Assessing the potential costs and benefits of electronic monitoring for the longline fishery in the Eastern Pacific Ocean

This analysis quantifies the potential costs and benefits of the adoption of an EM program for the Eastern Pacific Ocean (EPO) longline fishery, making three important contributions in the process. First, the work is centered on the EPO, primarily within the confines of the Convention Area of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), the RFMO responsible for the conservation and management of tuna and other marine resources in the EPO, a region with interest in EM but for which no specific quantified EM benefit estimates currently exist. Second, this analysis is explicitly focused on the longline fishery in the EPO; most cost-benefit analyses of EM to date have focused primarily on purse seiners and other large vessels (e.g., Banks et al. 2016). Finally, this work builds upon previous EM cost-benefit contributions by explicitly allowing for uncertainty (or variability) in the parameters informing the analysis, in an effort to account for the uncertainty in forecasting the costs and benefits of the effects of rapidly changing technology on a sparsely quantified fishery. Allowing for this variability will also support translation to other regions in the future. It is our hope this work may in the future also serve as a foundation for incorporating management goals and uncertainty into future EM estimates for other fisheries.