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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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