June 10, 2024 — NOAA Fisheries is engaged in a multi-year effort to strategically respond to climate-driven changes in the environment, maintain operating efficiencies and modernization efforts, and mitigate shifting survey needs. We continue to balance national priorities against a challenging economic environment where the rising cost of mission execution demands strategic pivots within survey activities to ensure critical data collection needs can be met.
This year, the Alaska Fisheries Science Center will redesign and reprioritize effort in several of its surveys, while advancing the use of modern methods and technologies to more efficiently collect data and accomplish its research mission to support sustainable fisheries management. It will also suspend one survey resulting from shortfalls in cost-recovery related to losses in the economic value of the catch.
“Alaska marine ecosystems are changing and our science has to change with them,” said Robert Foy, Alaska Fisheries Science Center Director.
Over the past several years, Alaska scientists have observed extreme marine heatwaves and high variability in marine environmental conditions. This has altered fish distributions and caused structural changes in Alaska marine ecosystems.
Alaska Fisheries Science Center staff have been engaged in strategic planning over the past several months to:
- Restructure internal operations
- Prioritize survey efforts
- Identify more efficient ways to collect data to support resource management decisions
These efforts are guided by the need to continue to meet thresholds of data collection and provision of scientific information.
To maintain their scientific integrity, we are re-evaluating all aspects of our research surveys including the overall design, spatial coverage, timing, and gear. We want to streamline our survey operations and identify new ways to collect critical information on fish and shellfish species.
To strengthen our ability to maintain continuity of survey operations, we reorganized our Groundfish Assessment Program into three operational survey teams. These teams better align with the three primary Large Marine Ecosystems where they primarily conduct survey operations. This realignment provides obvious points of contact to stakeholders for all bottom trawl survey regions. It also creates an operational structure that increases cross-training across teams to better address staffing needs