Explore fisheries rulemaking and management in the Southeast United States (St. Petersburg, FL)

The rulemaking process for fisheries managed in the Southeastern United States requires decision makers to balance their mandate to maintain sustainable federal fisheries while considering the competing interests of fisheries stakeholders and the biological capacity of southeast fisheries. This opportunity will allow an intern to contribute to the efforts of the Limited Access Privilege Programs and Data Management Branch (LAPP/DM) to aggregate, manage, and analyze fisheries dependent data to describe historical and recent fishing practices. The intern would be responsible for reviewing recent rulemaking documents to populate a database used to catalogue the management histories for economically and biologically important fish species. The intern will organize data on extreme weather events that have impacted the region to create a resource for stock assessment scientists to understand how these events intersect with fishing opportunities. Students with strong analytical skills will be given an opportunity to create R code that can be used to manage and analyze data to better understand current trends in fisheries landing and discarding behavior. Lastly, the intern would be given chances to conduct informational interviews and shadow available staff to learn how different sub-specialties contribute to the rulemaking process (social scientists, economists, regulation writers, etc).