Center for Independent Experts (CIE) Review of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Evaluation of the Effects of Fishing on Essential Fish Habitat in Alaska

The model developed by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to assess the effects of fishing on essential fish habitats in Alaska is a simple yet elegant representation of the balance between loss due to direct effects of fishing gear and the ability of organisms and structures to recover over time. It should be considered an intuition building tool, and the absolute value of the predicted impacts should only be considered as a first order relative indices of the potential impact of fishing activities on essential fish habitat (EFH) and its capacity to maintain stock productivity in the long term. Although every attempt was made to use realistic measures of the direct impact of trawls and the ability of different classes of benthos to recover from those impacts, the end result is that all model calculations effectively present a scaling of the spatial pattern in fishing activity within the eastern Bering Sea (EBS), Gulf of Alaska (GOA), and Aleutian Islands (AI).