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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Fisheries, Aquaculture and Living Resources
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2024.1426756
This article is part of the Research Topic Design Change to Fishery Independent Surveys: When to Adjust and How to Account For It View all 12 articles

Impacts of survey design on a Gulf of Mexico bottom longline survey and the transition to a unified, stratified -random design

Provisionally accepted
Jill M Hendon Jill M Hendon 1*Eric Hoffmayer Eric Hoffmayer 2Adam Pollack Adam Pollack 2John Mareska John Mareska 3Fernando Fernando Martinez-Andrade Fernando Fernando Martinez-Andrade 4Jeff Rester Jeff Rester 5Theodore S Switzer Theodore S Switzer 6Zachary C Zuckerman Zachary C Zuckerman 7
  • 1 University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, United States
  • 2 Southeast Fisheries Science Center (NOAA), Miami, Florida, United States
  • 3 Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Enterprise, Alabama, United States
  • 4 Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Austin, Texas, United States
  • 5 Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission, Ocean Springs, Mississippi, United States
  • 6 Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, St. Petersburg, Florida, United States
  • 7 Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The Southeast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program (SEAMAP) Bottom Longline (BLL) survey was established to provide a nearshore complement to the offshore National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) BLL survey. SEAMAP state partners (i.e., Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) used identical gear and sampling protocol to NMFS; however, temporal window, sampling universe, sampling frequency, and station selection were determined independently by each state based on available resources and capabilities. Although each state collected high quality data, the lack of a unified design complicated the efforts to combine state partner data to develop an index of abundance for stock assessment purposes. To improve the value of the survey and prioritize the quality and utility of the resultant data, the SEAMAP BLL survey was modified to implement a unified design that included consistency in spatial coverage and sampling frequency, and proportional allocation of sampling effort. Data from the early (2008-2014) and modified (2015-2021) SEAMAP BLL surveys, and from the modified and NMFS surveys were compared to determine the effects of this unified design on data precision. Overall catch composition slightly differed between the early and modified SEAMAP BLL surveys; however, taxa with declined abundance under the modified SEAMAP BLL survey were adequately sampled by the complementary NMFS BLL survey. Size composition was compared for three managed species. The size composition of Atlantic Sharpnose Sharks and Blacktip Sharks differed significantly between the modified SEAMAP BLL survey and the NMFS BLL survey, indicating that the modified survey is indeed providing complementary data. Further, implementing the modified design reduced the coefficient of variation for the indices of abundance for both Blacktip Sharks and Red Drum. The evolution of this survey highlights the benefit of unifying survey designs that build upon existing efforts to enhance the utility of survey data for multiple applications.

    Keywords: Fishery-independent survey, Coefficient of variability, Multispecies, standardization, stock assessment, Atlantic sharpnose shark, Blacktip shark, Red drum

    Received: 02 May 2024; Accepted: 06 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Hendon, Hoffmayer, Pollack, Mareska, Fernando Martinez-Andrade, Rester, Switzer and Zuckerman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jill M Hendon, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.