Habitat Analysis
 
 Danielle Brzezinski, Yong Chen, James Wilson,assisting WHOI's Scott Gallager and Amber York and the HabCam Team

Abstract

     The Closed Areas on Georges Bank were originally closed to help rebuild groundfish stocks. The absence of fishing allowed scallops as well to flourish in these areas. The abundance of scallops led to a
special access program for the scallop fleet to harvest within these areas. It also led to an increased level of research, including underwater video photography in this area. We are using data collected by WHOI's HabCam to compare epifaunal benthic communities between fished and unfished areas in Closed Area I, while also processing images to train an auto-identifying program that the researchers from WHOI are developing. The abundance of data calls for an empirically-determined level of sampling of the images and a more efficient method for processing them.
　

Stakeholder Participation

Danielle Brzezinski, James Wilson, Yong Chen

Abstract

     Insufficient and unrepresentative participation in voluntary public hearings and policy discussions has been problematic since Aristotle's
time. In fisheries, research has shown that involvement is dominated by financailly-resourceful and extreme-opnion stakeholders, and that it also tends to advantage groups with a lower cost of attendance (Osborne et al. 2000). Consequently, remote stakeholders feel isolated from the process. We are reviewing the New England Fishery Management Council's sign-in sheets for 2003-06. Participants' travel distance, costs, and association are estimated separately for the groundfish, scallop, and herring industries and connections to policy are studied.
The results show a strong correlation between attendees and their distance traveled (proxy for cost of attendance) with some evidence for influence on policy cost.

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