Grant Will Help Fishermen Gather Ocean Data

When Aubrey Church first started her career in fisheries research, captains told her they stuck thermometers inside fish to try and learn what the temperature was on the ocean bottom. Thanks to a $2 million grant from the state, fishermen will be able to collect far more precise information over a much greater expanse of ocean. 

“Today, fishermen can have an oceanographic sensor attached to their gear that wirelessly talks to a deck box in their wheelhouse so they can see the temperature and depth profile in real time,” said Church, the policy director at Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance. “This helps them refine their fishing practices and gives them access to oceanographic data that can hopefully start to connect the dots between what they are seeing on the water, and what is happening in their fisheries.”

Church was among many partners and supporters on hand at the Fishermen’s View in Sandwich on an unseasonably warm Halloween day when the Healey-Driscoll administration announced the grant to the Fishermen’s Alliance. 

The grant, through Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech) Innovation Institute, will bring together the largest cooperative network of fishing boats and environmental sensors in the country to study rising temperatures and boost the local bluetech economy. The funds will be used to outfit 150 commercial fishing boats with 450 sensors that will aid search and rescue operations, support marine transportation planning, and study the impacts of a changing climate on commercially harvested fish species. 

“Coastal communities across Massachusetts are wrestling with an uncertain future and will need to respond to challenges brought on by the impacts of climate change,” Economic Development Secretary Yvonne Hao said in a statement. “The equipment deployed through this investment will expand our understanding of how rising temperatures are impacting our bluetech economy and coastal resiliency.”

The Fishermen’s Alliance project builds on the Environmental Monitors on Lobster Traps and Large Trawlers (eMOLT) program, started by Jim Manning who recently retired from NOAA Fisheries, which distributes low-cost sensors to fishermen throughout New England and has been collecting data since the late 1990s. The fishermen, including several from Chatham and Harwich, gathered information about the waters they fish and recorded millions of measurements that informed fish stock assessments and resulted in a model for the changing environment off the New England coastline.

Massachusetts fishermen who used the first generation of these sensors report improved catch rates, avoidance of spawning stocks and proactively moving gear to avoid “dead zones” with low oxygen levels, said Melissa Sanderson, chief operating officer at the Fishermen’s Alliance. 

“The need for additional observations and better forecasts is compounded by the rapidly changing climate, which can cause massive economic impacts on commercial fisheries,” she said. “For example, the value of the $200 million Alaska snow crab fishery has evaporated in recent years due to a population crash followed by regulatory shutdown. New research indicates that the population crash in the Bering Sea was caused by subsurface marine heatwaves, something that has been difficult to measure in real time.” 

The funds will enable Lowell Instruments, eMOLT’S long-time technology development partner, to equip commercial fishing vessels with wireless devices to record temperature, salinity, depth, and dissolved oxygen. This project will also support workforce development opportunities by training Massachusetts Maritime Academy cadets on the use of the equipment. Project partners will also develop a new curriculum for Massachusetts high school students to understand how the equipment works and what it is used for. This expansion of the eMOLT program will also provide bluetech companies with access to affordable ocean observing technology.

“Our system is a low-cost, easy-to-use system for commercial fishermen to record high-quality data that would be otherwise prohibitively expensive to collect using traditional oceanographic methods,” said Lowell Instruments president Nick Lowell.