Characterization of the American lobster harvest has traditionally been conducted using at-sea observer or dockside coverage. However, doing so is challenging for the offshore fishery and can result in samples collected from only a few vessels, which may not represent the entire, diverse fleet. Additionally, there is no dedicated offshore fishery-independent survey for lobster resulting in limited data available for the US offshore portion of this fishery. Since 2013, The Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation has trained 29 vessels, with broad spatial sampling across the fishery, to collect biological data aimed to improve management. To identify spatiotemporal lobster patterns and potential vessel effects, the demographics of 145,663 lobsters were evaluated by k-means cluster analysis. This analysis showed the majority of catch for each sampling period grouped into one of three distinct categories: sublegal, between minimum legal size and 105 mm (75th percentile), or larger than 105 mm. These groups were distributed between broad geographical areas where spatial differences were shown to have the biggest impact on the catch demographics, however these differences did not always follow management boundaries. For example, the difference in catch between Georges Bank and Southern New England, does not align with the current stock boundaries between the Southern New England and the Gulf of Maine-Georges Bank Stock. This analysis could be easily adopted to compare fishery dependent data with management boundaries for other fisheries.

中文翻译：

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行业报告的生物数据揭示了美洲龙虾（Homarus americanus）的人口统计特征和商业船队异质性

传统上，美国龙虾收获的特征是通过海上观察员或码头报道进行的。然而，这样做对于近海渔业来说具有挑战性，并且可能导致仅从少数船只收集样本，而这些船只可能无法代表整个多样化的船队。此外，没有专门的、独立于近海渔业的龙虾调查，导致美国近海渔业部分的可用数据有限。自 2013 年以来，商业渔业研究基金会已培训 29 艘船只，在整个渔业中进行广泛的空间采样，收集旨在改善管理的生物数据。为了确定龙虾的时空模式和潜在的血管效应，通过 k 均值聚类分析评估了 145,663 只龙虾的人口统计数据。该分析显示，每个采样周期的大部分渔获量分为三个不同类别之一：不合法、最小法定尺寸和 105 毫米（第 75 个百分位数）之间或大于 105 毫米。这些群体分布在广阔的地理区域，其中空间差异对捕捞人口统计影响最大，但这些差异并不总是遵循管理边界。例如，乔治银行和新英格兰南部之间的捕获量差异与新英格兰南部和缅因湾乔治银行股票之间当前的股票边界不一致。这种分析可以很容易地用于将渔业相关数据与其他渔业的管理边界进行比较。