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Small‐scale fisheries are important for the livelihoods of millions but are vulnerable to global and local stresses. Resilient households are able to maintain, and even grow their livelihoods, despite these stresses. Improving fishers’ resilience contributes to poverty prevention and alleviation. Effective intervention requires accurate evaluation of fisher resilience, but no quantitative tool currently exists. In this study, we propose the fisheries livelihoods resilience check (FLIRES check) as a widely applicable tool to evaluate fisher livelihood resilience. This new tool combines the principles of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach with the methodology of RAPFISH (a rapid assessment of fisheries sustainability). For the FLIRES check, 43 attributes were designed to quantify previously described qualitative factors that enable or constrain livelihoods in fishing communities in West Sumatra, Indonesia. These were grouped into six “capital” fields (financial, human, natural, institutional, physical and social) used in the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach. RAPFISH multidimensional scaling was applied to evaluate resilience in each of these fields on a scale from good (resilient) to bad (vulnerable). The FLIRES check was tested in two fishing communities in West Sumatra. The tool identified strengths and weaknesses in livelihood resilience at a household, fishing gear and village scale, for each field. The FLIRES assessment compared well with qualitative descriptions as assessed by interview. It facilitates quantitative temporal and spatial comparisons of livelihood resilience which has not previously been possible. We invite further testing, refining of the attributes and wider application of this methodology.

To explore the contributions that fishing, trophic interactions and plankton production make to explanations of the observed variation of higher trophic (principally fish) levels in the western English Channel ecosystem, Ecosim simulations were run from 1973 to 1999 using the most complete data set yet assembled. The results indicate that a bottom-up mechanism plays an important role in the system production. Inclusion of a primary producer biomass forcing term, estimated from empirical data, improved the goodness of fit of the model estimates to the available biomass data by about 25% compared to fitting using only the series of fishing mortalities. Model fitting was further improved by changing the so-called vulnerability parameters, causing an overall improvement of 62% in explained variation. Incorporating the new vulnerability values, the model was used to estimate a primary production anomaly function to replace the primary producer biomass forcing in driving the model simulations. In this scenario, the model estimated a series of values for primary producer abundance that approximated the empirical data, but gave lower estimates than were observed towards the end of the period. This version also gave a better fitting to the zooplankton abundance data and generally improved the fitting to all functional groups. KEY WORDS: Ecopath · Climate change · Ecosystem approach · English ChannelResale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisher