Historical California Fish Landings Data, 19301968 Continuation proposal

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Historical California Fish Landings Data,
1930-1968(Continuation proposal)

• Alec D. MacCall and Don Pearson
• NMFS/Southwest Fisheries Science Center
• Meisha Key
• California Department of Fish and Game

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Scientific Rationale

• Marine organisms are integrators of their
  environment
• Biology can inform the physics
• Fish distribution (movements) and reproductive
  success reflect ecosystem conditions and
  processes
• Especially subsurface conditions and structure
• This is a rare biological data set with
  sufficient detail and resolution to compare with
  physical observations
• Physics can inform the biology/management
• Environmentally explicit (EE) assessment and
  harvest policy is the ideal
• Sardines are one of very few fish stocks with EE
  management
• We have a temperature-dependent harvest
  policybut it needs tuning
• The Pacific Coast has an intense low-frequency
  signal to work with
• Many more fish stocks would benefit from EE
  harvest policies
• Currently available time series are too short and
  recent to support

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Scientific Rationale (2)

• Sardine productivity (slope of bottom graph) is
  closely associated with the PDO (top)
• Mechanisms are still not clear
• Appear to be related to strength of the
  California Current
• Proposal fills in 1931-1968
• When and how will it change again? What should
  we do?
• Not only sardines, but many other fisheries are
  influenced
• Groundfish now disaster status
• Many salmon stocks now listed under Endangered
  Species Act

Individual fish landings
Monthly species summaries
Data already captured
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General Approach for Project
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Data Sample

• Images are microfiche photos of paper printouts
• Page format
• Strip format (ca. 9ft)
• This is a fairly typical image taken from the top
  of a strip
• Original microfiche is a little easier to read,
  especially for lightly printed numbers

A monthly column sum
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Scope of FY06 and FY07 Tasks

• Given the large quantity of data, project was
  divided into two parts accordingly
• Monthly Summaries (2006) - Useful by themselves
  and for subsequently checking individual landings
  data
• Began in September, with completion possible in
  next two months
• Individual Landings Data (funding is requested in
  FY 2007)
• Again, begin with most recent year and begin
  backwards