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 Essential Fish Habitat and Fishery Management By Anthony R. Wilbur, CZM Traditionally, fishery management has focused on controlling the level of fishing effort to reduce excess removal of fish, using management approaches such as catch quotas, gear restrictions, and closed areas. The 1996 amendments to the federal Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act broadened this focus by requiring fishery management councils and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries to identify and delineate Essential Fish Habitat (EFH) for all federally managed species. The EFH provisions added habitat protection to traditional management strategies, and required councils to identify adverse impacts to EFH and ensure EFH conservation and enhancement. EFH is broadly defined as "those waters and substrate necessary to fish for spawning, breeding, feeding, or growth to maturity." EFH is designated and described for all life stages (egg, larvae, juvenile, adult, and spawning adult), and covers finfish, shellfish, and squid species managed by the New England and Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Councils. The process used to identify EFH, which included analyzing relative abundance by 10' x 10' squares of latitude and longitude and designating squares with higher relative abundance as EFH, resulted in broad EFH delineations and virtually all of Massachusetts waters were designated as EFH for some species and/or life stage. An EFH can be designated as a Habitat Area of Particular Concern (HAPC) for a species or group of species when habitats and geographic areas are judged to be particularly important to the long-term productivity of a population or to be particularly vulnerable to degradation. The New England Fishery Management Council identified HAPC for juvenile Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) on the northeast peak of Georges Bank and for Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) in select rivers of Maine because of the demonstrated ecological importance of these areas to these species. A proposal for designating shallow waters of the Gulf of Maine, including Massachusetts Bays, as HAPC for juvenile cod is pending. The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries provided the background information for this proposal, which included a detailed assessment of cod's relative abundance and distribution and demonstrated that juvenile cod consistently inhabit coastal waters of Massachusetts. EFH has heightened the awareness of the value of habitat, and in many cases increased evaluation standards for habitat alteration projects in the Massachusetts coastal zone, and elsewhere, to limit impacts to important fishery habitats. The use of the EFH provision is in its early stages, but fishery and coastal resource managers are beginning to supplement traditional management approaches with habitat protection measures to foster sustainable fisheries. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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