PacFEM dashboard goes live; committee members praise new fishery‑footprint tool and request expansions

Jessica and a PacFEM presenter demonstrated the newly launched PacFEM public dashboard that synthesizes landing records, observer data, electronic monitoring and VMS into gridded summaries of fishing effort, revenue and weight. "PacFEM is now live," the presenter said, and walked members through filters by year, fishery and lease block and the mapping and chart features that summarize effort by grid cell and by port.

Features and limitations: the dashboard currently includes several commercial fisheries (albacore, Dungeness crab for WA/OR, fixed gear groundfish, market squid, at‑sea and shoreside whiting) and applies confidentiality aggregation rules where needed. The presenter noted a back‑end manager version for state and federal staff is planned. Committee members praised the tool, requested addition of more fisheries and recreational data, asked for a developer briefing, and suggested a short beta‑testing period to refine port filters and the area‑draw tools.

Why it matters: council and committee members said PacFEM will be useful for preparing coordinated comments on federal actions and for visualizing fishery footprints during marine‑planning or lease‑area reviews. Several members flagged recreational data and additional HMS species as priorities for future inclusion.

Next steps: committee members asked staff to invite PacFEM developers for a focused briefing, to explore adding fisheries and recreational datasets, and to consider how the dashboard can be updated with new annual data.