Print PageWild-caught fisheries are dependent on healthy coastal and marine ecosystems; moving towards sustainability requires that we manage and monitor harvest in an ecosystem context and incentivize good stewardship. On California’s Central Coast, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is applying our “working landscape” experience to the ocean by collaborating with fishermen and regulatory agencies to improve the socio-ecological systems that support the West Coast groundfish fishery. Existing fisheries management for groundfish is industry-dominated, conducted at a regional scale, and has largely failed both economically and ecologically. This is a fishery in crisis and in need of significant reform, particularly the bottom trawling component which dominates the fishery and can be historically characterized as a low value and high volume fishery with significant habitat impact, high bycatch and discard rates, and high biomass extraction. Many of California’s fishing ports witnessed declines in fish landings and fishery infrastructure in the 1990s as a result of increased fishery regulations aimed at rebuilding overfished groundfish populations. Conservationists and fishermen, typically adversarial in fisheries issues, realized that working together might be the only way to improve economic and environmental performance of the fishery.
Results/Conclusions
Based on recommendations from the National Research Council on abating bottom trawling impacts to seafloor habitats, TNC worked with local fishermen to use private buyouts of federal trawl permits to leverage habitat protection (3.8 million acres of no-trawl zones established as Essential Fish Habitat), reduce trawl effort (by > 50%), and convert traditional trawl effort to more selective, less-damaging gear types (eg. hook and line) to catch higher value products. As an owner of fishing privileges, TNC was able to forge new partnerships with fishermen to improve resilience and sustainability by protecting additional seafloor habitat through private agreements and promoting diversified harvest practices that have significantly reduced the fishing footprint and bycatch rates. We are testing electronic monitoring, conducting collaborative research on fishery impacts, and measuring environmental performance. As the fishery transitions to a “catch share” management system, we are assembling a groundfish quota bank, leasing quota to local fishermen to anchor fishing opportunities in small ports, and supporting community-fishing associations for more-sustainable local harvest. Increasing the resilience of socio-ecological systems depends upon finding ways for the local community to benefit from the enhanced productivity that results from good stewardship and to provide diversified harvest approaches and opportunities whereby local fishermen can adapt to evolving regulatory measures, variable stock status, and changing climatic conditions.
