Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation

This study will evaluate the efficacy of electronic software programs intended to replace mandatory commercial fishing paper-logbooks. This paper will not address electronic logbooks for recreational fishermen, electronic monitoring software for fishery observers, or programs designed to collect supplemental information from commercial fishermen. This project will provide a report on the status of electronic catch-reporting options in 23 coastal states. It is valuable to understand how state data managers follow different processes to design and launch electronic logbooks. In addition to a status-report on electronic reporting options, this document will identify the six core components of successful electronic logbook projects. To best capture the status of electronic logbook efforts nationwide, 17 interviews with state data managers and electronic logbook developers were conducted. Each state fishery was researched, and data managers were asked to subjectively describe how electronic logbooks contributed to information collection in their state. The study was most interested in obtaining unique regional insight that could identify successful components to guide future electronic logbook projects.  Lastly, training materials and assistance options available to fishermen on each state website were evaluated.