Matt--could we make this into it's own page on the website?
Acronyms
FAO: Food and Agriculture Organization
NMFS: National Marine Fisheries Service
NOAA: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization
RFB: Regional Fishing Body
EBFM: Ecosystem-based Fishery Management
UN: United Nations
LOS: Law of the Sea
Terms and Definitions
Sustainable: Fishing healthy ecosystems at a level and in a manner that it is reasonably believed can be continued indefinitely, assuming proper responses to ecosystem changes.
Healthy Ecosystem: A healthy ecosystem is characterized by optimal biodiversity, populations at carrying capacity, an age distribution as close to normal as possible, natural predator-prey balance, robustness to change, recovery of crashed populations, and minimal negative anthropogenic changes in all of these criteria.
Fish: Many organisms are taken from the oceans, so for convenience we adopted Magnuson-Stevens Act definition (found in Section 3) as including finfish, crustaceans, mollusks, and marine animals but excluding plant life, mammals, and birds.