Steven J. Barbeaux

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | NOAA · Alaska Fisheries Science Center

An alternate management system is introduced which uses seasonal and spatially explicit multi-species quotas generated from small-scale cooperative fishery acoustic surveys to manage the Aleutian Islands walleye pollock (Gadus chalcogrammus) fishery while limiting impacts on the endangered Western stock of Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus). Th...

Since 1982, the Alaska Fisheries Science Center has conducted standardized bottom trawl surveys of the eastern Bering Sea (EBS) shelf area between 20 m and 200 m in summer (May - August). During these surveys researchers have collected species composition and bottom temperature for all tows as well as measurements from all fish species encountered....

Walleye pollock (Gadus chalcogrammus) support a large commercial fishery in the eastern Bering Sea despite large interannual and decadal swings in population abundance. These oscillations challenge the fishery, prompting significant effort directed to understanding the species and its recruitment. Conceptual paradigms of walleye pollock recruitment...

Research surveys provide the foundation for sound, effective management of fishery resources and are integral to observing fish population trends. However, bias in sampling gear and operating hours may confound observed shifts in species distributions over space and time. Within North Pacific waters off Alaska, Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) sup...

In this paper, we compile estimates of cod size distributions based on zooarchaeological data and contemporary length-frequency data to look at variability in size composition through time across the North Pacific, from the northern Kuril Islands through the Aleutian Islands to southeast Alaska. The results suggest that a strong longitudinal trend...

There is increasing consensus of the need for ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM), which accounts for trophic interactions and environmental conditions when managing exploited marine resources. Continued development and testing of analytical tools that are expected to address EBFM needs are essential for guiding the management of fisheries...

It has been more than 100 years since fish were first described to move to deep waters as size increased, termed ‘Heincke's Law’. However, large‐scale studies on ontogenetic shifts are rare compared with increased reports of distributional changes in response to temperature, often confounded with the ontogenetic shifts. We fill this gap by examinin...

Over the past two decades, numerous ecosystem surveys and process studies have emerged to monitor and assess the large marine ecosystems of Alaska. Several regional collaborative integrated ecosystem research projects (IERPs) were conducted to gain understanding of fish population fluctuations in relation to the surrounding environment. The Gulf of...

This report evaluates how closely the North Pacific Observer Program (Observer Program) was able to monitor commercial fisheries in Alaska relative to the monitoring goals set in the 2020 Annual Deployment Plan (ADP).

A marine heatwave caused the total biomass of Gulf of Alaska (GOA) Pacific cod to plummet by 67% from 2015 to 2018. Based on the results from GOA Pacific cod stock assessment model, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council cut the GOA Pacific cod total allowable catch (TAC) by 80% in 2018. This study uses a 10-region multi-regional social accou...

Fisheries scientists and managers must track rapid shifts in fish spatial distribution to mitigate stakeholder conflict and optimize survey designs, and these spatial shifts result in part from animal movement. Information regarding animal movement can be obtained from selection experiments, tagging studies, flux through movement gates (e.g. acoust...

Some of the longest and most comprehensive marine ecosystem monitoring programs were established in the Gulf of Alaska following the environmental disaster of the Exxon Valdez oil spill over 30 years ago. These monitoring programs have been successful in assessing recovery from oil spill impacts, and their continuation decades later has now provide...

Description of how well observers and Electronic monitoring deployments performed in 2019.

In 2014–2016 an unprecedented warming event in the North Pacific Ocean triggered changes in ecosystem of the Gulf of Alaska (GOA) impacting fisheries management. The marine heatwave was noteworthy in its geographical extent, depth range, and persistence, with evidence of shifts in species distribution and reduced productivity. In 2017 a groundfish...

Advances in ocean observing technologies and modeling provide the capacity to revolutionize the management of living marine resources. While traditional fisheries management approaches like single-species stock assessments are still common, a global effort is underway to adopt ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) approaches. These approaches...

Analyses performed to evaluate whether observer and electronic monitoring was deployed into fishing activities in the North Pacific (Alaska) according to anticipated design. Includes responses to Council advisory bodies and recommendations to improve the deployment design for the upcoming year (2020).

Although climate‐induced shifts in fish distribution have been widely reported at the population level, studies that account for ontogenetic shifts and sub‐regional differences when assessing responses are rare. In this study, groundfish distributional changes were assessed at different size classes by species within nine sub‐regions using indicato...

In recent decades, Arrowtooth Flounder (Atheresthes stomias) has been the most abundant groundfish in the Gulf of Alaska and an apex predator with trophic links to many pelagic and benthic species. Its abundance and trophic status implies that a small change in survival may result in substantial uncertainty in the ecosystem, with potentially large...

This report contains the analyses and findings of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s Fisheries Monitoring and Analysis Division’s Observer Science Committee (OSC) on the efficiency and effectiveness of observer deployment following the 2017 Annual Deployment Plan. Responses to comments by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Science an...

An alternate management system is introduced which uses seasonal and spatially explicit multi-species quotas generated from small-scale cooperative fishery acoustic surveys to manage the Aleutian Islands walleye pollock (Gadus chalcogrammus) fishery while limiting impacts on the endangered Western stock of Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus). Th...

This report contains the analyses and findings of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s Fisheries Monitoring and Analysis Division’s Observer Science Committee on the efficiency and effectiveness of observer deployment following the 2016 Annual Deployment Plan (ADP). Responses to comments by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Science an...

In Alaska, commercial fisheries have been implicated in the slow recovery of the endangered Western stock of Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus; hereafter, W-SSL). To address this issue the Aleutian Islands walleye pollock (Gadus chalcogrammus; hereafter, pollock) fishery was closed in 1999. Although the fishery was reopened in 2005 to accommoda...

Summary of Changes in Assessment Inputs Changes in the model There were no changes made to the base model which has the same configuration as model 15.1 from 2015 except the addition of catch and size composition data from both the longline and trawl fisheries for 2016 as well as the addition of the 2016 Slope trawl survey index value and size comp...

Executive Summary Model 15.1 (same as the 2015 accepted model) is presented for ABC/OFL advice. The 2014 survey age composition data, 2016 Aleutian Islands (AI) survey biomass estimate, and updated 2015 and 2016 fishery catch estimates comprised the new data for this year's assessment. As in the previous six years there has been no directed fishing...

Relative to last year's assessment, the following changes have been made in the current assessment: Changes in the input data 1. Federal and state catch data for 2015 were updated and preliminary federal and state catch data for 2016 were included; 2. Commercial federal and state fishery size composition data for 2015 were updated, and preliminary...

This report contains the analyses and findings of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s Fisheries Monitoring and Analysis Division’s Observer Science Committee on the efficiency and effectiveness of observer deployment following the 2015 Annual Deployment Plan (ADP). Responses to comments by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Science an...

Scientists in the Fishery Interaction Team (FIT), established in 2001, study the potential impacts of commercial groundfish fishing on the endangered Steller sea lion in Alaska. Our overarching hypothesis is that commercial fishing results in localized depletion of Steller sea lion prey. FIT studies center on the three dominant groundfish prey of S...

In 2013 the United States/Republic of Korea Fisheries Panel funded an exchange of experts from the Republic of Korea and the United States to evaluate possible cooperative research projects involving the Korean managed fisheries. Besides collecting data useful for fisheries management, the cooperative research projects were aimed at fostering commu...

The development of spatially and temporally explicit fishery management system designed to limit fishery impacts on protected species based on cooperative acoustic surveys is explored. In Alaska, commercial fisheries have been implicated in the slow recovery of the endangered Western stock of Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus; hereafter W-SSL)....

This report summarizes the scientific achievements of Project B62 and B91. This report serves to also be the final report for the in-kind project B91 (which is not formally required to have a stand-alone report). State-of-the-art statistical methods were applied to estimate the functional responses of forage fish and commercial fish to changing c...

Barbeaux, S. J., Horne, J. K., and Dorn, M. W. 2013. Characterizing walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma) winter distribution from opportunistic acoustic data. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 70: 1162–1173. In 2003, acoustic data from 25 000 km of ship track lines were collected from two fishing vessels participating in the eastern Bering Sea w...

This year the BSAI Greenland turbot (Reinhardtius hippoglossoides) stock assessment will be lead by Dr. Steven Barbeaux. Although the stock will continue to be modeled using the same software as previous assessments (Stock Synthesis 3), there are a number of changes within the model. This paper is meant to guide you through changes in the Greenland...

This paper examines how climate variations influence the boundaries of suitable ocean habitat, and how these changes affect the spatial distribution and interactions between forage fishes in the southeastern Bering Sea shelf. The study focuses on the summer distributions of forage fish age-0 and age-1 walleye pollock, Theragra chalcogramma, and cap...

Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) have one of the most extensive global distributions of any cetacean, but distribution and movement patterns vary significantly between sexes. Adult male sperm whales are predominantly solitary and have an expansive distribution, whereas females and their offspring typically form groups of both sexes, remaining...

Although the International Council on the Exploration of the Sea Working Group on Fisheries Acoustics, Science and Technology provided guidance on using commercial fishing vessels for collecting opportunistic acoustic data (OAD), an approach for working with these non-traditional datasets has not been addressed. This dissertation demonstrates metho...

Faunce, C. H., and Barbeaux, S. J. 2011. The frequency and quantity of Alaskan groundfish catcher-vessel landings made with and without an observer. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 68: 1757–1763. The North Pacific Groundfish Observer Programme (NPGOP) is one of the largest on-board fishery-monitoring programmes in the world, and the data are used...

The objective of our project was to investigate whether cooperative biomass surveys can be an effective way to manage fisheries at the local scales that are important to predators such as Steller sea lions. To satisfy this objective we conducted wintertime acoustic surveys of pollock in the central Aleutian Islands from a NOAA research vessel and f...

Acoustic density data were collected from three commercial fishing vessels participating in the 2003 eastern Bering Sea walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma) fishery. Unique challenges encountered with these data included: 1) uncalibrated data from each vessel, 2) no formal sampling design, 3) data volumes that exceeded computing capacity, 4) unb...

Executive Summary The focus of this chapter is on the Eastern Bering Sea (EBS) region. The Aleutian Islands region (Chapter 1A) and the Bogoslof Island area (Chapter 1B) are presented as separate sections. Summary of major changes Changes in the input data The primary changes include:  The 2010 NMFS summer bottom-trawl survey (BTS) abundance at ag...

The focus of this chapter is on the Eastern Bering Sea (EBS) region. The Aleutian Islands region (Chapter 1A) and the Bogoslof Island area (Chapter 1B) are presented as separate sections. Changes in the input data The 2007 NMFS summer bottom-trawl survey (BTS) abundance at age estimates were computed and included for this assessment. The NOAA ship...

In 1999 the North Pacific Groundfish Observer Program (NPGOP) changed sampling protocols in order to optimize available observer resources. As the NPGOP modifies their program to meet an increasing number of objectives, it is important to ensure that new protocols continue to meet previously defined objectives. In this study, we evaluate how the ch...

The goals of this research were to investigate geographic patterns in the Aleutian Island region's demersal ichthyofauna and to determine whether they reflected the physical and biological oceanographic patterns documented by other authors in this volume. The analyses were structured according to the level of organization: at the community level, p...

Commercial echosounders are used to collect acoustic data from fishing vessels during normal fishing operations. In the winter of 2003 we collected approximately 32,000 km of backscatter data from three commercial fishing vessels participating in the southeastern Bering Sea Alaska pollock fishery. Although these data were not collected on a systema...

Executive Summary The focus of this chapter is on the Eastern Bering Sea (EBS) region. The Aleutian Islands region (Chapter 1A) and the Bogoslof Island area (Chapter 1B) are presented as separate sections. Changes in the input data The 2006 NMFS summer bottom-trawl survey (BTS) abundance at age estimates were computed and included for this assessme...

Executive Summary In 2008, Bogoslof pollock were moved to a biennial assessment schedule to coincide with the new frequency of trawl surveys conducted in this region. Presently, they are planned to occur on odd-numbered years, and for these years a more complete assessment of this stock component will be conducted. The following updates all availab...

Executive Summary Development of a detailed age-structured stock assessment for the Aleutian Islands Region pollock began in 2003 (Barbeaux et al. 2003) and has since been developed further (Barbeaux et al. 2008). In the initial study the near shore areas of the Aleutian chain island were isolated and identified as the Near, Rat, and Andreanof Isla...