Commercial Fishing Performance Measures
These performance measures show trends in key indicators of social and economic performance for commercial fishing activity taking place throughout the Northeast region for species managed by the New England and Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Councils. Given our focus on commercial fishing activity for species managed by the Fishery Management Councils, fisheries that are managed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), such as Lobster, were not included in the performance metrics due to incomplete vessel level data. Red crab was excluded due to confidentiality concerns, along with fishing activity that takes place exclusively in state waters (0-3 nautical miles).
The economic performance indicators assign every trip found in the dealer and vessel trip reports to a unique Fishery Management Plan (FMP). A trip is assigned to an FMP if more than 50% of its revenue comes from species included in the FMP. This may yield different results than shown in other reports. However, by doing so, we remove any double counting of trip revenue and fishing effort among the various FMP's and our estimates of total revenue and effort by FMP sum to the region-wide totals. All revenue figures are in 2023 dollars based on the GDP implicit price deflator. This allows comparison of revenue between time periods using a consistent dollar value.
The social performance indicator approach calculates the commercial fishing engagement index for each community using the commercial pounds and value landed by FMP, the number of dealers or first receivers associated with each FMP, and the number of commercial permits for each FMP as found in National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) landings data. This may yield different results than shown in other analysis. The use of this index rather than any of the variables alone is a more holistic approach as it provides a multifaceted characterization of fishing communities that enables the reporting of commercial fishing activity in communities where confidentiality may otherwise be a concern.
