Shore-based and boat-based fishing surveys in Guam, the CNMI, and American Samoa: survey design, expansion algorithm, and a case study

This document describes annual catch and effort estimations from shore-based and boat-based fishing surveys in Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), and American Samoa. The catch and effort estimates in these three United States Pacific island territories were historically produced with a series of expansion scripts written in Visual FoxPro (VFP). Recently, scripts in the programming language R were developed to replace and improve upon the VFP scripts. This report describes the current survey design and expansion methods, including some recent modifications incorporated in the R scripts. The annual catch is estimated as the product of catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE, from the catch rate survey) and annual fishing effort (from the fishing effort survey). 2022 NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) PIFSC (Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center) CIMAR (Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research) Submitted https://doi.org/10.25923/c9hn-5m88 Public Domain 2117