Commercial fisheries drive economic growth and vitality across the nation and are under threat from unstable fish stocks and unstable seafood markets

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration awarded a cooperative agreement to Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission for $9.306 million on October 1, 2025, under the Fisheries Data Program (CFDA 11.437) to build out an electronic monitoring (EM) pilot program for Pacific Islands longline fisheries.

The award funds deployment of EM systems to all vessels in the Pacific Islands longline fleet, establishment of data collection protocols and data infrastructure, and integration of monitoring data with national fisheries monitoring systems. The work covers the Hawaiian Archipelago and multiple U.S. jurisdictions including American Samoa, replacing reliance on human observers with electronic monitoring to document catch and interactions with species of concern while enabling optimized harvest management.

Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, an interstate compact agency headquartered in Portland, Oregon, representing California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, serves as the recipient. Performance of work occurs in Portland, Oregon. The period of performance runs from October 1, 2025, through September 30, 2028. The Fisheries Data Program provides support to state fishery agencies and interstate commissions to enhance data collection and analysis systems for coast-wide and insular area fisheries management, supplying catch, effort, economic, and biological data on federally managed species to Fishery Management Councils.

The pacific islands (PI) region, around the hawaiian archipelago and multiple US jurisdictions including american samoa, rely heavily on the commercial longline fisheries to bring in fish that are sold across the globe. Stable future harvest requires fisheries activity monitoring, which can occur following multiple methods. Currently, the PI fisheries use human observers on a subset of fishing trips to document catch and negative interactions with species of concern. This proposed work will build out a nascent pilot program for electronic monitoring (EM) of the PI longline fisheries and achieve the following outcomes: equip all vessels in the fleet with EM systems, and establish the data collection protocols, data infrastructure and data integration with national fisheries monitoring data systems. Through these outcomes, the PI longline fisheries will have the monitoring system needed to accurately monitor the fleet so that harvest is optimized. Rather than hampering fisheries harvest due to monitoring uncertainty, this program unleashes the potential of PI longline harvest by building a robust monitoring program to ensure the fleet has fish to harvest in the future.