On Friday, March 26, 2010, the Gloucester Times reported that "The research arm of the National Marine Fisheries Service has missed its own deadline for publishing fresh data on the status of New England's groundfish stocks — even as the New England fishing industry braces for business casualties from hard catch limits based on data from 2007."
Shortly after the Times' report, the National Marine Fisheries Service gave the following statement to Saving Seafood:
"For fishery science and management use, Spring survey data have been available since August 2009. The Spring 2009 bottom trawl data was available about one month later, and the fall will be about two months later than in recent years (2006-2008 average.) In 2009, the bottom trawl survey moved to our new research vessel, the Henry B. Bigelow. It's taking a bit longer to process a Bigelow survey cruise in comparison to one conducted by our former vessel, the Albatross IV, because the Bigelow gathers much more data"
"Assessments conducted so far in 2009 and 2010 that could make use of the 2009 Spring bottom trawl survey data have done so and have not been in any way disadvantaged by the extended data processing time. Fall survey data are not available until the spring of the following year–about now–and this will be in the case of Fall 2009, which should come online within the next two weeks. Both Spring and Fall 2009 bottom trawl data will be available as usual for assessments underway now."
"We also post a subset of the survey data in two popular reports–one called a Resource Survey Report and the other a Cruise Report. We were much later than usual posting these for the Spring 2009 bottom trawl survey. In the past we've gotten these up within a month or two of releasing the master data files for researchers and managers. As we get more accustomed to working with the /Bigelow/, these will likely be posted as usual, within one or two months of getting the larger data files on line."
"The Spring 2009 Resource Survey Reports and Cruise Reports [were posted on Friday], and we hope to post the Fall 2009 survey reports by the end of May."
See the links below for the initial story and the Spring 2009 Resource Survey Reports and Cruise Reports.
The delayed posting of the stocks data from trawl surveys taken in the spring and fall of 2009 was attributed to data and calibration problems created by the 2008 replacement of NMFS' longtime research vessel, Albatross IV, with its successor, the Bigelow.
The change created a onetime "apples and oranges" situation, according to the top research scientist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center.
"We made a number of changes in the ways we did the survey," said Russel Brown, the supervisory research fishery biologist at the center at Woods Hole. He conceded "not doing a very good" job of predicting when the data vetting and analysis would be done and the material posted on the science center Web site.
A spokeswoman for the center had written in a Jan. 27 e-mail that "we expect to post the spring (2009) data in about two weeks and the autumn data by the end of February."
In a telephone interview yesterday, Brown said he expected the 2009 spring data will be available "immediately, maybe within days."
Read the Gloucester Times story
Read the Spring 2009 Resource Survey Reports and Cruise Reports