Tight feedbacks facilitate ecological and social resilience of small-scale fisheries to climate variability in the Gulf of California, Mexico

Background/Question/Methods

Climate variability has significant effects on the primary and secondary productivity of the Gulf of California's marine ecosystems, but the effects of these disturbances on fishermen and fisheries are not well understood.  Ecological theory suggests that the resilience of complex adaptive systems like the one associated with the region's small-scale fisheries can be enhanced by tight feedbacks created by localized interactions among heterogeneous elements. In this case, the fishermen themselves - with varied preferences for how, when, and where to fish - create these interactions. They work in tens of local communities throughout the region, often organized into small fishing cooperatives. We hypothesized that fishermen would respond more strongly to climate variability in the case of more sedentary species, i.e., those for which they have more direct knowledge and control. We also hypothesized the strength of fishermen's property rights would influence the strength of the feedback between climate, fishermen's effort, and ultimately, fishing revenues.

Results/Conclusions

Through empirical analyses of daily logbook data from three cooperatives in Baja California Sur, motivated by an analytical model of cooperatives' decision making, we found that the cooperative with stronger property rights managed the effort of its fishermen more aggressively than the other cooperatives. These responses were more marked for the more sedentary species and also were influenced by climate variability, which is known to negatively impact the population growth rate of some of the targeted species. Our results illustrate how both ecological and institutional factors can mediate resource users' responses to climate variability, and ultimately contribute to emergent effects on coupled social-ecological marine systems. Such feedbacks are thought to be essential to the effective stewardship of common pool resources like fisheries. By linking theoretically grounded, mechanistic models with empirical analyses of the human-environment interactions of interest, our approach advances understanding of social-ecological system dynamics and can also inform more proactive and ecosystem-based management. This project is part of a broader interdisciplinary research program focused on the coupled social-ecological systems associated with the small-scale fisheries of the Gulf of California.