The New England Fishing Industry Is Helping Scientists To Understand Ocean Changes
"Heavy snow falls on a docked commercial fishing boat in the small New England town of Westport, Massachusetts." by Jeff Golenski is marked with CC0 1.0.
May 3, 202651 minutes
Carolyn Fortuna
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For decades, fishing studies typically employed one-on-one mapping exercises, guided by a facilitator who helped fishing industry participants to draw polygons or mark points on a digital or a paper map of an area of interest. Such ocean mapping has a strong temporal component, as it is intended to gather data for multiple seasons or even multi-decade fishing patterns. However, a new intersection of the fishing industry and research scientists is providing much more robust information about the seas below.
A whole slew of fishers have willingly added another task to their long days at sea: collecting essential data information about the changing ocean environment with the helping hand of technology.
Other fishers want in — there’s a waiting list.
“You can observe a lot just by watching.” —Yogi Berra
Nearly 150 fishermen along the eastern seaboard have given permission to have temperature sensors installed on their traps or trawl nets. As chronicled by the New York Times, it’s one element of a larger non-profit program — one that kicked off in 2001, expanded in 2024 with a $2 million grant from the state of Massachusetts, increased with $200,000 from the Nature Conservancy, and was boosted by $120,000 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). A $5,000 package of sensors, software, and tablets that the fishers deploy is paid for by the program.
Sensors, which connect via Bluetooth to a laptop-sized instrument on the bridge, trail behind the vessels along the seafloor. As they capture a three-dimensional map of the ocean, data is downloaded and transmitted via cellular connection to a remote computer server. The sensors record water temperature and oxygen levels from surface to floor.
It’s an upgrade from the common practice of prediction ocean variations through satellites or thermometers. An anticipated improvements will add salinity assessments, which are really important as a bell weather of substantive changes in ocean currents and subsequently affected climate patterns.
This fishing industry data is continuously collected and fed into regional weather and climate models. In fact, there have been about 23 million temperature records collected in the program to date. The data influences marine forecasts, the health of commercial fisheries for lobster and black sea bass, and how many government limits to set on total numbers of fish caught.
The data collection efforts don’t solely benefit research scientists; participating fishers have more information to work with now to assess the best places to fish. That’s important, as the waters around New England are one of the fastest warming in the world, and fishers are facing declining stock in local waters. Fishers can observe the collective data from their boat, data from other fishers, and a regional map of conditions. No boats are identified in the data projections.
It’s part of an emerging trend to engage stakeholders with direct experience and significant knowledge about the areas of interest. This is sometimes referred to as a broader methodological umbrella of “citizen science,” which encompasses approaches that involve non-scientists in the process of scientific knowledge production. Inviting the fishing industry to be a stockholder integrates local ecological knowledge, permits sustainable retention of climate-resilient emerging species, and supports marketing efforts to increase demand for new fisheries.
The data is being accessed by the World Meteorological Organization and the US Coast Guard, among other organizations. The Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation maintains the devices and compiles the data. The Foundation’s leadership isn’t a coincidence: climate change has caused the Gulf of Maine to warm faster than 99% of the world’s oceans, even taking into account seasonal fluctuations.
“The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.” —John Buchan
Over the past decade, episodic ocean warming events, known as marine heatwaves, have increased in frequency, intensity, and size compared to a historical baseline in the Gulf of Maine, as studied by researchers writing in Ecography. These events can force ecological communities to reorganize by displacing their preferred habitat. Such reorganization, in turn, can lead to ecological disruptions such as mass mortalities, with the result of economic disruptions as populations decline or move out of fisheries range.
Interviews with several Maine fishermen highlight their concern regarding the lack of fishery diversity in their state, viewing it as a limitation to adapting to climate-driven changes. As described in the March 2026 issue of Fisheries, managers express the difficulty associated with managing fisheries to preserve abundance and ecosystem health while also maintaining viable opportunities for fishers and the broader fishing industry. Fishers and fisheries managers alike believe that this is partially due to a lack of adaptive management practices.
Southern New England fishers who were interviewed express concerns for their Maine counterparts. They suspect that the Maine fishing industry will soon face the same challenges and frustrations as the southern New England fishing industry as experienced in recent years due to stock distribution fluctuations in their waters.
“Water is the driving force in nature.” —Leonardo da Vinci
Since the middle of the 20th century, annual emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased every decade, from an average of 3 billion tons of carbon (11 billion tons of carbon dioxide) a year in the 1960s to 9.5 billion tons of carbon (35 billion tons of carbon dioxide) per year by the 2010s.
The world’s oceans are an natural mechanism to offset climate change, as they absorb significant amounts of GHG emissions. They are also acting as a sink for numerous human-generated environmental hazards, such as nutrient loading, coastal littering, and macroplastics/ microplastics. All these impacts are currently affecting ocean wildlife and are expected to increase in the 21st century, says NOAA, if no immediate action is taken to reverse this pattern.
Blue economy studies often gather data on both the total area of each activity’s use and its most dominant use area. Sectors such as fisheries management, energy development, and marine conservation increasingly rely on sophisticated mapping processes to address the growing complexity of ocean use.
That’s because climate variability and change is impacting marine ecosystems and the services they provide to the communities, businesses, and fisheries that rely on them. Ocean acidification threatens the fundamental chemical balance of ocean and coastal waters across the globe.
Accurate forecasts and analysis of species distributions in response to changing climate is essential for proactive management and conservation decision-making. Long-term monitoring and scientific analysis of ocean carbon can help determine if ocean uptake of CO2 will keep pace with emissions and how to best anticipate, mitigate, and adapt to potential future changes.
Resources
- “Climate resilience in the fisheries social–ecological system: Capturing opportunities from emerging species in the Gulf of Maine.” Sophie Swetz, et al. Fisheries. March 2026.
- “Data integration improves species distribution forecasts under novel ocean conditions.” Nima Farchadi, et al. Ecography. August 13, 2025.
- “In New England, catching climate data along with fish.” Eric Niiler. New York Times. April 1, 2026.
- “Participatory seascape mapping: A community-based approach to ocean governance and marine conservation.” Isabel James. Ocean & Coastal Management. February 2025.
- “Quantifying the ocean carbon sink.” NOAA. July 19, 2024.
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