Draft 2022 Annual Deployment Plan for Observers and Electronic Monitoring in the Groundfish and Halibut Fisheries off Alaska

This draft 2022 Annual Deployment Plan (ADP) documents how the NOAA Fisheries intends to assign fishery observers and electronic monitoring (EM) to vessels fishing in the partial observer coverage category (50 CFR 679.51(a)) in the North Pacific during the calendar year 2022. The North Pacific Observer Program is the largest observer program in the country and covers vessels in both partial coverage and full coverage. In the full coverage component of the program, every trip is monitored by 1 or 2 observers and the vast majority of groundfish harvest is covered by this program. In 2020, for example, observers collected data on board vessels and at processing facilities for a total of 40,838 observer days and 96% of these days were in full coverage (there were 39,153 full coverage days on vessels and in plants; and 1,685 partial coverage days on vessels and plants).

In the partial coverage category, the ADP specifies the sampling design and selection rate—the portion of trips that are sampled by observers and EM. The sampling design involves three elements:

1. the selection method to accomplish random sampling
2. division of the population of partial coverage trips into selection pools or strata
3. the allocation of deployment trips among strata.