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Scallop Vessel Access to Groundfish Closed Areas: A Management Success
By Paul J. Howard
Fishery management successes do not come easy. In an era where fisheries around the world are declining, here in New England for the first time in over a decade we are experiencing significant improvements in many stocks, especially sea scallops. Without a doubt, the rapid turn around of the sea scallop fishery is a success story. Today, we know that collaborative research and adaptive conservation plans can work, the stocks will rebound, and the benefits can be huge.
Cooperative Studies — The Devil Is In The Details
By James H. Gilford
More and better fisheries data are needed to meet the long term needs of rational fisheries management as well as the current mandates of the Magnuson-Stevens Act; that’s a given. No matter what the source, those data must pass scientific peer review with respect to quality and credibility and they must be available and useable by fisheries managers; that is a given, too!
Cooperative Studies Are Too Frequently All Talk And No Action
By Randy Fisher
Just the other day someone asked me if cooperative studies were useful to the interstate management process. The obvious answer is “Yes” but, after a few sips of wine, I’ve sat back and given this question more thought. What really is a cooperative study?
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Cooperative Research
Cooperative research remains NFCC focus
One of the best ways to build bridges between managers and user groups, between scientists and advocates, between fishing communities and interest groups is through collaborative efforts to collect information. The NFCC has been thinking and writing about cooperative studies since the mid-1990s. Some of our board members have been innovators in cooperative work on the ocean, in working fishing boats. Our board and staff have written extensively about the subject, presented seminars on cooperative data collection, and participated in a report released in December 2003 by the National Academy of Sciences.
Fishing for Data: Scientists and Fishermen in Collaboration
By Penelope D. Dalton
Fishermen and government scientists working together to collect and analyze fisheries data? Impossible you say? Not only possible, but happening in growing numbers and as a top priority of NOAA Fisheries.
Cooperation Must Recognize And Overcome Differences
By Brock Bernstein
Cooperative studies are an attractive tool for fishery management because of their potential for reducing conflict, improving the knowledge base for management decisions, and attracting additional sources of funding and expertise.
NFCC Sponsors Panel at AFS in Anchorage
NFCC organized a symposium at the annual conference of the American Fisheries Society in Anchorage, Alaska in 2005 in which expert panelists shared their experiences and insights about science, fishery management, process planning, public policy, stakeholder participation and monitoring of the effects of marine protected areas. NFCC targeted the symposium as an opportunity for exchanging information and opinion on a highly visible and sometimes contentious topic.
The half-day symposium brought together perspectives spanning multiple jurisdictions, disciplines and cultures, as well as points of view and approaches that have not always intersected easily in the designation of marine protected areas. Panelists included diverse presenters from as far away as Alaska and Fiji, state and federal managers, fishermen and marine ecologists (Jim Reynolds, of the Institute of Applied Sciences, University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji Islands; Michele Buckhorn, University of California; Jim Taggert, U.S. Geological Survey, Juneau, Alaska; Brock Bernstein, President of NFCC; Lisa Wooninck, NOAA Fisheries Santa Cruz Lab; Susan Golding, member of California’s MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force; Bill James, California nearshore fisherman, and Loren Wenzel, NOAA MPA Center in Charleston, SC).
Marine Reserves
Further Discussion of the Use of Marine Reserves in Fishery Management
NFCC played a key role for a number of years in the debate about the potential usefulness of marine reserves as a fishery management tool. In addition to facilitating a number of meetings and workshops throughout the west coast, we completed an assessment of the success of MPA designation processes throughout the country that was published by NOAA’s National MPA Center (see it here). These ranged from locally designed and managed MPAs to larger networks of reserves that involved multiple local, state, and federal participants. NFCC then addressed the science underlying the use of reserves in fishery management by sponsoring a consensus conference, modeled on the National Institutes of Health format, that brought together many of the leading scientists in this field and resulted in a concise consensus statement (Click here to readl).