The commercial harvest monitoring system and subsistence and recreational fishing harvest system are the two projects that the Department of Lands and Natural Resources have prioritized in the CNMI marine conservation plan recently approved by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Island Regional Office.
These two projects are expected to cost CNMI a total of $124,000 for the initial year of implementation, and $102,000 annually thereafter.
The funding will come from payments and fines collected from foreign fishing vessels venturing into the Exclusive Economic Zone surrounding the CNMI.
Jack Ogumoro, the CNMI’s on-site coordinator of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, said some of the projects they have outlined in the marine conservation plan are already being implemented.
The harvest monitoring projects, he said, have yet to be carried out.
The commercial harvest monitoring system aims to develop and maintain a simple database of commercial fishery data that can be used for further analysis and reporting, he said.
The project involves the creation of a foreign fishery information system and domestic fishery harvest database.
The goal of the subsistence and recreational fishing harvest monitoring system, for its part, is to conduct periodic surveys of anglers and collect data on subsistence and recreational fishing effort and expenditure.
This involves an “enhancement of data collection capability and the establishment of a subsistence and recreational fishery harvest database.”
