New Date: March 5-7, 2024
To ensure interested stakeholders can attend, NOAA Fisheries has rescheduled the North Atlantic right whale vessel strike risk reduction workshop.
- New date: March 5-7, 2024
- New location: Arlington, Virginia
In addition, NOAA Fisheries will hold the On-Demand Interoperability Workshop from November 28-30, 2023 in Boston, Massachusetts.
NOAA Fisheries and our partners are dedicated to conserving the North Atlantic right whale population. NOAA Fisheries is releasing several other actions this fall that support the right whale Road to Recovery. These actions support the overall goals of the Road to Recovery by addressing threats to the species and monitoring recovery progress.
More information on the two workshops is below.
Vessel Strike Risk Reduction Technology Workshop:
NOAA Fisheries seeks to foster new technologies to reduce the risk of vessel strikes with large whales including endangered North Atlantic right whales. The agency intends to promote the research, development, testing, and operationalization of innovative tools and management practices to offer vessel operators additional options for reducing lethal collisions with whales.
Vessel traffic along the U.S. East Coast is expected to grow with increasing commercial, industrial (offshore wind), and recreational use of our coastal waters. NOAA Fisheries wants to prevent conflicts with whales by expanding and working to operationalize innovative options for vessel strike mitigation.
While in-person attendance may be limited due to space constraints, there will be opportunities for remote/virtual attendance to ensure broad participation. Please check our website for additional details and registration information in the coming weeks.
On-Demand Interoperability Workshop:
NOAA Fisheries is collaborating with gear manufacturers, fishermen, and other partners to develop solutions for implementing on-demand fishing (also known as ropeless or pop-up) in fixed-gear fisheries. On-demand fishing replaces traditional vertical lines and surface buoys with an on-demand gear retrieval system, acoustic signaling, and virtual gear marking (i.e., no persistent vertical line and no surface buoy). It is necessary to implement an interoperable system for deploying and retrieving ropeless fishing gear across technology manufacturers and to share geolocation data of ropeless fishing gear to avoid gear conflicts across fisheries (i.e., mobile and fixed-gear vessels) and support management needs across jurisdictions (e.g., Northeast vs. Mid-Atlantic).
NOAA Fisheries is hosting an interoperability workshop November 28-30, 2023 to explore the development of standards for acoustic communications and data specifications for implementing an interoperable on-demand fishing system in a regulatory program. The workshop will include fishing gear manufacturers, acoustic communications experts, fishermen, and other stakeholders to evaluate key technical components for deploying, tracking, and retrieving ropeless fishing gear on days 1 and 2, while day 3 is for state and federal fishery managers to discuss different approaches to implementing interoperability standards.
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