The environmental Monitors on Lobster Traps and Large Trawlers (eMOLT) program is a collaborative effort between the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation with support from commercial fishermen, the tech industry, and regional non-profit organizations. Fishermen who participate in the program use a range of sensors attached to their gear to collect environmental observations during the course of their normal fishing operations. These observations include bottom temperature, water column temperature profiles, dissolved oxygen, and depth. The measurements are immediately visible to the captains on a computer in their wheelhouse and are wirelessly transmitted back to a server via satellite or cellular network in near real time. From there, the real time observations are used to fine tune ocean forecast models and the historic data are put to use in a range of data products at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. The eMOLT program currently has nearly 100 participating vessels on the east coast of North America between New Jersey and New Brunswick and over 12 million individual data points collected between 1996 and the present. In this talk we describe the evolution of the eMOLT program over time, instrumentation presently in use, our efforts to make the data available to the broader scientific community, and our plans for the future of the program. 

Primary Presenter: George Maynard, NOAA Fisheries (george.maynard@noaa.gov)

Authors:

James Manning, NOAA Fisheries - Retired  (james.patrick.manning@gmail.com)

Erin Pelletier, Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation  (erin@gomlf.org)

Huanxin Xu, Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation  (xhx509@gmail.com)