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GCN Home > 10/13/03 issue

GCN Awards Excellence in IT: Law of the seas

By Patricia Daukantas, GCN Staff

NOAA systems get a line on fishing laws and legal caseload

The National Marine Fisheries Service has developed technological solutions to two of its main responsibilities: keeping fishing vessels out of restricted waters and fighting regulatory challenges in court.

The service, a bureau of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is receiving a GCN Award both for its Vessel Monitoring System, which electronically augments traditional surveillance of restricted fishing zones, and for its General Counsel Litigation Database.

The General Counsel Litigation Database helps the attorneys in the NOAA general counsel’s office manage their litigation workload, track outcomes of cases, research statutes under which cases have been filed, track literature and study emerging trends, said Lawrence Tyminski, CIO of the fisheries service, also known as NOAA Fisheries.

NOAA Fisheries’ Office of Law Enforcement has about 160 special agents and enforcement officers to cover 3.5 million square miles of water under its jurisdiction, said Mark Spurrier, deputy chief for enforcement. The Vessel Monitoring System helps the small staff protect that vast area.

Before VMS, either the Coast Guard or NOAA Fisheries boats on patrol had no way of knowing that a fishing vessel was intruding into a closed area unless they observed the infraction. But that’s like doing routine random police patrols in a large city, Spurrier said.

“You have no indication that crimes are occurring,” Spurrier said. “You ride around your patrol sector and see if you run into something, so it’s a pretty inefficient way to target limited resources.”

With VMS, NOAA Fisheries can monitor electronically tagged fishing vessels, Spurrier said. If a tagged boat crosses into an area where fishing is seasonally or permanently prohibited, the tag sets off an alarm on a geofencing system and notifies the bureau of the potential violation.

Often, NOAA Fisheries asks the Coast Guard “as our partners on the water” to respond to the violation, Spurrier said. Either agency now can catch the violators almost in the act.

“Ninety-nine percent of all the hard-working men and women in the fishing industry do the right thing for the right reasons,” Spurrier said. “But we have a few that, like in most cases, give people bad names.”

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