about today and uh what we've learned through that process uh since really 2005 maybe beginning with uh the crab rationalization program in alaska so within that limited scope of uh data collection um the universe of potential data collections um I do I want to start by noting that that um uh for alaska commercial fisheries um the amount of administrative data that is produced uh to monitor catch and landings and processing and revenue and taxation is extremely comprehensive doesn't cover everything and notably it doesn't cover much in the way of demographic information um but it is sufficiently comprehensive that that uh the north pacific council uh is is is is quite well resourced to um to capture information on fishery operations and the distribution and levels of uh production and revenue both in the harvesting and processing sectors um but digging below the level of of revenues and production uh information is quite limited um with a few exceptions and that's what I'm going to talk about so uh starting in 2005 the north pacific council started a program to collect uh comprehensive economic data from the crab rationalization fishery uh or crab rationalization program um which was uh developed as a uh an annual economic census mandatory census applied to catcher vessels if your processors something a processing sector in 2005 they developed a similar program for uh the what's called the amendment 80 sector which is about 28 catcher processors participating in non-pollock crawl fisheries in the Bering Sea in 2012 they developed a data collection for the AFA Pollock sector but it was a sort of a narrowly focused data collection that was really intended to just measure one aspect of um of a bycatch management uh amendment uh within AFA and then in 2015 they began a data collection in the Gulf trawl brownfish fisheries um the council recently completed with the assistance of the science center in the region a fairly comprehensive review of the edr program and the documents that came out of that may be useful uh to the committee if it's something that you'd like to look at um a lot of examination of uh flaws and limitations and the reasons for those limitations in uh in the utility of edr data and um and overburdened some of some of some aspects of the data collection apart from the the edr programs which are mandatory censuses we've also undertaken some limited voluntary cost and earnings data collections over the last decade and a half or so one of them is um a charter business survey that was conducted in 2011 through 2016 which was a very comprehensive employment cost and earnings survey that was administered on a voluntary basis it was fairly successful and believe my colleague Dan Lu is uh is on the meeting I'm not sure if I have uh all of the years that it was collected and uh but it started out close to 50 percent response rate and then declined fairly precipitously in the following years I believe Dan is developing a new implementation of that survey uh we also in 2015 did a small survey that was really intended to um to collect data from from small boat fleet particularly the halibut sable fish fishery wasn't limited to that but we had some data available from the other programs and so we focused on filling in some data gaps with this survey and it was intended to really respond to the overburdened some of the edrs and develop what I think was a fairly workable minimal burden approach to collecting that data um so those are our our current ongoing data collection the guatral survey was actively discontinued by the council recently we collected that data for the last time this summer uh we're rather last year um and uh they have initiated the development of a new data collection that is intended to address at least one of the aspects of fragmentation that we have in the existing edr program and that is to collect information on crew participation employment and earnings comprehensively across all fleets in Alaska so that's taking a different approach than what's done in the past which is really sort of specific data collections for individual management programs principally catch our programs so um so out of that program review uh I think I can draw some uh some conclusions or draw some attention to key failures in the process over over those years um and actually the our data collection effort really started in 1998 with a survey that was developed or a set of surveys that were developed um in collaboration with the the pollock fishery the pollock industry that were intended to that were quite comprehensive surveys were intended to really set a course for comprehensive economic data collection across the Alaska fisheries it was quite a cooperative process developing those surveys but they were voluntary and then once they were implemented only one response was received and that notable failure really kind of set the course for the last 20 years of data collection development and how it's functioned in in particular the when the crab program started to be developed in the the late 90s early 2000s the council determined and and largely through the demands of our scientific and statistical committee demanded that a mandatory economic census would be part of the management program itself um so that was that was developed in collaboration initially by an interagency working group of economists and social scientists and data experts and then in collaboration with industry participants crab industry participants and what was developed out of that was a extremely ambitious set of analytical objectives uh and an intractively complex survey instrument that uh produced both poor data quality because of how complex it was and just vastly overburdened something um the revision process for for fixing that uh ended up being quite protracted and quite acrimonious and ended up in the withdrawal of the of really counsel support and reliance on science center and and agency expertise in developing these kinds of surveys um and that that continued for for quite a long time and it's really something that only recently is is starting to be overcome uh and it it also first stalled sort of nascent efforts that the council was undertaking to develop more comprehensive uh economic and and other types of data collection another um distinct sort of failure within the edr program um a particular data collection that has failed is the amendment 91 survey which which i noted earlier is intended to monitor specific aspects of a part of the afa management structure um uh the since being implemented in in 2012 the council or the data collection itself has never actually achieved the analytical objectives and it produces very little data that is of much practical use but because of just sort of the intransigence of uh of the institutional process for oversight of these data collections and how difficult it is to implement revisions um the council has really declined uh taking any action to revise the survey and it continues uh was not discontinued like the bullet for all edr was in a recent review um so that's that's an overview of our edr program we have a lot of lessons learned uh that hopefully will help us to develop the the crew data collection and build on that to to expand any additional pieces of information cost and earnings information uh potentially uh quota share uh royalty and distribution information um so that's that's we're just beginning development on on that um a lot of the aspects of the shortcomings of the edr are really have to do with with uh sort of evolving set of process failures um and these these are things that that we kind of revealed and and and they're attempted to articulate for the council in the edr program review uh so the thing the principle flaw in the edr program and the data and utility of the data uh is fragmentation um data is is we collect distinct sets of uh variables in the different data collections we have those variables for distinct subsets of the uh fleets and pop and fishery populations and as a result of that fragmentation it's really quite difficult to use the data um edr data uh lacking cost and earnings data uh that that is available comprehensively across uh vessels and management programs uh in in council regulatory analysis really limits the analyses that can use that data to those that are really constrained to just affecting that particular sub-population for which we have data um so and and those are relatively rare instances um it also really limits the efficiency of the data collection and management process rather than having fairly uniform um uh set of variables and uh and well-defined populations um for more uh more expanded populations for which we have these data we end up with with a lot of infrastructure that's built to hold relatively little information the principal users of our of our data are really council staff and and regional uh economic staff and regulatory review analyses um and as i've noted they have relatively few opportunities to use these data in those types of analyses and consequently they don't uh relatively few staff level analysts have had the opportunity to work with with these data develop familiarity with them understand what they can reveal about um uh potential changes in the fishery potential responses to do different management alternatives um and also the really the pace of of workflow for uh in the council process for for staff analysts as well as at the regional office really precludes their opportunity their their ability to to delve into these data and to to um to employ much more than than simple summaries of data you know to employ statistical methods models to to try and um um estimate potential outcomes from different management alternatives um and consequently there i think the the the approach has sort of been habituated to doing um uh to using administrative data where we have full enumeration of of certain measurements and uh and quantitative metrics uh that can be developed for uh these analytical documents are really sort of limited to to to simple summaries of existing administrative data and there just hasn't been much development of ability to use statistical methodology um to to capture uncertainty in any kind of formal way um and so that that capacity really needs to be developed in concert with the data availability i'm sort of talking about in the context of our working relationship with the with the north pacific council and flaws in or process flaws that that um that have become evident i don't want to put the responsibility for that on the council like but it's it's sort of inherent in the structure of council management so our deference uh or reliance on the council to really sort of take the lead on developing these data collections partly comes out of the fact that um that we've had fairly poor success with uh with voluntary data collections so the need to implement mandatory data collections really necessitates working through a regulatory process um so we're really in the council context for developing those but the nature of the council's resources um is such that it's very difficult to develop the sort of continuity of focus and the and the level of expertise needed to not only know what exactly it is they want to measure but uh to develop um the the systems needed to manage and collect this type of data and to to design efficient surveillance um so that that expertise is largely lacking and i think that's the result of the the lack within our agency of community of practice that has been developed or or it hasn't been developed and it's largely because of resources constraints that other people have talked about already today so the the fact that we're we're a small uh group of scientists and and other personnel working on this kind of information both working on the sort of social science of the work but also working on the the survey science aspect of data collection which is a whole area of expertise that uh generally's generally folks going into to fisheries social science and economics are not generally trained in survey science or if they are it tends to be for economists at least tends to be non-market economics which is household surveys and an important lesson that we learned fairly early on is that business surveys are very different from household surveys um when they're trying to collect uh costs and earnings essentially financial data from complex businesses uh it's a very demanding survey design context and requires a very different approach from designing a household survey or even a business survey for small owner operator types of businesses um and that so that community of practice that would help us to develop that expertise as an institution I think is largely lacking and that's another aspect of fragmentation so we have you know individual science center staff working on individual surveys but we rarely have the opportunity to sort of come together and compare our approaches and develop a set of best practices that's something that's that's been addressed in in by's office of science and technology recently we had a couple of working groups that have been productive one on vessel returns and one on cost and earnings data harmonization but these are recent efforts um and uh and fairly limited in scope and that's something that I think is important to to draw the comparison to is the the community of practice that exists um within the stock assessment realm of science and uh and all of the institutional and intellectual resources that are devoted to um to national standard one and maximum sustainable yield and harvest specifications which is a very clearly delineated set of requirements under national standard one which in contrast to the scope of sort of analytical mandates that we have with respect to economic and communities economic uh outcomes and distribution and community effects and other socioeconomic aspects and social cultural aspects um uh somehow I think we need to develop a community or communities of practice to be able to tackle those issues and it's going to take time uh so getting to other lessons learned other than those observations about process failures things that we've learned in the in the course of of uh implementing our economic data report program and reviewing it and and trying to improve it over time is really the need for less rigid forms to develop these surveys in uh as people have noted resource limitation and PRA constraints really limits our ability to to undertake experimentation and so we have really just a small handful really across the agency of cost and earnings surveys let alone the full scope of of survey uh uh data needs and and and survey applications that that are badly wanting um and the the need to to experiment is really precluded by the rigidity of the the system that we work in um one small aspect of that is the fact that pretesting is critical and it's really difficult to accomplish uh in particular with business surveys some of these surveys are quite complex they take uh they may take a submitter 20 hours to complete and getting somebody to pretest a survey that takes 20 hours um that's not something that most people are going to do voluntarily and if they are they're not representative of the general population that you're attempting to collect data um from they're they're going to be be more sophisticated and more more motivated to to be engaged rather than than you know most operators who are resistant to reporting data and may not have particular accounting sophistication um business surveys are very different I already noted that uh burden is very complex and it's not simply a matter of cost and time um uh the sensitivity of individual pieces of information and to perceive the risk of reporting that information um and in our case uh we actually have a signing statement in it in our ed rs that uses the term burgery uh so that just the the the risk that at least some submitters um feel that they're exposed to and reporting information is is unnecessarily heightened you know how am I doing with my day I think um Brian if you're able to wrap up shortly so we can take a few questions that would probably be um ideal so um I'll just ask you to wrap up soon we are still um working with Dale to get him on the line uh so we should have him momentarily okay all right um other lessons learned uh data quality is really hard uh to convey to non scientific not statistical uh uh audiences uh and not only that but it's it's it's just a difficult uh concept to get heads wrapped around in a sort of general context um as opposed to data quality when you're talking about for a particular application of a particular set of variable um but in these data collection programs that are intended to be sort of multi-faceted multi-use it's it's hard to capture data quality um so that's an area of uh capacity and expertise that I think we need some development on within the agency um as far as people in groups not considered their their large areas of social cultural populations that uh that are not even going to try to address um within the the strictly economic realm and particularly within industrialized commercial fisheries um a key population that we don't have much information on that has asked that has direct application to distributional uh uh equity is information on a flow of quota royalties uh quota uh quota earnings to quota holders uh because um most of the information that we that we collect on revenue is really at the sort of entity level um whether it's a vessel owner or a or a quarter shareholder or a permit holder um those holders tend to be entities rather than individual persons in many cases at least um the largest beneficiaries tend to be energies so we we don't have a lot of information uh that we can link to individual persons and therefore even lacking demographic information we really don't have the types of entities that have demographics in a sense anyway um the council is prioritizing crew as sort of the first highest priority of an uncovered population that we want to monitor as as beneficiaries of fisheries management and with direct and solid linkages to uh to communities so that is the first priority and that's the next initiative that we will be pursuing um and I'll stop talking to you thank you Brian um reserve time for questions of clarification from Brian Jim thanks Brian especially for doing this on uh such short notice you mentioned uh the council efforts with regards to crew participation and earnings could you elaborate a little bit more where that is and the timing and what the the scope of it is sure so something that sort of this distinguishes Alaska is that uh commercial fisheries crew are required to hold a license issued by the Alaska State of Alaska um Alaska Department of Fish and Game those licenses the commercial crew licenses are are are basically similar to to hunting permits um they're part of the same sort of permitting process as uh hunting and fishing permits um there's a fair amount of uh well residency address age sex um that is the set of demographics that are collected in those uh in those permit applications um but that's that's really sort of the richest demographic information that we have for any you know class of participating um set of individuals and and commercial fisheries so those licenses um the issuance of those licenses generates a registry in our edrs there are at least two of them the crab edr and well crab edr the amendment 80 edr and well golf 12 edr all collected crew license numbers and crew earnings and participation so the number of crew members in particular classes are reported in those edrs total uh crew earnings or or uh uh crew payments by category of of crew to in certain instances those that's stratified by individual fishery so we have all we basically have most of that information or have those sets of variables collected for for our edrs what the council is has and and those but those edrs also collect other sets of variables so you know limited sets of costs and variables um or in some cases very liberal very limited in the amendment 80 context quite comprehensive reporting of of capital and its and annual expenses for fishery for for vessel operations um so the council just took action in uh and i guess june uh recommending the development of the crew uh universal crew data collection program uh and we at the science center uh are uh will hopefully be coordinating with the Alaska regional office to uh to develop this data collection but there's a lot of different ways it could go um the council was fortunately not too prescriptive on how we go about to actually collecting this data and something that we could maybe break up into different components and collect different aspects of the data screen at different platforms that are more avatars so in-stream collection of crew participation information as uh one example and annual summary of uh earning that was that too long-winded gem no that was great thank you all right well um thank you brian uh i see that dale has joined so to paraphrase the first she'll become last and um we're going to dale if you would like to just do a sound check just to make sure we can hear you yeah hello yep great we can um so thank you very much for joining us dale uh as a reminder dale is the program lead for the southwest fishery science economics and social science branch and um dale thank you very much for joining us very good thank you so much um so i'm going to present of course from the southwest center uh just let me do a little minimization here so um so this will represent i'm going to start off i'll talk about uh international tunas through the uh inter-american tropical tuna commission and then i'll talk about our small pelagic uh fishery uh where we have some information um so the uh international tunas uh that involves with a tangible uh effort credit scheme we are developing uh jointly with the uh inter-american tropical tuna commission for tropical tuna purse saners in the eastern pacific ocean uh the us of course is a states party to the convention and it's working to the ittc capacity working group and uh is done the scheme is done jointly with the uh secretariat um and we are using principles of uh fair division uh to design an allocation scheme of days and we will soon be using principles of fair division notably a claims problem uh to look at uh new uh granting new entrants uh uh eligibility and training and assessing and taxing um uh days at sea to uh these new entrants and uh now so we look at a quality of outcome and on the allocation scheme we have distributed shares of days uh the scheme is is really not too different than the uh vessel day scheme of the parties to the narrow convention um and then um we are also looking at uh for the new entrance problem as a claims problem um we're looking at the impact on vessel desk uh basically on efficiency as measured by uh vessel daily operating profit from different types of assessment schemes um constrained equal losses uh proportionality of the two uh major um uh approaches uh so with that the kind of data that's required are landings from the ittc data uh prices from maventa ecuador um we supplement a bit with uh Bangkok prices if if required uh operating costs for uh different flag states vessel size classes whether they fish with the dolphin mortality limit or not um and these come from a series of uh surveys and then companies will provide confidential information um we will look at vessel sizes uh they measure that in cubic meters of wealth capacity uh the various flag states that have a tropical tuna percenter that um is it eligible through resolution c203 they have basically a limited entry program there and then whether they have a dolphin mortality limit or not and that data comes uh from the ittc iss quality of outcome using standard kind of uh equity metrics and the new entrance problem uh is a bit of work in progress we're having a workshop uh late august uh early september to work that out i've done a lot of preliminary investigation um uh on that where i look at the impact basically i'm afraid of efficiency okay and then we have the coastal commercial coastal pelagic cps um so we have transition cps cost and earnings survey from using a single fishery specific survey to a regional uh a general regional multi fishery survey uh it's a collaborative effort to integrate the cps cost and earnings survey with the northwest fishery science and groundfish open access survey uh the bundled icr uh which omb approved april 27 for 16 groups of commercial fisheries uh allows us to use the voluntary cost and earnings surveys included in that icr through april 30 of 2025 uh there's no funding currently available for implementation now on recreational fisheries um there's a discussion on moving to a national recreational business cost and earnings survey uh from the current regional specific survey um and there's a hybrid generic icr survey currently under review at omb uh since uh 2022 um so now in uh what issues or lessons have been learned uh so there's the issue of survey omb clearance survey clearance times are longer than anticipated are there so still economic data collection efforts have been tried and failed um the 2021 fielding of the cps cost and earnings survey had a lower than expected response rate about 15 percent and response rate fell from prior uh uh survey effort levels now i want to say parenthetically we don't have any cost share programs out of lovoia and as a quant consequence we really don't have any leverage for sort of man mandated uh cost and data collection um are there groups of people that you think are not being considered in current efforts but should be um the demographic data is not uniformly collected across commercial or recreational surveys are there types of socioeconomic data related to equity that the council is using or relying on in decision making no the cps management is partly based upon biomass estimates um thanks now i want to add also uh parenthetically that we don't have a social scientist uh in the southwest center we are shorted an fte and that's been frozen for quite a while uh and we are also short a um base uh a base uh fte as well so and we so as a consequence we don't really collect that sort of demographic information that's used by the social scientist uh and would uh pertain to environmental justice issues so i'm uh happy to uh take any questions that you might have thank you dale i'll um open it up for questions of clarification from the committee proceed yeah dale how are you doing good man i'll see you in a couple weeks here yeah yeah so it seems you you people have been able to collect some demographic data is that true and how come because we heard from other groups and that is a difficult thing to collect we have not um here in lohoya uh in particular it's really us um it's really we three economists with sam harrick's retirement uh we're a shortened economist there and we're supposed to have an fte and that's been frozen uh from washington that's been frozen for quite a while we don't have whether here or in stanah cruise a social scientist that would normally concentrate on demographic data uh we could if we were looking at things like a quality of opportunity uh where we were trying to uh get uh sort of a quality of opportunity adjusted uh incomes or or shares or whatever but uh we haven't applied any of that um those sorts of ideas to uh here in the southwest center particularly lohoya so so quick one so the limitation there is uh capacity is is people to actually do it not because of any other barriers so yes um we we literally are short two people okay and um one is a full-time that's when sam harrick retired and he's not been replaced and there is an fte on that line out of dc that everybody has uh we were getting ready to hire somebody in 2008 uh and then that was uh with the crash uh that was um stopped and there's been no discussion of filling that uh that washington s and t based fte thank you any other questions from the committee well that's what i'd like yeah i'll give you one more if that's not yeah you talk about equality of outcome can you explain that please and um it sounds interesting so oh well um you know there's kind of two broad indistributive the philosophy of distributive justice uh there's a distinction between really dating from john rolls and uh ronald door and then later supplemented with richard atchison who's here at ucfd that named cohen who was at oxford and then the economist we might know of john robert and mark floridae picking up on it so there's a distinction between equality of outcome which is pure consequentialism which is just what you would think of and there you can apply the standard kind of metrics you could you know pins parade you could do lorenz curve genie coefficient atkinson's equity metrics or the generalized entropy tile methods would be kind of standard uh assessments and then now equality of opportunity says that well let that you know people have outcomes due to kind of two broad issues uh one is exhaustion of circumstances beyond their control responsibility or choice and that might be that would fit in with uh environmental justice issues so that would be like uh income gender race uh maybe you're born in a poor community um it's kind of known in the egalitarian opportunism literature as just sort of uh birth bad luck and then um the other variable would be you know effort meaning how much do you some people you can put them in equal circumstances and some care and some don't you know some will be you know rich somewhat whatever so the equality of opportunity what one does is one um you can regress and you can say let's take i i'm doing this with international seabed authority regressing um the gross national income per capita upon various exogenous variables that would represent these circumstances beyond control and then you get an income that's left over you can apply something like a tile uh or generalized entropy uh uh between index and then what you get is you get different equity measures for the different groups where you've controlled for the circumstances you're you're looking at differences between circumstances and then you can you can actually go a step further and devise things like distribution weights based on that um so anyway so that's a quality of outcome versus a quality of opportunity to the best of my knowledge nobody in fisheries has yet uh other than me has applied quality of opportunity to look at fisheries thank you professor that's good it's really interesting stuff let me tell you uh rachel you're next yeah thanks you you also mentioned the new entrance problem and did you did you have data to support the new entrance problem or how was that showing up and driving the the policy worker involved in yeah so we've designed a transferable day credit scheme not a right space management but a credit based system and uh more like what you see in pollution or in this case there's a precedent here in dolphin mortality limits so these are simply limits uh made flexible within a year so we have this transferable scheme and so I count I have a simple model and what I've done is I've calculated um the increase in efficiency that can be expected and um and there is an existing limited entry program here and then we allowed for um then I allowed for new entrance to come in now the new entrance have something called capacity which is it's how it's like a limited entry program like in this case is cubic meters of well capacity so you um I designed a couple of different allocation schemes to uh for the new entrance flag states that receive capacity the right to capacity that is new entry and how much how many boats say how many cubic meters of well capacity they would receive uh based upon the existing precedent of the fleet the existing fleet and then I and then you have to operationalize that one has to give days now if you did a transferable day credit scheme you would have a total allowable effort so that means you have to take some of the existing days and we measure it by days at sea because it's easy to measure and allocate it to these new vessels so then the question becomes because in a in a voluntary self-enforcing organization such as a uh regional fisheries management organization you know the votes are uh invariably by consensus are unanimous and so it's a Pareto principle or acceptability doesn't hold that is that a state's party might actually lose uh welfare in this case measured by uh vessel uh operating profit uh then they might actually not agree to whatever you want to do so um I've been operating under that limit and then so I there was a count there was an increase I calculated a vessel specific uh increase in uh vessel daily operating profit so there was a Pareto increase but not not by all vessels and and that's the rub so I calculated if you took the aggregate increase in efficiency there is enough profitability to cover the new entrance and giving them the basically the mean um uh daily uh days uh corresponding to boats of their size but when you realize that about a quarter of the boats don't increase their efficiency that means that we were to tax them any any days they would go negative and profit and so they're the incentive for their corresponding flag state might be to uh veto this now the problem we face is that many boats are multi-vessels so it's quite possible they might reallocate internally but I can't measure that so then I tried now and then I tried so Aristotle's equity principle or strict proportionality does not work then because you're taxing everybody but I tried looking at another fair division principle called constrained equal awards uh losses which is where you give you tax everybody equally on the existing boats on days but if they lose profits they're not taxed but and if I were to apply that uh bankruptcy rule uh it would work but the problem is I'm relying on a couple things um strategy proofness by which because we have multi-vessel companies and even flag different you know within a flag state you have these different vessels so if if I don't mean uh strategy proofness I mean incentive compatibility so that they might change the ownership of the boats and or they might transfer shares to one another and only the uh proportionality principle is incentive compatible so then you're left and the other problem we have is that I can't you know these these measures of profit are not verifiable and it's not strategy proof I can't rely on these guys to honestly report this so I'm really stuck um I'm stuck by the Pareto principle and I'm stuck by incentive compatibility and I'm stuck by strategy proofness in aggregate we can do it but I don't know of a rule district a fair distribution rule that would allow this um assessment and satisfy the Pareto principle or acceptability uh incentive compatibility and strategy proofness so I'm bringing in some fair division people for a workshop here in La Jolla uh and um see if they have any ideas uh about how to get around this problem um is the problem of course again is that you have uh and these are voluntary self-enforcing organizations where decisions are made by consensus so all you need is one state's party to lose and have an incentive to negate everything now the beauty of such an approach is because it's a fair bargain it's you get both fairness is non-envy and impartiality and then it also leads to a concept of justice is impartiality falling Brian Berry so that's great when you get a decision it's we can legitimately say it's a fair it's it's a fair decision right satisfies a fairness couple different fairness definitions but we got this problem that of incentive compatibility uh strategy proofness and I can't I can't measure profits um like you know what actual profits are they're just off some dumb model all right long-winded answer but it's kind of you know a reasonably complex problem all right thank you very much um we've been going at this for two hours now I would propose a sort of seventh inning stretch for 10 minutes uh to allow people to stretch their legs take a personal break if you need to coffee break if you need to it's 303 on my watch three minutes past the hour we'll come back at 13 minutes past the hour for a panel discussion so thank you all very much I we hope those who are on the zoom call can come back with us for the panel discussion we do understand if you have to drop off if you have other commitments but thank you to all our presenters and we'll see you again in 10 minutes uh socioeconomic of collecting socioeconomic data um to help the agency assess the equity in the distribution of fishery management benefits um we had follow-up questions for clarification uh after each presentation I'd like now like to open the floor um to more general questions from the committee if people in the audience wish to comment on the questions we ask that you please use the raise hands feature which is under the reactions button at the bottom of your screen possibly under the more button the three ellipses um uh if you don't have a reactions button um but I'll I'll perhaps start with a broad question and it's something that is at least forming in my mind and I came into the committee process thinking that the answer the the answer to the question we had been asked was before before us if we only dug a little to find the answer and I'm beginning to wonder whether the the equity discussion in fisheries isn't uh in a sense a technology forcing question that we don't have the tools in our hands currently to answer the question and and the very fact that we're asking the question is going to force us to develop new ways of collecting data new ways of assembling data from different sources new ways potentially of analyzing date data from different areas so for those of you in the regions do you think each of your regions is equipped to answer the question about the the degree to which benefits of fishery management are equitably distributed or do you feel that you are challenged by that question that those data are not at hand and in fact would require new data collection systems to begin to answer them as usual with my questions there's a stunning silence in the answer um Brian thank you very much for taking up the gauntlet Brian and then leave Brian sure um well I mean you know clearly how to measure equitable distribution is is a complicated questions and and uh so it's hard to hard to answer the question can we answer that question without really understanding uh uh exactly how to do it um but I think you know that caveat not notwithstanding we we clearly don't have sufficient data and I'll ask it to do it we can we can understand a certain extent the distribution of uh of say ex-vessel revenues um amongst vessels but tracking the those benefits through vessels down to the community level is hampered by the lack of of uh ownership information or or uh at least tractable ownership information uh for for vessels um uh it really complicates that so it's hard to even uh uh imagine uh any particular aspect of uh equity and distribution that that we could adequately respond to given the available to them great thank you Brian I suppose I'm heartened by the fact that you think even ex-vessel value is something that could be done currently uh leaf um after Brian's response there I am I'm not sure I actually have a different perspective and much much difference to add um I mean I I do think that there are some cases where some version of equity we we could come up with some sort of measure I think that's extremely limited and we don't have that on anything more than a vessel level or um you know anything like that so at the individual level absolutely not from a demographic perspective across different demographics no we don't have sufficient information so unfortunately no thank you leaf um Dale you were the third who who took the bait yeah uh thanks I everything that's been said I agree with uh I mean most fundamentally what do you mean by equity and for whom those are the questions and only when you really address what do you mean by equity and for whom can you can we really answer the data question so I think given the fact that we have landings we can usually get price information we we can look at there are a lot of standard equity metrics for uh looking at at that and then with some pretty standard definitions of equity although you have to get some ethical decisions about which uh part of the income distribution you're going to wait and then if you're going to look at in terms of profits uh well our cost data is kind of iffy we're going to look at uh demographic information to get at things like the quality of opportunity versus a quality of outcome and we're mostly talking about a quality of outcome then we need really good demographic data and if you mean communities then again we're short of data so it in part depends upon what you mean by equity and for whom and I can I think we can answer some rudimentary questions uh but mostly based on landings data um anyway that's my two cents thank you Dale I'll give Justin uh chance as well and then we'll go to uh Rashid and Rachel so Justin yeah thanks I'll just I'll just chime in that you know in our region we haven't really applied any equity measures aside from maybe looking at the distribution of revenues in select um select fisheries so there's a lot of room to be to be made there and I think going back to my talk and and the diverse benefits in our region I think we have a lot of work we need to do first to understand frameworks to measure these benefits um Rashid had great observation that there's advances in methodologies to quantify a lot of these non-market benefits but I think an inherent problem in our region is that a lot of the communities would have problems with assigning dollars and monetary values to a lot of these benefits um and almost goes against the point of those benefits to certain certain communities so I think that's my brief comment thank you thank you Justin uh Rashid I think you are next so Justin yeah your your last point there is well taken I mean the first time I went to Prince Rupert and tried to talk about valuing their fishery you should have been there to see their reaction it was unbelievable I had to stop talking about valuing first nations fisheries for years until somehow they came back to me so I think there's movement that there's now more indigenous people in Canada who say look for our values to be taken seriously we have to just buy the bullet and put some dollar values but others are still arguing in the sense you you you you just explained that's the first point in general about data you know and this is coming from a university person so maybe it doesn't work for you who are actually doing work on the ground real work right but in general in my lab we never accept I never accept the student coming to me and say I can't do this study because I don't have data no no there is data it's not perfect and some data are better than others but in general all data are are what living data they're late data in progress if you think of life there's no point in time that you have all the data on anything and we can argue about that do you know what particles are floating here fully I don't think so tomorrow scientists may get an equipment that will tell us more so essentially what we do is take whatever data you have do the best you can and make the decisions you have to make because you cannot just go to sleep and give up right so so that is how I will approach this no matter what you can do you start the progress and actually by starting you improve the data and it goes on and before you know you have the data you you really need to do a complete analysis so I just want to encourage that the idea that we have no data we can't do anything wish we just abandon that and do the best we can let's get going anyway thank you Rashid uh Rachel yeah I think I think it was Justin who mentioned a tool um that I I don't know if we'd heard of yet so I wanted to ask the full group about this climate and economic justice screening tool and if they've found that useful in this in this realm it looks like they're presenting data at the census track level but also in the context that federally recognized tribes and it seems like there might be some opportunity to at least understand or or consider equity and at those scales in the context of fishery so is that something that your science centers are working on or working with or are there are there issues with that Danica in response to Rachel's question yeah hello Danica Klyber again um oh hi um so in terms of that tool I think one of the issues that that Justin mentioned again coming from the perspective of the pacific island region is that the data census track data is not available in the territories um on a yearly basis and so we get uh sort of uh data poverty issues and so they kind of get left out of some of these considerations so you get potentially some of the most um underserved communities just being left out of the equation altogether when we look at it at that national scale so that that would be um that that has been my persistent concern with that data it's also at a geographic community scale so um you can understand something about the general demographic attributes of those communities but connecting that to who's doing the fishing who's benefiting from the fishing who's bracketing the fishing it's much harder to do and so that that connection as was mentioned earlier is is the difficulty that's just from my experience yeah thank you Danica um I see that Min Yang is still on the zoom call and so I'll just invite Min Yang if you want to offer answers to any of these questions um from your northeast perspective you're please welcome to don't feel constrained uh about responding um Grant your next on the list yeah thanks I have a uh broad question uh that may be difficult but I appreciate any responses in the definition of equity in the recent strategy document the fisheries equity and environmental justice document that came out um the term underserved communities use a lot but the actual definition of that as provided in that document is really quite broad there's reference to ethnic and racial categories to religion to gender to sexual orientation to poverty and economic condition to persons with disabilities to people living in rural and urban areas uh and that could be read as extremely broad and including quite a few groups so I'm I'm wondering if there's any clarity within the organization or within your groups about priority or tractability or perhaps both with that list of attributes and membership and underserved communities down there hi sorry don't mean to be hogging the the time so um I'm a social scientist at the pacific industry science center I was also one of the co-chairs of the group of the working group that created the strategy um so I was I've been intimately involved in the definition so we went um those all those categories were a result of going off of the definition from 1395 the executive order is coming out of the biden administration but as you as you can tell we also looked specifically for fisheries uh underserved communities within the fisheries context so that's where you get a lot of the language on crew processing plant workers subsistence fisheries etc so I think the way it's structured is is every region and program office is supposed to really look for uh their their own we didn't want to be prescriptive um obviously it'll be different from region to region so that that question might be answered more specifically in the implementation plans which should be coming out uh towards the end of this year thank you danica um lisa yeah I think I'm gonna articulate this really badly but um Justin and others in the pacific um I got me thinking a little bit about the relationship between the federally managed species in us waters and the the larger really big value fisheries in the region like the tuna fishery um some of which is managed uh you know through international agreements and what struck me with some of the data on like the importance of the port and the value of the landings um you know side by side with high levels of underserved communities and high levels of um poverty as defined by those metrics and I guess my question is just how you in the region think about fisheries allocation between sort of the federal level and these really high value international fleets um if you're allowed to think about them if it's part of your mandate or if it's just you know something that you have to set aside um Justin I guess I'll speak to this briefly since since our region was mentioned and we we have tuna fisheries and so I would say in lisa's question we typically focus on um you know measuring the economic performance and benefits of our fisheries I know our council is probably a little bit more equipped towards uh advocating on behalf of the domestic fleet in the international arena we haven't done a lot of work um I know dale has done a lot more work than we have in our region in the context of international tuna fisheries but um at the science center where we largely focus on our regional long line fisheries documenting the benefits economic performance and the council is usually utilizing our information to advocate on behalf of domestic fisheries and the state department is is the one at the table as far as I know so we're a little bit removed from that thank you Justin other questions from the committee appreciate yeah for alaska I was wondering uh the the systems you describe to what extent community base fisheries quota is taken into account now I'm connected to alaska uh indigenous people um thank you for the question um it kind of to consider how to approach that so um the community development well the community development quota groups um um they are I mean their their ownership of uh of quota is is clearly identified so we know um we know we uh we we know certain things about their their their exercise of those benefits and harvests uh that quota um in the crab program we do monitor uh royalty payments for or or costs at the vessel level that are being paid just for cdq uh crab quota um we uh we do know uh cdq group ownership of non cdq crab quota um so we can look at the distribution of ownership within the the um crab quota pools um by uh uh cdq group uh equity um are there particular aspects of cdq group engagement that that you had in mind so so if we take if you take let's say um I don't I don't know the details so let's say you take the total quota approved uh in alaska you know and then what proportion of it goes to the cdqs and how will you see that in terms of equity will you think that this is uh reasonable or or what do you think in your opinion not that of alaska right right because I feel that that could be a good example of how to ensure some level of equity right what you guys are doing in alaska right um so my my colleague uh marisha is is inserted some comments about the decennial program review for the cdq program um so there's a fair amount of disclosure involved in that and and um uh detailed analysis of of cdq group participation and benefit and uh what they what they uh do with uh with their their earnings um within it I'm not sure how how well we can comprehensively look across all of uh all of the places where cdq groups have you know might have the opportunity to be engaged in a particular way um and the degree to which they actually are um broadly speaking within individual management programs I think we can assess that to some degree um particularly well in in the crab program um less so in in other places thank you are the questions from the committee rachel I just had a follow-up to rashid's if I was understanding your question um the cdqs are allocated 10 off the top and the rest of the allocation happens after the cdq allocation at this point I'm going to the species that are eligible for that I think where we see inequities in that program is that cdq communities are defined within 50 miles of the coastline so there's kind of issues emerging by the communities just outside that boundary who don't receive the cdq benefits but are impacted by federal fishery decision-making if I think that's what you're asking the other questions or comments from the committee I I do have another quick question I just wanted to kind of survey all the the panel members and the participants today if if they have any um examples or thoughts some positive examples in terms of where equity was accounted for in a decision or a fishery management plan in their regions that they thought worked particularly well and again if you don't have something on the top of your head now but something that comes to mind um sort of for me it's always in the shower the next morning but um that's probably an idea you don't want enough of that um please email uh state stacey with uh any responses that you have stacey you had your uh just to um concur with that and and to note that we appreciate so many folks being on the line today I know we've heard primarily from um the invited speakers uh and some of their colleagues but um just to reiterate the point that we're interested in hearing from anybody that's wanting to contribute so um please do not hesitate to uh circulate information and use me as a conduit for that to the committee sorry jim yeah you might have said this and I might have missed this phrase but maybe another way to say is that is there a process undergoing that you think is going to lead to a very valuable rather than has it occurred because maybe there's highlighting like we just started this and we think this is going to lead to a good outcome that would also be very valuable to get information so sorry if I overlap Brian if you're speaking we're not able to hear you you might be muted on a phone line or otherwise muted um I'm not muted I didn't I wasn't prompted to speak yet um oh tom tom is muted that's why no worries go ahead Brian well I think yeah so taking our our our um uh sort of nascent crew economic survey uh that is in development so that uh will hopefully provide us with with um with a rich data set that will allow us to to certain degrees to uh to to to measure participation by crew members with various aspects of you know demographic categories within the crew population um most notably community residents um but some other things um and uh will allow us to look at the distribution of uh at least uh vessel earnings to those crew members and to those communities um but uh this data collection while being comprehensive hopefully across federal fisheries is going to lead out um uh state fisheries uh so that's that's a concern um I'm sure that that you know once we so you know we can we can we can uh we can report out you know estimated earnings at the at the say community level or certain aggregates that allow us to to get past confidentiality constraints but the the the geographic distribution of benefits across communities and um but then the the ways to slice those by different attributes of communities um is it's just very difficult to conceive of uh exactly how what dimensions of uh equity to focus on um and the sort of critical thresholds of uh inequitable or mal-distributional outcomes to to draw attention to can I just follow our response to that yeah yeah please Brian um is this requirement that the crew need to get a license is that driven by the state of Alaska is that a rule from the state or is this somehow tied to NOAA fisheries right no it's a state law it's a state law does anybody else know if another state has a similar requirement I haven't I don't know if it's similar requirement I I mean it creates the ability to do a sample frame right because you have this registration and you can actually track crew across vessels and across fisheries and it seems really interesting that way I would guess it must have something more to do with an income concern from the state rather than from a fisheries concern that they're worried about lost revenue for people who seasonally move to Alaska and leave would be my guess uh leaf yeah I was going to say one potential I think promising avenue of you know equity analyses and in our center is this west coast fisheries participation survey that that was briefly mentioned and and it while it wasn't designed with addressing equity and fisheries management benefits directly it does present a subset of interesting questions I think that would allow some some interesting analyses and so I may or may not have mentioned that survey respondents characterize themselves according to geographic location fisheries self-reported incomes and then maybe more importantly membership in groups identified as underserved and so um in some other questions along the on the survey are perceived impacts of management interventions I think a potentially interesting one to me anyway is perceived representation in the management process and then capacity to participate in management decision-making processes so I again I depends on the equity questions that you're trying to address and answer but I do think that this survey provides some interesting information proceed I have a question Mike okay I forgot that yeah so I'm wondering if you can maybe each one of you one or two benefits from fisheries management that you know about what are the benefits we've been talking about benefits of fisheries money I know some of you touch on that but just to go around and drop a few words for us and that's why you do day in day out right Justin Justin yeah I'm thinking okay well I'll jump in here and talk about some of the benefits fisheries management what we have is sustainably sustainably managed fisheries within the pacific islands region and I think all of the diverse benefits that I spoke to in my presentation are afforded to our region through sustainable fisheries management okay and I guess I'm a little hesitant to bring this up but I will say and maybe this is I think with my science center hat off but you know I think one of the things the council might be interested in I'm hesitant to speak on behalf of council but a lot of their concerns I know we're talking about the benefits of fisheries management but I think an equity of said benefits I think a concern at times from communities in our region is the equity in the cost and burden of fisheries management to our region or maybe stated otherwise when there are policies perhaps outside of the scope of fisheries management that apply to our region and there's concerns about whether those are equitably applied across the nation I'll leave it at that because that's not what I should be speaking to and this is excellent actually Justin you've just had nodded heads around the room in many senses that your comments about the costs of participation in the western pacific region is clearly a burden that that region shares that is higher probably than the other regions so thank you for that comment any other responses to Rashid's probing question about the benefits of fishery management if not I'm going to draw the afternoon session and in fact the day is open sessions to a close I want to thank all of you for your participation today in a very rich discussion we heard lots today about the how difficult a challenge the committee and the agency is faced both from a theoretical point of view and we heard from Dale about ideas of distribution of outcome versus distributions of opportunity but also from a practical point of view we heard particularly this morning about some of the practical challenges of collecting the kind of socioeconomic data that are required related to having survey implements approved about the challenge of using incentive based programs and I you know it's always surprising when you run into these things you've not thought about that in a university system we can give tickets that you might win you know a hundred dollars you might win five dollars and that's fine in a university but in an academic setting that begins to look more like a lottery and the federal government can't run a lot lot lot lot lottery so things that probably many of us around the table don't recognize that you are faced as federal employees within the agency on a day-to-day basis I was impressed by the idea that the regions are sort of their own independent experiments and we heard lots about the differences between the regions today about the specific challenges they face whether that be at the science center or the council level or at the regional office level we heard from Justin particularly with the the nice graphic about the value of the fishery beyond the primary benefits that we've been tasked with of that sort of allocation and permits and I thought the figure that you had Justin in your presentation was a particularly nice example of that we heard a lot of concern expressed today about capacity in the agency to undertake this work and probably also capacity in the councils to undertake this work that this has not been work that the agency and the councils have traditionally been involved in but it is work that they are now beginning to be challenged and asked to undertake we heard from Brian the idea of the development of a community of practice somewhat akin to the community of practice that exists in the stock assessment field where there are regular national convenings that the SSC bring together to try and learn from the experiments that are going on in every region in every different fishery and I thought that was a nice idea but I suppose to me that the most important message that came through in the discussions today was from everyone we heard from and from the committee members themselves was a recognition of the importance of the work it is clear that stakeholders and council members federal representatives and the agency itself is is deeply committed to understanding whether or not the benefits of fisheries management however we define them are equitably distributed and I think to me that was the most important message of today and I think Rashid's response to my comment questioning whether we are ready to do this is exactly the right one whether we're ready or not we're going to be doing this and we need just to be getting on with it and and I think we as a committee have to find a way to produce useful recommendations to the agency for how it will be more ready to answer this question in five years time than it is today so I want to thank all of you on the call today all of you who have presented to us a reminder that if a moment of inspiration hits you and you want to communicate with us please do so through Stacy and she will ensure that the information gets to all of us on the committee we have several more meetings coming up one in August and we think there'll be another one in September we are hoping for a draft of our report by I would hope late September at the latest just as a note to the committee itself the time is ticking and we value all of your input into our deliberations so thank you all very much and we will sorry you can clap if you wish I just want to add my appreciation as well and note I've put my email address in the chat for folks to reach me also I'd like to point out and as Tom mentioned our next scheduled open session meeting is August 14th and 16th we have quite a blended agenda shaping up for that but we welcome everybody on the line to join us for that as well the information for joining on the line will be available on our website soon but if you'd like more information on that open session meeting please don't hesitate to reach out to me as well and we can make sure to provide that can I just clarify is tomorrow morning not an open session I'm sorry tomorrow morning is also an open session yes so separate and apart from today and tomorrow morning our next open session meeting is in August we do also hope that folks will join us tomorrow morning