GULF OF MEXICO FISHERY MANAGEMENT COUNCIL
HABITAT PROTECTION COMMITTEE MEETING
Courtyard Marriott Gulfport, Mississippi
June 15, 2010
VOTING MEMBERS
Myron Fischer (designee for Randy Pausina) Louisiana
Joe Hendrix Texas
Rick Mach USCG
Damon McKnight Louisiana
Julie Morris Florida
NON-VOTING MEMBERS
Kevin Anson (designee for Vernon Minton) Alabama
Roy Crabtree NMFS, SERO, St. Petersburg, Florida
Robert Gill Florida
John Greene, Jr. Alabama
Tom McIlwain Mississippi
Harlon Pearce Louisiana
William Perret (designee for William Walker) Mississippi
Michael Ray Texas
Robin Riechers Texas
Ed Sapp Florida
Bob Shipp Alabama
Larry Simpson GSMFC
William Teehan (designee for Ken Haddad) Florida
Kay Williams Mississippi
STAFF
Steven Atran Population Dynamics Statistician
Steve Bortone Executive Director
Assane Diagne Economist
Trish Kennedy Administrative Assistant
Shepherd Grimes NOAA General Counsel
Richard Leard Deputy Executive Director
Phyllis Miranda Secretary
Charlene Ponce Public Information Officer
Cathy Readinger Administrative Officer
Carrie Simmons Fishery Biologist
OTHER PARTICIPANTS
Dave Allison Oceana, Washington, D.C.
Pam Anderson PCBA, Panama City, FL
Holly Binns Pew Environmental Group
Donna Brooks GFA, FL
Glen Brooks GFA, FL
Mike Colby Clearwater Com. Marine Association, Clearwater, FL
David Cupka SAFMC
Dave Donaldson GSMFC
Russell Dunn NOAA, St. Petersburg, FL
Tracy Dunn NOAA GC, St. Petersburg, FL
Ben Fairey Orange Beach Fishing Association, Orange Beach, AL
Troy Frady Orange Beach, AL
Claudia Friess Ocean Conservancy
Chad Hansen PEW, Crawfordville, FL
Dennis Heinemann Ocean Conservancy
Darrell Hingle Hitchcock, TX
Ralph Hode GSMFC, Ocean Springs, MS
Peter Hood NMFS, St. Petersburg, FL
Jill Jensen NOAA
Bill Kelly FKCFA, Marathon, FL
Chris Koenig FSU, FL
Ron Lukens High Springs, FL
Rich Malinowski NMFS, St. Petersburg, FL
Dave McKinney TX
Michael Miglini Corpus Christi, TX
Russell Nelson CCA, FL
Robert Novotny FL
Dennis O’Hern FRA, St. Petersburg, FL
Heather Paffe EDF
Hal Robbins NOAA GC, St. Petersburg, FL
Steven Sail Miami, FL
Phil Steele NOAA Fisheries
Ed Swindell Hammond, LA
T.J. Tate Reef Fish Shareholder’s Alliance
Bill Tucker Dunedin, FL
Donald Waters Pensacola, FL
Wayne Werner FL
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The Habitat Protection Committee of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council convened in the Coastal Ballroom of the Courtyard Marriott, Gulfport, Mississippi, Tuesday afternoon, June 15, 2010 and was called to order at 4:00 p.m. by Chairman Joe Hendrix.
ADOPTION OF AGENDA AND APPROVAL OF MINUTES
CHAIRMAN JOE HENDRIX: We’ll call the committee to order and we have Hendrix, Morris, Coast Guard representative, Damon McKnight, and Myron Fischer. We’ll call the committee to order and I’ll call for the Adoption of the Agenda. Any changes or modifications or additions to the agenda? If none, we’ll accept the agenda as published here. Any changes or additions to the minutes? We’ll accept the minutes as recorded.
UPDATE ON FIVE-YEAR REVIEW OF ESSENTIAL FISH HABITAT
Jeff Rester is here today to give us an update on the Five-Year Review of the Essential Fish Habitat Fishery Management Plan and, Jeff, you’re going to give us an outline today of the current process?
MR. JEFF RESTER: Yes, just discuss a little bit of what we have completed so far and what we have plans to complete and when. What we’re going to do is talk about the five-year EFH review and the reason why we’re doing this is it’s required within the EFH provisions that every five years, or earlier, if you want to, you need to look at the information contained with your EFH Amendment and make sure that it’s the most up-to-date information available.
What we’ve started off doing is just going through the old amendment and reviewing existing EFH descriptions and designations by life stage for errors and this is just an example of one of them.
We originally worked on the amendment before and it was never pointed out to us that there’s actually a dam here at the end of Lake Rousseau in Florida, on the Florida Barge Canal. Everything that’s in the red up to this way in Lake Rousseau should not be EFH, because it’s all fresh water and there is a dam there.
There are a few other instances like that, but also, another step that we wanted to take was evaluate new information available since the 2005 amendment. We need to look at species added to or eliminated from the fishery management unit and also changes to the status of managed species, whether they’re overfished or rebuilt, and look at new information about species or life stage distribution, abundance, density, productivity, or habitat associations.
As far as new information, what we’ve found is that we can now produce larval distribution maps of things from the SEAMAP plankton surveys.
We can produce larval distribution maps for Spanish mackerel, king mackerel, cobia, little tunny, dolphin, red drum, red snapper, gray snapper, wenchman, vermilion snapper, and gray triggerfish. Unfortunately, with the level of identification that we can do for some of these larvae, we’re not able to get down to the species level, but for groupers we can get down to the Serranidae family. For tilefish, we can get down to the family level and also, for the amberjacks, we can get it down to the genus level.
For the shrimp, we can identify them as penaeid larvae. They’re working on identifying those further down and also for the spiny lobster and stone crab. We are able to do some of that.
Here’s some of the SEAMAP data from some of the surveys and looking at the distribution of king mackerel and also for Spanish mackerel.
One thing we haven’t designated in the past was deepwater coral. We haven’t looked at that in the Gulf of Mexico, even though there are significant amounts of deepwater coral, lophelia, madrepora, and also oculina. A significant amount of research has been done in the past ten years on deepwater corals here in the Gulf of Mexico.
This just shows coral distribution that we had in the 2005 amendment, all of these yellow areas, some of the banks, northwestern banks and the south Texas fishing banks. Then also where they’ve recorded lophelia, madrepora, and also oculina in the Gulf. These colors aren’t showing up real well, but there’s oculina over here and there’s also some, perhaps, other instances of that, but out there in deeper water. It’s something we can look at.
One of the other things we wanted to look at is to determine possible new methodologies for designating EFH and this is being handled by John Froeschke there at the council office. The 2005 designations were based upon the higher species densities from the 1985 NOAA Data Atlas.
New methods could possibly improve or refine these EFH designations. The Northeast Fisheries Science Center had a habitat evaluation workgroup that went and reviewed sixteen potential methodologies for designating EFH and they recommended generalized additive models.
Again, John is working on this and a GAM is simply a flexible statistical method to model species habitat relationships. You look at species distributions and you look at the habitats that you have information on out there, environmental parameters, and put it into a model and it will give you back a distribution of where it thinks that you would find those species.
Here we’re using SEAMAP data and John has run this for summer distribution of brown shrimp and also fall distribution of brown shrimp and it’s kind of misleading up here.
The way we’ve designated it in the past was for the Shrimp FMPs that included more than one species, but you can see where you could go in and possibly state that you want to just look at the higher areas for brown shrimp distribution and maybe the nursery areas also, but it gives you the ability to look at that and perhaps find areas that are truly more essential. This is just a graph of predicted versus actual catch for that model.
You can combine these relationships with maps of known habitat attributes to inform research management decisions. You can look at incorporating this into ecosystem-based fisheries management and also a variety of other purposes.
One of the considerations would be our data availability and that possibly could be limiting for some species. That’s one of the things that we need to consider.
Also, what we want to do is evaluate whether EFH should be designated by species or by FMP. Currently, it is designated by FMP. Like I said, for the Shrimp FMP you have shrimp EFH there and it’s not necessarily essential for all the species that are managed.
We want to look at whether that could be broken down -- In talking with National Marine Fisheries Service, that was one of the things, when they go and review projects, that they would perhaps like to have, is the ability to state that not only is this area essential for shrimp that it’s for these particular species or all these different species and when you come in and state that instead of just having this for a couple of FMPs that it’s essential for perhaps twenty to twenty-five species that some of these resource agencies would get the point that it is very important habitat.
Also, what we want to do is make recommendations on whether the EFH descriptions should be updated and review any changes or new information on non-fishing impacts that may adversely affect EFH and also review any changes or new information on fishing impacts that may adversely affect EFH.
What we want to do is look at, in the past five years, whether there’s been any changes on where, when, or how gear is used in the fishery, improved information about how gear is used, and new information about the effects of gear on habitat. I’ve done a literature search on these fishing impacts and have a little bit over sixty references in the past five years.
Not all of them are germane to fisheries here in the Gulf of Mexico, but also, we wanted to look at some of the data that was used in the 2005 amendment and compare that to what’s currently going on within the fisheries.
As we all know, with shrimp it’s declined tremendously in the past ten years and there’s no telling what this line is going to look like here in the next couple of years there, but that would give us a handle on potential fishing impacts or problems that may be seen.
Also, one of the things that we need to look at in our five-year review is habitat areas of particular concern. We’ve designated those for the Flower Garden Banks, the Florida Middle Grounds, the Tortugas North and South Ecological Reserves, the Madison-Swanson Marine Reserve, Pulley Ridge, and the Northwestern Gulf of Mexico Reefs and Banks.
We need to determine if those current HAPC designations are adequate or if areas need to be removed or added or potentially modified.
What we have to have is a draft ready for your review at the August council meeting. This report must be submitted to the National Marine Fisheries Service by the end of the year and the National Marine Fisheries Service is going to provide a letter back to the council which states whether or not they consider the five-year review complete and it will present their assessment of the results and the review and provide recommendations for future action.
After this process, we could look and see if the EFH Amendment could or should be updated next year if it’s needed. That concludes my report.
CHAIRMAN HENDRIX: Thank you, Jeff. In this report that you’re going to prepare for the next meeting, Jeff, do you foresee having a list of changes included or recommended modifications and in what form we may need to put those in, whether it’s going to have to be a plan amendment or you and John are going to work on this?
MR. RESTER: We’re going to have in the report a very detailed list of our findings. We can make a little summary of it as far as recommendations or as far as changes or something like that and then after the process, we could decide how we’re going to proceed with National Marine Fisheries Service. Once it’s okay by them, whether we want to go with a full-blown update of the amendment or how we want to proceed with that.
CHAIRMAN HENDRIX: Thank you. Any questions or additional information from other council members? Any other business to come before this committee?
OTHER BUSINESS
MS. JULIE MORRIS: We had a conversation at a previous meeting about whether U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was going to continue participating in this process and has there been any news on that? It’s both this committee and another committee that nobody has been participating in from U.S. Fish and Wildlife.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR STEVE BORTONE: I wrote a letter and received no response yet, except that they would send a response, but that hasn’t happened yet and that’s been about two months.
CHAIRMAN HENDRIX: At one time she sent us a letter saying she was not going to participate.
MR. LARRY SIMPSON: That was my comment. She said that since Doug had left that they would probably not be there unless there was a specific need for them to be there, whereas Doug was involved a little bit more and integrated and consistent.
CHAIRMAN HENDRIX: Thank you. Any other business or any other topics of discussion we need to bring up under the committee? Then I guess we’re adjourned.
(Whereupon, the meeting adjourned at 4:12 p.m., June 15, 2010.)
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