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Federal Register / Vol. 86, No. 119 / Thursday, June 24, 2021 / Rules and Regulations 2018 year-classes being among the weakest in recent history. Such declines in population are by no means unprecedented. The Pacific sardine has undergone large population fluctuations for centuries even in the absence of industrial fishing as evidenced by historical records of scale deposits.
Although this decrease in biomass triggered the requirement to declare the stock overfished, overfishing has never occurred for this stock, as Pacific sardine catch has been well below both the acceptable biological catch ABC
and the overfishing limit OFL in every year.
Most stocks managed under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act Magnuson-Stevens Act are managed with the goal of maintaining a fixed biomass level and use a constant exploitation rate to achieve that management goal. This is not the case for Pacific sardines, which as stated above, are well known to experience dramatic swings in abundance in response to environmental conditions and in the absence of fishing pressure.
In addition, Pacific sardine are important forage species and play a critical role in the marine ecosystem.
Accordingly, management for Pacific sardine does not rely on a fixed exploitation rate or a single set of management measures. Instead, the Council has crafted a management framework that does two critical things:
1 The harvest control rule incorporates the stocks current levels of productivity to adjust the exploitation rate based on whether the stock is experiencing high or low recruitment, and 2 implements stringent management measures as soon as the stock exhibits signs that it is entering a significant downswing in biomass. With respect to this latter element, the FMP takes the very precautionary step of mandating a closure of the primary directed fishery, when the stock reaches 150,000 metric tons mt, a level three times higher than the overfished threshold. The primary directed fishery is the main driver of fishing mortality for Pacific sardines and its closure creates an automatic reduction in removals, even in the absence of changes to the annual catch limit ACL. This FMP provision has kept the primary directed fishery closed since 2015 7 years so far, which was 4 years before the stock was even declared overfished. In addition, when the stock reached its overfished level of 50,000 mt in 2019, the FMP
automatically required a reduction on incidental catch limits of Pacific sardines in other CPS fisheries from 40

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percent to 20 percent, which also has major impacts on fishing mortality. The FMP explicitly acknowledges that this framework could constitute a rebuilding plan without further adjustment. The Magnuson-Stevens Act provides Councils with 2 years to develop a rebuilding plan once a stock is declared overfished a process which itself takes several months. Sometimes, if a Council fails to develop a rebuilding plan and NMFS must develop and implement its own plan, it can take more than 2 years to implement a plan.
The Council took the extraordinary step to anticipate population fluctuations for this cyclical stock and not wait to respond to low productivity and decreasing stock size. Instead, the Council automatically implemented provisions that would be found in a rebuilding plan as soon as the stock passed certain biomass thresholds. This represents an extremely precautionary approach to management.
Comment 2: Oceana claimed that Amendment 18 violates the MagnusonStevens Act because the recommended management strategy for the rebuilding plan Alternative 1 Status Quo Management considered in the supporting EA for Amendment 18 see ADDRESSES does not provide at least a 50 percent probability of rebuilding the stock within the modeled rebuilding timeframe through 2050. Relevant to this, Oceana also claims that NMFS did not use the best scientific information available for evaluating the effects Alternative 1 Status Quo Management in the EA. Furthermore, Oceana claims that NMFS mischaracterizes Alternative 1 Status Quo Management to achieve a particular conclusion.
Response: NMFS has determined that the information and analysis used to determine a rebuilding timeline based on status quo management is supported by the best scientific information available and that status quo management has not been mischaracterized for a specific outcome.
To support their claim, Oceana highlights the results of the preliminary model run for Alternative 1 Status Quo Management provided in the SWFSCs Pacific Sardine Rebuilding Analysis Appendix A of the EA, which had an output that the stock would not rebuild before 2050. However, NMFS does not rely on these initial modeling results because they do not realistically reflect the biological impacts that would result from management under Alternative 1
Status Quo Management. Instead, NMFS
relied on several sources of information when selecting Ttarget i.e., the target rebuilding time frame. First, additional modeling results using a 2,200 mt
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constant catch level predict that the stock has at least a 50 percent chance of rebuilding in 17 years, only one year later than the 16 years predicted under Alternative 3 Five Percent Fixed U.S.
Harvest Rate. Second, both rebuilding timelines under Alternative 1 and Alternative 3 are likely overestimated by the modeling results since both alternatives do not account for the fact that in recent years only a small portion of the already-small U.S. Pacific sardine landings are from the northern subpopulation of Pacific sardine i.e., the population managed under the CPS
FMP, with a greater proportion coming from the southern subpopulation. Third, NMFS took into account the biology of the sardine stock and its changing productivity based on ocean conditions.
In addition, Alternative 1 Status Quo management allows the stock to rebuild on a similar timeline as Alternative 3, but also prevents further economic harm to the fishing industry, which has already been declared a Federal disaster since 2015 when NMFS closed the primary directed fishery. NMFS believes that the stock has at least a 50 percent chance of rebuilding by the Councils recommended Ttarget of 14 years reduced from the modeled 17 years for 2,200 mt constant catch to account for the fact that only a small portion of the 2,200 mt is from the northern subpopulation, discussed more further below.
When analyzing the effects of Alternative 1 Status Quo Management, NMFS relied on several sources of information to support its conclusion.
These are not separate characterizations of the alternative, as the comment suggests. Instead, NMFS recognized that the model available was not capable of capturing all aspects of the Pacific sardine stock and that other sources of information should be used to evaluate the alternatives and select rebuilding criteria, including the additional model results for a constant catch of 2,200 mt intended to represent expected average catch by fishery during the rebuilding period, the mixed stock composition of Pacific sardine landings, and the biology of the sardine stock and its changing productivity based on ocean conditions.
The initial model run calculated rebuilding probabilities as though the full ABC is harvested, which has never been the case due the non-discretionary harvest restrictions already in place pursuant to the CPS FMP that purposefully restrict the fishery from catching the full ABC. These include the continued closure of the primary directed fishery i.e., the largest fishery that takes the majority of Pacific sardine
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