The fisheries of the U.S. island territories in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands), Western Pacific (Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa), and the state of Hawai’i (HI) share many common qualities that present technical challenges for performing stock assessments and providing management advice. The primary challenges include limited availability of reliable data on fisheries landings and catch rates and the sparsity or absence of fisheries-independent surveys. These “data-limited” fisheries are primarily multi-species, non-commercial (subsistence, artisanal, and recreational), and include diverse fishing communities that are often geographically and sometimes culturally distanced from scientists and managers. Such fisheries require unique and innovative approaches to modeling population dynamics and generating management advice that differ from many of the highly commercial and data-rich fisheries of the mainland U.S. We propose an innovative session of full-length presentations, lightning talks, and a panel discussion that will provide a broad forum to share ongoing research, challenges, successes, and future directions in fishery-dependent data collection, scientific survey activity, community engagement, assessment science, and management of these unique island fisheries. This symposium is co-organized by members of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center (PIFSC) and Southeast Fisheries Science Center (SEFSC). Although the primary focus of this symposium is likely to be fisheries in the U.S., we welcome contributed research, ideas, and solutions for fisheries science and management from all island fisheries.
Organizer: Matt Damiano, NOAA, Southeast Fisheries Science Center, [email protected]
Co-organizers: Erin Bohaboy
Supported by: Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center (NOAA/NMFS), Southeast Fisheries Science Center (NOAA/NMFS)