By David Pendered
Oct. 6 — To improve the monitoring of the nation’s fisheries, an environmental foundation is offering grants to groups that devise electronic methods to track fishery catch now that the Supreme Court has halted a program that used human monitors.
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, in partnership with NOAA, is offering grants expected to range from $200,000 to $500,000 per award. The goal is to enhance the development of existing electronic technology to improve the timeliness and quality of data about the catch. Recipients are to be announced in March 2026.
The information could help scientists and regulators provide better oversight of the nation’s fisheries. For instance, the knowledge could lead to efforts to prevent of the overharvesting of a species, and to the identification of the extent of wasteful bycatch of marine mammals, sea turtles, sea birds and other creatures in order to devise ways to prevent them from being scooped up by happenstance and discarded.
The grant program comes on the heels of a 2024 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a requirement that some fishermen pay for onboard human observers. This ruling had a wider impact because it overturned a precedent set in 1984 known as the Chevron Deference. The Chevron Deference enabled federal agencies to exercise discretion in setting rules for areas they oversee, from public health to environmental regulations to tax collection.
Chevron was overturned in a case brought by herring fishermen who objected to a requirement that they pay the salaries of onboard huma observers. The observers had been a standard for some 50 years, were in generally supported by commercial fishermen, and the observers’ salaries were paid by the federal government.
Federal funding for observers’ salaries ended in 2020 and the government required some fishermen to pay the salaries of onboard observers, at a price of up to $700 a day, according to published reports. Fishermen went to court, and prevailed.
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