UW Aquatic & Fishery Sciences Quantitative Seminar

Emma Fuller

Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University

Fleet connectivity across West Coast fisheries: quantifying the effect of a management intervention on revenue diversity in an interconnected socioeconomic environment

Abstract

Ecosystem-based management (EBM) has become the approach du jour of ocean and coastal conservation and stewardship, appearing prominently in an array of highly visible policy documents. Much of the research on EBM has sought to illuminate the connectivity within and between the biotic and abiotic components of these systems. These efforts focus almost exclusively on the ecological components of these systems, without consideration of the social or economic influences that interact across time and space. Understanding these human interactions therefore represent an important frontier to EBM science. In this talk I'll present an approach for measuring human connectivity of fisheries at a vessel and port level and use it to evaluate how a change in management affects fisheries connectivity in US west coast commercial fisheries. By comparing changes in fisheries connectivity for vessels and ports which have ITQ landings, I find evidence that catch shares have increased the diversity of vessel participation, but not affected the connectivity among fisheries at a port level. Further I demonstrate that these port-level patterns of participation contain information that can be predictive the entry and exit decisions of those groundfish trawl vessels that exited after ITQ implementation.