Gulf Council Requests Proposals to Address Expanded Sampling of the Fleet for Effort Monitoring in the Gulf of Mexico Shrimp Industry

For Immediate Release
July 15th, 2021

The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council (Council) seeks a highly-qualified contractor to organize and expand a vessel position monitoring system for the federally permitted Gulf of Mexico shrimp industry. The current Gulf of Mexico electronic logbook (ELB) program that utilized a 3G cellular network to transmit data is no longer supported as of December 2020.

The Council, in coordination with NMFS, is seeking to develop a new program that will provide continued collection, storage, and transmission of shrimp vessel position data that are used to estimate shrimping effort in the Gulf of Mexico. This new program is intended to replace the current shrimp ELB program which no longer transmits data through the 3G cellular network. The need for this study is to test the P-Sea WindPlot software program with a portion of the shrimp fleet in the near term to determine if it meets the needs of industry, Council, and NMFS. The newly developed program will ultimately need to meet NMFS hardware and software approval to be utilized throughout the shrimp industry.

This is a 12-18-month project and a maximum $350,000 is available to fund the work.

The Request for Proposals including the full scope of work can be found here.

Proposals Submission Deadline: 11:59 PM, EDT on August 20, 2021