Researcher Chat: Chris Brehme on Working with Lobstermen and their Data

How can the lobster industry – worth a half billion dollars in Maine – have a voice in marine spatial planning? This research team dove into how proprietary lobstering data can be considered in mapping out the activities taking place on the water.

Sea Grant plays a unique role in bridging science and community engagement. 

To do so, we are a neutral entity. We value our non-partisan approach to our work, because it allows us to work with all communities, facilitate sometimes tough conversations, and bring people together to find solutions to difficult challenges. 

However, we’ll be vulnerable with you, and say that navigating some complex topics while remaining neutral can be hard. So please have some grace with us, and grace with each other as we listen and learn together. As we go, we might come up with more questions to pursue, and you might have some as well. Please reach out, we’d love to hear from you!  -  Feedback Form

Transcript

Researcher Chat: Chris Brehme on Working with Lobstermen and their Data

Abbey Greene: The ocean. For many, it's a source of life and peace, but it's also a source of complex issues. Welcome to For Shore, a podcast for talking about those complex ocean issues.

In this episode, we'll be talking to a scientist that works on one of our favorite New England summer foods — lobster — and the data we need to understand this fishery.

--

Chris Brehme: Democratizing data. That's really what it's all about.

--

Poonam Narotam: That was Chris Brehme, a trained geographer who works with fisheries data. This podcast comes to you from Sea Grant, a national program that brings top-notch marine science to all coastal US states and territories. This season we talk with researchers funded by Sea Grant in 2021 about how coastal communities are grappling with new ocean industries. Fishermen, in particular, are experiencing a lot of changes, and Sea Grant is committed to supporting them. We'll delve into social science, people's perceptions of ocean uses, and how ocean spaces can be shared. We're going to have candid conversations and together we'll make research more accessible and understandable for all.

Poonam Narotam: I'm Poonam Narotam of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant.

Abbey Greene: And I'm Abbey Greene of Rhode Island Sea Grant. This episode takes us to Maine — home of some of the best lobster in the world. This fishery is worth half a billion dollars and everyone wants to see it thrive for generations to come.

Chris Brehme: I'm the project director at the Lobster Institute. It essentially gives me this role where I can coordinate research, work with coastal communities on issues that are really important right now — whether it's working waterfront, access to resources, or marine spatial planning.

Poonam Narotam: The Lobster Institute is a part of the University of Maine. The Sea Grant-funded project that Chris talks to us about actually started under Kate Beard Tisdale, who retired from the University of Maine. Halfway through, Chris took it over the finish line.

Chris Brehme: The title is "Can Proprietary Lobstering Data Inform Offshore Development?" This project is about trying to bring information about where fishing is taking place — where lobster fishing is taking place — into the conversation about what activities are taking place on the water broadly. This lobster fishery, that at least on the street in Maine you're aware of, involves people whose workday involves getting on a boat and going out into the water, often close to shore, but sometimes quite far offshore. They have not historically been required to say where they are. So it's a bit of a hole that we're trying to fill with this project: where does lobster fishing actually take place, specifically?

Abbey Greene: How are you working with the lobstermen to make this happen?

Chris Brehme: What we're trying to do is work with the fishermen who work on the ocean to find a way that they're willing to tell us more about their work and what they're doing, so that we can collaboratively manage the marine resources out there in the future — both the ones that are commercially important, but also the ones that are aesthetically and spiritually important to us. It's really about sharing information and working alongside people who might not necessarily trust each other. We reached out to folks who were already engaged in some sort of collaborative research, or engaged with fishing associations, particularly the Maine Lobstermen's Association. They were already a little less skeptical and a little bit more willing to be part of a project in which fairly personal data was being asked for.

Abbey Greene: Working alongside the people at the center of this work to collect data is a kind of participatory research. It's a way of doing research that's really focused on building strong relationships. As such, Chris's team considered how they could collect data on lobster fishing in the Gulf of Maine in a way that made it super easy for fishermen to participate in the study.

Chris Brehme: This project didn't employ a new transponder or any sort of equipment on the boat. It relied on the fishermen — and I think this is part of the spirit of this project. It relied on their existing investment on their boat.

Poonam Narotam: The GPS collects data every two seconds with a timestamp and a location. So the researchers had a wealth of data they could go through to identify patterns.

Chris Brehme: The methodology involved grabbing data, bringing it onto a flash drive, anonymizing it, and then putting it on a laptop computer to bring it into GIS and assess those data — filter those data to try to separate sitting in port, or anchoring at sea, or steaming to fishing grounds from the actual act of fishing. And that was all about calculating speed. So if you have a location and a time, or two locations and the time between them, of course you can calculate the speed.

Poonam Narotam: You're going to make all my math teachers throughout my life very happy, because now I finally have a real-life understanding of why we care about two points on a map and the distance between them and the time that it took to get from one to the other. Well, this reason, of course — so we can build a really cool data set!

Abbey Greene: I worked on a recreational fishing project where we were trying to gather data that's location-specific, but we had to walk a fine line of being specific enough that we knew where they were talking about, so it could inform marine spatial planning, but being broad enough that we're not spot burning.

Poonam Narotam: Quick definition here: spot burning is when fishermen's favorite, special, and often secret fishing spots are publicly revealed.

Abbey Greene: Can you tell us, Chris — was that something you had to tackle in your research?

Chris Brehme: There is this sort of voyeuristic aspect to the work in that when the raw data comes to me, it is very precise, as we say in geography. The contract that we've developed with fishermen is that they will get the final decision on the level of aggregation or resolution that data is shared with. The State of Maine Department of Marine Resources has this rule of three that they talk about. The rule of three involves bringing in a certain threshold of fishermen so that you can't necessarily identify one particular fisherman and their location.

Poonam Narotam: When Chris talks about the rule of three and aggregating data, that's about anonymizing it enough so that one individual fisherman's location isn't broadcasted. These are all techniques to protect this proprietary information.

Abbey Greene: Their work wouldn't have been possible without strong partnerships with the Maine Lobstermen's Association — or the MLA — and the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, also known as RODA. RODA had experience creating a Fisheries Knowledge Trust, the first industry-owned platform where fishermen could aggregate, secure, and share the knowledge they collect about our ocean in a standardized, accessible repository.

Chris Brehme: Working with them was really critical because they had the experience of having thought through the memorandums of understanding with fishermen, and the security protocols that would need to be used for acquiring and housing the data. To a pretty significant extent, I think we leaned on them for that information.

Abbey Greene: Were fishermen compensated for participating in this, or were they just understanding that this data would hopefully give them a voice — a seat at the table — when it comes to decision making about marine spatial planning in the future?

Chris Brehme: No, we didn't directly compensate them.

Abbey Greene: But they were invested in the project because by sharing their data, in theory, the findings would help inform future marine spatial planning with the needs of the lobstering community in mind. Is that correct?

Chris Brehme: Yeah, that's correct. And so this was a means by which fishermen could have their fishing effort data be part of marine spatial planning in general, and be part of that decision-making process, while maintaining some control. There are going to be better decisions made about offshore activities that could impact my fishing, if my fishing is part of those decisions. It's really important that the fishermen's voice is part of that. I think people realize, ultimately for the most part, that transparency is more beneficial than keeping things close to the vest.

Poonam Narotam: Now that we understand the methods, we want to talk about something Chris and his team prioritized in this project's design: data ownership. According to the Office of Research Integrity, data ownership refers to both the possession of and responsibility for information. Ownership implies power as well as control. So when working with the fishermen, this research team prioritized making sure the data — and therefore the power — was placed in the hands of the fishermen themselves. You might be wondering: if that's the case, where does the data live now? We learned from Chris that the data is housed at the Maine Lobster Data Trust, which is jointly managed by both the University of Maine Lobster Institute and the Maine Lobstermen's Association. This makes it so that participating fishermen can access their own individual data and can use it to inform their own work. The data is all anonymized. It's not been used in any offshore wind siting and permitting processes to date, but the groundwork is laid for it to be used in future marine spatial planning efforts. So looking to the future, Chris — how do you hope the data will be utilized?

Chris Brehme: One of the things we're really interested in is working on supporting modeling of future scenarios of the fishery. And critical to that is understanding effort. When you talk about resources, you talk about stock assessments. The federal government has particular models and methods for assessing on a regular basis what the health of the stock looks like. And one of the things that's been missing from that is a clearer picture of fishing effort. We would hope that this project would help fill that gap and help inform future stock assessments.

Abbey Greene: Chris also said he's thinking about ways to leverage existing partnerships and ongoing work on other projects to be proactive about recruiting fishermen to participate in future data collection efforts. He wants to identify the geographical data gaps and see if he can find fishermen to help fill those. So Chris, if you were giving advice to fellow researchers, how would you build trust with fishing communities?

Chris Brehme: Yeah, I think that's a really good question. I've definitely thought a lot about this over my career. I think it makes a lot of sense to look for strategic partnerships and collaborations, and to be as sincere in your intentions as possible. Sincere and transparent — that's really important. Because at the end of the day, the people that we're engaging with, at least in my case, they're neighbors. We're all in it together, I guess is how I think about it on this coast. And it's a beautiful place to be. We all agree with that. So we should continue to be able to find common ground, I think, by starting with the things that we care about, which are the communities in which we live. I would start with people you do know, and start with people who have enabled or created that trust already, and get a sense of how they've done that. Hopefully they'd be open to working together. At the Lobster Institute, we're really interested in collaborating. That's part of our mission: to connect industry folks with scientists in the University of Maine system to help them answer questions that are pertinent.

Poonam Narotam: What are your plans for this project going forward? You've started a really cool initiative of collecting data with lobster fishermen. You've created all these relationships. You've mentioned building out the data set. Do you have plans to continue some of this research?

Chris Brehme: Yeah, absolutely. We've brought it in as a core initiative now at the Lobster Institute, and part of that is because our partner, the Maine Lobstermen's Association and their nonprofit community alliance, is really behind this project. We'll continue to look for funding and ways to expand that, while also communicating with the Department of Marine Resources about their tracker project. What would really be cool is if the fishermen could immediately access the tracker data from their boats and their neighbors' boats, their community's boats. Maybe we could serve a role where we help to make those data available in formats that fishermen would find useful. You get to access the data rather than having this box on your boat that's just keeping track of where you are and being pinged into DC or Augusta somewhere, with no control over that. So that's the spirit with which I'd like to keep this project going — that spirit of transparency and ownership.

Yeah, democratizing data. That's really what it's all about.

Poonam Narotam: Chris, thank you so much for spending time with us today. This was a fantastic conversation.

Abbey Greene: Want to learn more? You can find research publications, more resources, and other episodes of For Shore on our website, seagrant.noaa.gov. We're all learning together, so send us your questions.

Poonam Narotam: This episode was produced by Ryan Campos of the University of Rhode Island Inner Space Center. And this podcast would not be possible without the support of our funders: Rhode Island Sea Grant, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant, the National Sea Grant Energy Liaison Initiative, the Northeast Sea Grant Consortium, NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Prince Charitable Trusts, University of Rhode Island, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

See you next time, For Shore!