Collaborative Research
Partnering Fishermen & Scientists to Drive Solutions
Since our inception, MCFA has provided an important bridge between scientists and the needs and knowledge of Maine’s fishing industry. We help fishermen connect with researchers to ask and answer questions about the changes that they are seeing out on the water and to create opportunities to optimize fishing practices. We lead and support numerous collaborative research projects. Often, this research gives fishermen early opportunities to test and provide input to refine fishing gear designs and accountability solutions, like video-based monitoring and ropeless buoys.
We engage fishermen to collect ecosystem data during their normal fishing operations. MCFA is currently leading a project in collaboration with Ocean Data Network, The Nature Conservancy, and twenty Maine and New Hampshire fishing vessels to collect bottom temperature and dissolved oxygen data in offshore areas. Early anonymized data from this effort can be accessed through the Fisheries Ocean Data ERDDAP.
We are also launching a citizen science initiative, in partnership with Manomet, to provide commercial and recreational fishermen with a means to collect empirical data to substantiate anecdotal accounts of more frequent black sea bass encounters in the Gulf of Maine.
