(1) The authors shall refer to the numbers in the tables in this report as data. The reader should remember that assignment of fishing operations to groups sometimes required the use of systematic decision rules when uncertainty existed. Thus some of the assignments are in a sense "estimates". The data and statistics in these tables ultimately depend upon the accuracy of those assignments.

(2) Again, recall that a small part of the harvest was assigned to an unknown group. The percentage reported in this table represent percentages of the total harvest that could be assigned to the two groups of interest.

(3) These data are for operations that actually fished over the 1991 to 1994 time period.

(4) "Fished" or "participated" here means that a fishing operation assigned to the entity recorded landings over the 1991 to 1994 time period.

(5) Estimating an entity's fractional share of the 1984-1990 halibut harvest was beyond the scope of this study. As a result, the authors chose to use the entity's fractional share of the QS in an area as a very rough surrogate for the entity's fractional share of the 1984-1990 harvest for that area. This may not be a good surrogate; therefore, the percent change variable should be viewed with caution. For example, persons who participated over the 1984-1987 time period but who did not participate during the qualifying years of 1988 to 1990 did not receive a QS allocation and therefore their harvests were not considered in the calculations of QS fractional shares. This factor, taken alone, would mean that an entity's fractional share of the QS allocation for an area would tend to overstate the entity's fractional share of the harvest over the 1984-1990 time period. It also means that the "percent change" variable would tend to understate the actual percentage change between a person's 1991-1994 fractional share of the harvest and the person's 1984-1990 fractional share of the harvest. Further discrepancies between an entity's fractional share of QS for an area and that entity's fractional share of the 1984-1990 harvest occur because persons with more than five years of credited harvest in the area only received credit for their five best years in the QS allocation. For all these reasons, one should be cautious about interpreting the percent change variable.

(6) As noted in the methodology section, when the permit holder and vessel owner on a 1991 to 1994 fishing operation were different entities, and both entities appeared to have received an initial allocation for the area, the methodology assigned the 1991-1994 catch to the vessel owner. This might mean that the entities who actually fished over the gap time period are somewhat underestimated and the catch share of some of the entities that fished may be somewhat overestimated.

(7) Some persons who received swappable CDQ compensation QS in an area where they had received an initial allocation of regular QS also fished in that area during the 1991 to 1994 time period.

(8) A vessel owner was assigned to a community by the address on the RAM Initial Allocation file. The vessel owner could be a natural person or business entity.