Case Study: NOAA achieves GIS-based fisheries decision support with @Orchard LLC

NOAA expands Fish-BANC pilot to ~20 priority fish species with @Orchard

NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) faced a challenge in Guam and American Samoa, where fisheries managers lacked unified tools to integrate fragmented fisheries, habitat, and management data. This prevented them from evaluating how spatial management measures contributed to biological outcomes for reef fish. @Orchard LLC was selected to lead a pilot study under NOAA's Fish-BANC initiative to address this data integration problem.

@Orchard integrated disparate datasets from multiple sources and developed a practical, ArcGIS-based spatial evaluation framework. This solution provided fisheries managers with a tool to assess the performance of Spatially Managed Areas against biological targets. The successful pilot demonstrated the feasibility of the approach and directly led to NOAA awarding @Orchard a two-year follow-on project to expand the tool, enabling more transparent and data-informed decisions to protect reef ecosystems and sustain local fisheries.

NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)