Determining the Accuracy of Fishermen-Collected Market Category Data for Northern Black Sea Bass

general description:

To help fill in data gaps on black sea bass in the Mid-Atlantic and Southern New England regions, the CFRF and Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management established the Black Sea Bass Research Fleet in 2016. The Research Fleet comprises commercial fishermen who collect biological data on their black sea bass catch.

For the first time in 2023, data from the Research Fleet were incorporated into the Research Track Stock Assessment for northern black sea bass to improve discards-at-length estimations and age-length keys. However, Research Fleet data was not used in catch-at-length estimations due to the lack of market category information collected by the Research Fleet, which is necessary for the new base model for the black sea bass assessment.

Market categories (small, medium, large, or jumbo) are primarily determined by weight at seafood processing facilities and affect the price of black sea bass. Fishermen interact with black sea bass often and likely have a good understanding of how their landed black sea bass will be classified by processors; however, this assumption must be verified before such data can be collected and submitted for inclusion in stock assessments.

Project objectives:

This project will leverage the Black Sea Bass Research Fleet to:

  1. Determine how similarly fishermen can visually identify the market category of landed black sea bass compared to the market categories determined by seafood dealers

  2. Potentially validate the use of fishermen-collected market category data collected by the CFRF Black Sea Bass Research Fleet for incorporation into future stock assessment models to improve landings-at-length estimations

project team:

This project is supported by: