John PostProfessor of Biology, University of CalgaryThe Invisible Collapse of Recreational Fisheries: Patterns, Processes and Prognosis
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Over the last decades we have witnessed the sequential collapse of many of the world’s largest commercial fisheries. Explanations for these collapses are varied but almost always includes over harvest. Declines of recreational fisheries are often discussed anecdotally but there appears to be a sense that these fisheries tend towards self-sustaining. The argument is that recreational fishers respond to declining quality by fishing elsewhere, or substituting other recreational activities. We will examine several processes involving fish and fisher behaviour that instead lead to accelerated declines and should lead to collapse of recreational fisheries. A common response to declines in fishing quality is the imposition of regulations such as bag and size limits. Unlike quota restrictions in commercial fisheries these regulations control the behaviour of individuals but not the population of fishers. Therefore positive effort responses can lead to continued overfishing even in heavily regulated recreational fisheries. Since fishing effort is spatially aggregated over the large spatial scale of lake districts, spatial patterns are expected to emerge in the sustainability and collapse of individual fisheries in at the landscape scale. The future of recreational fisheries in North America is likely to involve increasingly restrictive regulations and strong arguments for effort control. Adaptive management experiments could be used to assess the tradeoffs involved in developing a spatial mosaic of recreational fisheries within which effort control is one potential management tool.
NSERC University Research Fellowship 1989-1999 Universities of B.C. and Calgary
NSERC Post-doctoral Fellowship 1987-1989 University of Wisconsin
Ph.D. 1987 York University
M.Sc. 1984 York University
B.Sc. 1980 University of Toronto
John’s research program focuses on the processes that control growth and survival of juvenile fish and their recruitment into adult stocks. These processes are at the core of our understanding of habitat requirements, fisheries productivity and harvest dynamics of freshwater fisheries. John and his graduate students use a combination of laboratory and field experiments, field observations and computer models to identify, quantify and extrapolate findings over ranges of spatial and temporal scales. Current applications include assessments of: sustainable fish yields, interactions between native and exotic species, instream flow needs, food web interactions and climate change impacts.
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