Many commercially and recreationally important fish species converge to reproduce in fish spawning aggregations (FSAs) at specific times and locations.  FSAs are critical for fishery and ecosystem resilience, highly vulnerable to fishing, and understudied and largely unmanaged in the Gulf.  To address FSA science and management, RESTORE Science funded a two-year cooperative project that supported regional workshops involving scientists, managers and fishers, identified knowledge gaps, produced technical and peer-reviewed publications, and synthesized existing information and data (see Fish Spawning Aggregations in the Gulf). The project recommended working with fishermen to identify, characterize and prioritize multi-species FSAs in the Gulf and create a network of instrumented, long-term monitoring stations at priority sites.  The project further recommended a co-creative process to incorporate new understanding and monitoring data into stock assessment frameworks and ecosystem-based management strategies.  

RESTORE recently supported a new, 5-year project to implement recommendations from the first study. The project team is supported by an advisory group of technical experts, resource managers, and fishers.  Together, we will prioritize potential FSA sites for further characterization, monitoring and modelling.  Six high-priorty multi-species FSAs wil be selected as sentinel sites.  Sentinel sites will be equipped with in-situ instrument bundles to collect biophysical time-series data and sampled bi-annually for evidence of spawning, with a study fleet of commercial vessels. We will update a large monitoring database, developed in the first RESTORE FSA study.  These and other data will be used to develop an Ecological Niche Model (ENM) ensemble to track and understand spawning locations and seasonality over recent years and to project changes in phenology and habitat suitability into the future.  Model outputs will in turn inform management considerations.