8 May
Kerim Aydin
Research Fishery Biologist, NOAA Fisheries, Alaska Fisheries Science Center
The Evolution of Ecosystem Approaches to Management Through Punctuated Equilibrium: Notes from the Front Lines
Abstract
The development of Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) in U.S. fisheries has been billed as taking an “evolutionary” (incremental) rather than “revolutionary” approach to including ecosystem considerations into fisheries management. However, as any biologist knows, evolution itself may consist of long periods of stability (e.g. status quo management) punctuated by disruptive events (e.g. fisheries collapses, endangered species listings, lawsuits) and rapid, controversial, and/or ad-hoc reorganizations. In Alaska, fisheries management has been extremely proactive in terms of protecting ecosystems, yet it has not escaped its share of crises. Can developing an IEA approach help us avoid them? Sustainable exploitation relies on the assumption that fishing is reversible, and models currently in use (both single-species and multispecies) tend to reinforce this view. How safe is this assumption? Are we accurately and proactively reporting expectations of recovery, uncertainty, and ecosystem change? For example, between 2000 and 2005, an unprecedented lack of ice cover in the southeast Bering Sea may have led to changes in plankton production with consequences for upper trophic levels – this consideration among others led to (ad-hoc) pollock quota reductions based on “ecosystem considerations.” We must simultaneously formalize such decision rules, while remaining flexible: the ecosystem can still surprise us in spite of our caution. Finally, at what management level (single-species, multi-species, or ecosystem) do decisions best match the mandate of the decision-makers? Here, I review some of the more recent crises and the lessons learned while developing a more anticipatory system of combined modeling and monitoring for applying ecosystem-level assessments in Alaska.
Bio
Kerim Aydin is the Supervisory Research Fishery Biologist of the Resource Ecology and Ecosystem Modeling Program, NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center. His current research is focused on modeling predator/prey interactions, both from an individual behavioral standpoint and from a population (food web model) standpoint, on developing data collection techniques for examining marine food webs (e.g. diet studies and stable isotope examinations of fish communities), and on applying these models in a fisheries management context. He is a member of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council’s Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands Plan Team and a lead coauthor of the Council’s annual ecosystem assessment for Alaska (access.afsc.noaa.gov/reem/ecoweb/). He is particularly interested in the stability and complexity of large marine food webs and how structural elements of marine food webs evolve in response to climate variation and human influence. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, in 2000 and his B.S. from Harvey Mudd College in 1992.
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