Hawaii FEP - Western Pacific Fishery Council

CHAPTER 6: IDENTIFICATION AND DESCRIPTION OF ESSENTIALFISH HABITAT6.1 IntroductionIn 1996, Congress passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act, which amended the MSA and addedseveral new FMP provisions. From an ecosystem management perspective, the identification anddescription of EFH for all federally managed species were among the most important of theseadditions.According to the MSA, EFH is defined as “those waters and substrate necessary to fish forspawning, breeding or growth to maturity.” This new mandate represented a significant shift infishery management. Because the provision required councils to consider a MUS’s ecologicalrole and habitat requirements in managing fisheries, it allowed Councils to move beyond thetraditional single-species or multispecies management to a broader ecosystem-based approach.In 1999, NMFS issued guidelines intended to assist Councils in implementing the EFH provisionof the MSA, and set forth the following four broad tasks:1. Identify and describe EFH for all species managed under an FMP.2. Describe adverse impacts to EFH from fishing activities.3. Describe adverse impacts to EFH from non-fishing activities.4. Recommend conservation and enhancement measures to minimize and mitigatethe adverse impacts to EFH resulting from fishing and non–fishing relatedactivities.The guidelines recommended that each Council prepare a preliminary inventory of availableenvironmental and fisheries information on each managed species. Such an inventory is useful indescribing and identifying EFH, as it also helps to identify missing information about the habitatutilization patterns of particular species. The guidelines note that a wide range of basicinformation is needed to identify EFH. This includes data on current and historic stock size, thegeographic range of the managed species, the habitat requirements by life history stage, and thedistribution and characteristics of those habitats. Because EFH has to be identified for eachmajor life history stage, information about a species’ distribution, density, growth, mortality, andproduction within all of the habitats it occupies, or formerly occupied, is also necessary.The guidelines also state that the quality of available data used to identify EFH should be ratedusing the following four-level system:Level 1:Level 2:Level 3:Level 4:All that is known is where a species occurs based on distribution data forall or part of the geographic range of the species.Data on habitat-related densities or relative abundance of the species areavailable.Data on growth, reproduction, or survival rates within habitats areavailable.Production rates by habitat are available.174