It’s time for the seasonal AKFIN photo contest! Have you braved the Bering Sea? Adventured upon the Alaskan archipelago? Spent summers scraping scales? Now is your chance to submit an Alaskan Fisheries themed image to AKFIN to be exhibited on our website. Four new photos will be posted on the home page slideshow every quarter.
Please email submissions to kmclean@psmfc.org . We prefer photographs be in a .jpeg, .jpg or .gif format and between 2 and 5Mb, with a resolution around 180dpi.
AKFIN recently collaborated with Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC) and NMFS Alaska Region staff to report economic performance indicators for five North Pacific catch share programs: IFQ sablefish and halibut, the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Crab Rationalization program, AFA pollock, Central Gulf of Alaska rockfish, and Amendment 80 non-pollock trawl catcher/processors. Results will be published later this year in a NMFS Office of Science and Technology report.
This reporting is part of a nationwide effort implemented in 2011 by NMFS to monitor the overall performance of fisheries using standardized economic indicators. Current metrics for annual reporting describe catch and harvest, fishing effort, and revenue, with development of additional metrics for fishery productivity underway. AKFIN staff are currently working on expanding this reporting to non-catch share fisheries, including the Alaska weathervane scallop, BSAI freezer-longliner Pacific cod, and GOA non-Rockfish Program rockfish fisheries. Subsequent work will include development of analytical datasets to support routine annual reporting of these performance metrics.
On behalf of US Coast Guard (USCG), the National Marine Fisheries Service has requested that AKFIN provide a list of all commercial fishing vessels that operate in federal waters off Alaska and the West Coast. This database list will also include vessel registration and fishery permit information along with the top three landing ports by vessel for 2009, 2010, and 2011. This data request is in response to the Coast Guard Authorization Act (P. L. 111-281) signed on October 15, 2010, which made several significant changes to Chapter 45 of Title 46, requiring, among other things, the mandatory safety inspection by the USCG of all Commercial Fishing Vessels operating beyond 3NM.
AKFIN has been working with social scientists from the Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC) to develop a reporting dashboard in AKFIN Answers (Oracle Business Intelligence reporting tool) to support the Community Profiles for North Pacific Fisheries – Alaska, a NOAA technical memorandum scheduled for publication in early 2013. The AKFIN Answers reporting dashboard is supported by a specially designed database repository that contains hundreds of census, commercial, recreational, and subsistence metrics calculated by year and Alaskan community for 2000-2010.
More recently, these AKFIN Answers data exports were used to source an online mapping application that spatially represents commercial fishing activity by Alaskan community. These interactive maps show such statistics as landings by port, residency of state and federal permit holders, and vessel ownership to name a few.
In addition to summarizing commercial data, AFSC programmers are working to include a subset of the subsistence and recreational statistics reported in the profiles, to be released at a later date.