AOA Aquaculture Atlas Follow Up Meeting with CFSB Minutes
January 11, 2022 12PM PST
Attendance:
Chris Voss, Bernard Friedman, Gary Burke, Kim Selkoe, Michael Harrington, Mike Nelson, Jame Morris (NOAA), Ken Riley (NOAA), Diane Windham (NOAA), Gretchen Bath (NOAA), Keighley Lane (NOAA)
Notes: Ava Schulenberg
Agenda:
This meeting is an opportunity for folks from NOAA NCCOS to walk through the methodologies and results from the Aquaculture Opportunity Area Atlas for the Southern California Bight and to answer any questions CFSB may have.
Diane opened the meeting on January 11, 2022 at 12:00pm. Meeting was held via Google Hangout.
James Morris opens up the meeting by stating that the model is biased for fishing, he emphasizes how much their team cares about fishing and most of them come from fishing families and have a long history of supporting commercial fishing.
Depth (10-150m from shore) and distance from shore (25nm max) parameters were for all types of aquaculture. Held 395 stakeholder meetings that helped to develop a suitability map aka a heat map where they overlaid a grid where they look at individual compatibility scores for each grid cell, which represents 10 acres (e.g. a hard bottomed cell area would get a score of 0 because it is not a good zone for aquaculture). After performing a cluster analysis and using a precision siting model, top scoring cells are identified and the final suitability scores are placed on each of those AOA options and those top 10 are what they put forward in the atlas.
Bernard prompts James with the idea of discussing more fishing-based implications for our community. James insists on finishing their presentation first and then we will move into discussion.
After analyzing the highest scoring cells, they discovered three primary areas of highest opportunity that are slightly south of SB, off Ventura coast, and then Santa Monica. James is confident this is one of the most dense marine spatial studies ever conducted given the amount of data layers they have processed.
James now opens up the meeting to discuss with CFSB.
Gary asks why Santa Monica was nixed as an option and James lets him know that it actually was not nixed and was identified as an area with at least two zones that scored highly for suitability. Gary expresses his concern for the areas given that they are heavily used for commercial fishing and thinks there will be a lot of conflict. James responds by showing fishing data and ensuring that they have taken all of this into account and used a large volume of VMS data during their review process.
Diane says the executive order led NOAA to identify aquaculture areas under a NEPA process. Now that the atlas is complete, the next step is for NOAA to publish a notice of intent to prepare an EIS which will be published in the federal register which will have a 60 day public scoping with it which will be the first opportunity to provide public input into the process and they welcome all feedback and comments. The two year clock starts when they publish the notice of intent. Keighley will send a timeline with more certainty as we get closer to that time which we will share out.
Kim has questions about how fisheries data were treated - She said she looked at the lists and maps and she says there are some glaring errors in the data in some of them and suspects there could be less glaring but still important errors in others, so she is curious about what kind of vetting was done in order to use this data. She asks if they are going to be collecting information and feedback on the maps and modifying them? James responds saying the programmatic EIS will be receiving public comment which will be the next opportunity to raise your hand. He urges everyone to speak up if they see something erroneous in the data so they can correct what they need to. Kim says there are definitely fishing maps for species that are not fished in those areas, but that she doesn’t want to go into specifics at this time, to which James responds saying send it to him and they will review. Kim also notices that the more layers you include the more expanded the scale of possible values are, so when you put in extra fishing layers it takes away from the importance of the key fisheries that would be most harmed by this new use, so she thinks in terms of a way to manage their data and look at broad pictures, these cumulative maps work well, but when thinking about socioeconomic or environmental consequences, looking at these highly summarized views are more harmful than helpful in certain ways, so these sorts of maps are a starting point not an ending point to doing these types of analyses. She says there is a need to identify which fisheries are most impacted in terms of losing highly valued fishing grounds or a larger fraction of their fishing grounds. Some gear types require a larger buffer around installations than others. Look at the value of the fisheries for the adjacent ports in the Channel and avoid impacts to the highest value fisheries. For instinct the halibut trawl fishery is already very constrained and is important locally. You need to attach dollars to what losses will take place. Those are analyses you should present us with so we can make fair assessments of the impacts to fisheries.
Diane urges everyone to speak up when they publish the notice of intent because that comment period will be the first opportunity to raise concerns. Diane says she is interested in making the connection between their sociologists, economists, and other fishing groups, and she hopes to be able to continue the dialogue and get a lot of written submissions so they can have their work cut out for them.
Kim wonders if there’s a date where it’s too late to modify the dots? James responds saying that to her point, this is the starting point, and that these locations will likely change based on reviews and input that wasn’t available during the screening process. He says he knows how valuable Kim’s opinions are during the review process and he encourages her to get them the information early so they can all collectively review public input on top of that thereafter. James points out that they did not attempt to weigh individual layers due to difficulty. He also says they allowed double counting for fisheries by not excluding VMS data and AIS data because it conserved fishing a bit more. He says Kim is absolutely asking the right questions about structure and weight. Ken says that these concerns are consistent with the recreational fishing community as well as seen on their call prior to this one.
Kim urges them to hone in on the gillnet fishery in particular. She also says that in terms of capturing the value and loss of grounds to these fisheries and looking at the economic value of the fishery, it’s really important to assess these analyses in a zoomed-in way. We don’t have funding to do this and it would allow fisheries to be engaged in a better way. She says putting some numbers to it would help compare these different fisheries.
Kim asks about how they mitigate when doing spatial analyses to which Ken responds saying that they have complex teams (anthropologists, scientists, economists, etc.) they’ve hired to capture and work on this type of information including economic impacts. Ken pulls up a slide showing shrimp trawling as an example of how they use precision siting analyses to minimize interactions of the AOA with shrimp trawling. Kim says it would be ideal if we had access to the data maps at resolution that would allow us to look at this or if they can put a compilation together of the raw data of key fisheries with their clusters overlaid on them because different fisheries are more or less resilient/fragile and to lose a little bit more area means more based on the fishery. Kim also points out that VMS in our neck of the woods is not that common and there are a lot of fishermen who don’t have it. Ken also notes that due to proprietary information, not everything that was in the cake mix is something they can share even though we see the whole cake. There are certain things he says that they cannot disclose due to confidentiality.
Chris thanks everyone for having this meeting and offers the dockside perspective saying that we’re all facing a lot of different challenges right now that are coming at our community that are coming from the federal government. He said they did a great job doing the analyses that they were tasked to do and we’re getting very familiar with the NEPA process because of offshore wind too. He urges them to be sensitive to the fact that as fishermen we are now being inundated with the need to speak up and work with state agencies on a number of issues (MPA, offshore wind, chumash sanctuary, and now open ocean aquaculture, etc.), so we are dying by 1000 cuts and they need to be aware of the fact that we’re all dealing with a major cumulative impact that has accelerated in the past couple of years. He wants to make sure there is a concrete mitigation structure that can help our fleets survive, because we intend to raise this issue as we proceed. Diane responds stating that she appreciates this reminder and looks forward to keeping an ongoing open dialogue.
In closing, Keighley reminds everyone that there is a listening session on 1/18 with slides that are similar to what we saw today but if there are others that would’ve liked to be here today, it would be a great opportunity for anyone else to get up to speed.
Meeting adjourned at 1:16pm.