Ecosystem‐based fisheries management in the Northwest Atlantic

Abstract

Introduction 153Living marine resource management context, history and background 154The fisheries 154The ecosystems 155Implementation of ecosystem-based approaches in living marine resource management 156Habitat closures and marine protected areas 157Models to provide tactical and strategic management advice 157Addressing questions on groundfish carrying capacity 159Directly examining pairwise species interactions 160 AbstractThe northwest Atlantic has had a notable history of living marine resource (LMR) exploitation. There have been calls for evaluating and improving approaches to manage those resources as stocks have undergone sequential depletion, with some dramatic instances of stock declines. The need for more holistic ecosystem-based approaches to manage LMRs has been increasingly recognized as part of these calls, along with the recognition that there are broader issues to consider when managing a fishery. We discuss some of the major efforts to this end which are extant among our institutions. We emphasize current initiatives to implement ecosystem-based fisheries management in the northwest Atlantic, with a focus on how advice based on the natural sciences supports an ecosystem-based approach. We present this information as a case study within a rich historical context of fisheries science and management.

Effects of closing bottom trawling on fisheries, biodiversity, and fishing communities in a boreal marine ecosystem: the Hawke Box off Labrador, Canada

“…Temperate regions tend to have wider-ranging and migratory species, which limits spatial coverage of entire life cycles (Le Quesne and Codling 2009;Link et al 2011;Breen et al 2015). In addition, response times to closures may be longer (Fisher and Frank 2002) as a consequence of relatively slow individual and population growth rates.…”

Distinguishing benchmarks of biological status from management reference points: A case study on Pacific salmon in Canada

“…Furthermore, ecosystem reference points and the indicators on which they are based can be developed in relation to the population sizes of a species of interest, population trends, community composition, and energy or material flow (Kershner et al 2011). Multiattribute ecosystem-based control rules for fisheries can be identified when ecosystem indicators are related to fishery-induced changes (see Link 2005), but despite recent progress implementing an ecosystem-approach to fisheries management (Hollowed et al 2011;Link et al 2011), the application of such control rules is rare. One, often paralysing challenge in making management decisions that account for the multi-dimensional nature of ecosystem dynamics is reaching consensus among diverse interests and conflicting objectives.…”

Comparing Apples to Oranges: Common Trends and Thresholds in Anthropogenic and Environmental Pressures across Multiple Marine Ecosystems

“…Each ecosystem in this study has, at some stage in the last half century, experienced overfishing (Bakkala et al, 1979;Rosenberg et al, 2007;Walters et al, 2008;Link et al, 2011a;Miller et al, 2014). The impacts of overfishing are complex, but well researched.…”

“…Although each ecosystem examined has different socio-economic histories (Hollowed et al, 2011;Link et al, 2011a;Karnauskas et al, 2013;Levin et al, 2013), different levels of population density, and differential reliance on living marine resources that vary in the use of marine habitats and ultimately shape the stability of the ecosystems, there are a number of common trends that are surprisingly consistent across all ecosystems. These common trends would be difficult to detect if not examined at the ecosystem-level and in a multivariate context, both in terms of detecting baseline reference points and observing emergent properties of marine ecosystems.…”