Seabrook Station donates to NHEP

Our friendly neighborhood nuclear plant recently donated $12,000 to the New Hampshire Estuaries Project to support the state’s estuaries. Al Legendre, principal engineer at Seabrook Station, presented the check to NHEP project director Jennifer Hunter. Located adjacent to the Hampton-Seabrook Estuary, the plant has made donations to NHEP for nine consecutive years.

The funds will go toward protecting, enhancing and monitoring the environmental quality of estuaries across the state. Hunter said Seabrook Station’s contributions are sorely needed. Federal funding for the program is decreasing, making it more difficult for NHEP to implement its long-term management plan.

Past donations have contributed to a number of environmental activities, including projects to enhance shellfish populations in Hampton-Seabrook Harbor and improve opportunities for shellfish harvesting.

“The NHEP also considers Seabrook Station a good partner in monitoring the local environmental conditions,” Hunter said in a release. “For years, they have freely shared data they collect with us to complete our environmental indicator reports and our State of the Estuaries Report that is published every three years.”

NHEP, which is based at the University of New Hampshire, is primarily funded by a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The program supports environmental stewardship and community land use planning activities in the state’s coastal watershed, which includes 42 communities in Strafford and Rockingham counties. For more information, visit www.nhep.unh.edu.

report offers solution to overfishing

A group of marine science and fishery management experts led by University of New Hampshire staff member Andrew Rosenberg has proposed a straightforward approach to end overfishing in the United States. The team released a report on Friday, Oct. 12, detailing its plan to establish performance measures to curb overfishing.

Rosenberg, a professor at the Department of Natural Resources and the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at UNH, was lead author of the report.

“Our goal with this report is to create a practical way to end overfishing by developing a simple, consistent process for setting annual catch limits that reduces risk to the resource and is more predictable for fishermen,” Rosenberg said in a release.
The report proposes ways to account for inherent uncertainties in fishing data when establishing catch limits for fisheries

“Fishery managers never have perfect data, nor do management plans always work as intended. As a consequence, management decisions need to be more conservative to prevent damage to the resource and to the fishery,” Rosenberg said.
The Lanfest Ocean Program released the report in time for the National Marine Fisheries Service to use its recommendations to develop regulations for the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act. The act, which was signed into law in January as the nation’s primary ocean fisheries law, requires all fisheries to establish annual catch limits at a level that does not allow overfishing. The law also holds fishery managers accountable for adhering to the limits.

“Although this report is aimed at U.S. fisheries management, the group has come up with a solution to overfishing that can be used around the world,” said Margaret Bowman, director of the Lenfest Ocean Program. “I encourage fishery managers far and wide to start implementing these principles.”