Fishers have detailed knowledge of their resources, their environment, and their fishing practices that is rarely systematically collected. We conducted three types of interviews with coastal Newfoundland fishers to identify the range of information available, to see if it could be quantified, and to explore its potential for reconstructing trends within fisheries. These fishers have many terms for Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), each associated with characteristic patterns of seasonal movement and availability to gear and indicating the location of several coastal spawning areas. They described a variety of changes in fishing practice. Of the four changes that could be quantified, all contributed to decadal-scale increases in catch efficiency prior to 1992, while change in catch per unit of effort for cod was consistently negative at decadal scales. For these fishers' lumpfish (Cyclopterus lumpus) roe fishery, catch per unit of effort was consistently negative in the 1990s. We describe ways to access the large reservoir of information held by fishers, the use of several cross-checks to identify consistent patterns, and the use of trends and patterns to broaden the basis for interpreting quantitative surveys used in fisheries assessment. Local information from resource users can be assembled in forms usable in quantitative stock assessments.
Introduction 428 Four case-studies 428 NE Atlantic -Barents Sea: cod, herring and capelin 429 NW Atlantic -Newfoundland and Labrador: cod and crustaceans 431 Upwelling systems -Northern Benguela Current: small pelagic fishes 434 Upwelling systems -Ghana: demersal and small pelagic fishes 436 Comparisons and contrasts from the case-studies 438 Ecological (biophysical) system 438
AbstractMarine social-ecological systems consist of interactive ecological and human social elements so that changes in ecological systems affect fishing-dependent societies and vice versa. This study compares the responses of marine ecological and fishingdependent systems to environmental change and the impacts of globalization, using four case-studies: NE Atlantic (Barents Sea), NW Atlantic (Newfoundland), SE Atlantic (Namibia) and the equatorial Atlantic (Ghana). Marine ecological systems cope with short-time changes by altering migration and distribution patterns, changing species composition, and changing diets and growth rates; over the longer term, adaptive changes lead to increased turn-over rates and changes in the structure and function of the system. Fishing communities cope with short-term change through intensification and diversification of fishing, migration and 'riding out the storm'. Over the longer term, adaptive changes in policy and fisheries governance can interact with social-ecological change to focus on new fisheries, economic diversification, re-training, out-migration and community closures. Marine social-ecological systems can ultimately possess rapid adaptive capacity in their ecological components, but reduced adaptive capacity in society. Maintaining the diversity of response capabilities on short and longer time scales, among both ecological and human fishing systems, should be a key policy objective. The challenge is to develop robust governance approaches for coupled marine social-ecological systems that can respond to short-and long-term consequences of global change.
Questions centered on the development of local and traditional ecological knowledge and the relationship of that knowledge to the development of conservation and management practices have recently attracted critical attention. We examine these questions with respect to the dynamic commercial fisheries of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. The knowledge of fish harvesters coevolves with fishing practices and is embedded in a dynamic socioecological network that extends into and beyond the fisher, fishery households, and communities to include management, technologies, markets, and marine ecological conditions. Changes in these networks have moved knowledge and practices related to fishing in directions defined by policy, science, economic rationality, and new ecological realities. We characterize this movement as a shift along a continuum from local ecological knowledge (LEK) towards globalized harvesting knowledge (GHK) as harvesters become increasingly disconnected from socioecological relationships associated with traditional species and stocks. We conclude with a discussion of how LEK/GHK have interacted over time and space with other knowledge systems (particularly science) to influence management, and suggest that contingent, empirical evaluations of
The prevalences of OA and OAl are high in snow crab-processing workers of Canada's East Coast. Cumulative exposure to snow crab allergens was related to the prevalences of OA and OAl in a dose-response manner taking into account atopy, gender and smoking.
Fisheries sustainability is recognized to have four pillars: ecological, economic, social (including cultural) and institutional (or governance). Although international agreements, and legislation in many jurisdictions, call for implementation of all four pillars of sustainability, the social, economic and institutional aspects (i.e., the “human dimensions”) have not been comprehensively and collectively addressed to date. This study describes a framework for comprehensive fisheries evaluation developed by the Canadian Fisheries Research Network (CFRN) that articulates the full spectrum of ecological, economic, social and institutional objectives required under international agreements, together with candidate performance indicators for sustainable fisheries. The CFRN framework is aimed at practical fisheries evaluation and management and has a relatively balanced distribution of elements across the four pillars of sustainability relative to 10 alternative management decision support tools and indicator scorecards, which are heavily focused on ecological and economic aspects. The CFRN framework has five immediate uses: (a) It can serve as a logic frame for defining management objectives; (b) it can be used to define alternate management options to achieve given objectives; (c) it can serve as a tool for comparing management scenarios/options in decision support frameworks; (d) it can be employed to create a report card for comprehensive fisheries management evaluation; and (e) it is a tool for practical implementation of an integrated social–ecological system approach.
Some recent scholarship has focused on integrating local and/or traditional knowledge with conventional scientific information in fisheries management to improve the factual foundation of and strengthen support for management decisions. This article compares a sequence of historical and contemporary scientific texts and maps about the migrations and stock structure of cod in the Northern Gulf of St. Lawrence with texts and maps generated by the authors through the collection, aggregation and interpretation of commercial fish harvesters' ecological knowledge. We find that the relationship between fisheries science and harvesters' ecological knowledge is dynamic and has changed over time, and that both are 'situated' socially and ecologically. Overall, each paints an incomplete picture of cod movements and stock structure but the knowledge of harvesters provides a valuable complement to scientific information, particularly at the local scale, and has the potential to contribute to the identification of local cod stocks that are new to science and management. We end by considering how this case study informs the larger discussion about the challenges and potential benefits of the so-called integration project to bring together science and the ecological knowledge of fish harvesters.
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