This document is intended to provide the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, including its
Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) and Advisory Panel (AP), with information on ecosystem
status and trends. This information provides context for the SSC’s acceptable biological catch (ABC)
and overfishing limit (OFL) recommendations, as well as for the Council’s final total allowable catch
(TAC) determination for groundfish and crab. It follows the same annual schedule and review process
as groundfish stock assessments, and is made available to the Council at the annual December meeting
when Alaska’s federal groundfish harvest recommendations are finalized.
Ecosystem Status Reports (ESRs) include assessments based on ecosystem indicators that reflect the
current status and trends of ecosystem components, which range from physical oceanography to biology
and human dimensions. Many indicators are based on data collected from NOAA’s Alaska Fishery
Science Center surveys. All are developed by, and include contributions from, scientists and fishery
managers at NOAA, other U.S. federal and state agencies, academic institutions, tribes, nonprofits,
and other sources. The ecosystem information in this report will be integrated into the annual harvest
recommendations through inclusion in stock assessment-specific risk tables (Dorn and Zador, 2020),
presentations to the Groundfish and Crab plan teams in annual September and November meetings,
presentations to the Council in their annual October and December meetings, and submission of the
final report to the Council in December (see Figure 1).
The SSC is the primary audience for this report, as the final ABCs are determined by the SSC, based on
biological and environmental scientific information through the stock assessment and Tier process3,4.
TACs may be set lower than the ABCs due to biological and socioeconomic information. Thus, the
ESRs are also presented to the AP and Council to provide ecosystem context to inform TAC as well as
other Council decisions. Additional background can be found in the Appendix (p. 224).
Figure 1: Ecosystem information mapping to support Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management through Alaska’s annual harvest specification process.
The ‘honeycomb’ on the right shows examples of ecosystem indicators that are provided to Ecosystem Status Reports (ESRs) at the Large Marine
Ecosystem (LME) scale and/or to Ecosystem and Socioeconomic Profiles (ESPs) at the stock-based level.