Resilient Salmon, Resilient Fisheries for British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Salmon are inherently resilient species. However, this resiliency has been undermined in British Columbia by a century of centralized, command-and-control management focused initially on maximizing yield and, more recently, on economic efficiency. Community and cultural resiliency have also been undermined, especially by the recent emphasis on economic efficiency, which has concentrated access in the hands of a few and has disenfranchised fishery-dependent communities. Recent declines in both salmon stocks and salmon prices have revealed the systemic failure of the current management system. If salmon and their fisheries are to become viable again, radically new management policies are needed. For the salmon species, the emphasis must shift from maximizing yield to restoring resilience; for salmon fisheries, the emphasis must shift from maximizing economic efficiency to maximizing community and cultural resilience. For the species, an approach is needed that integrates harvest management, habitat management, and habitat enhancement to sustain and enhance resilience. This is best achieved by giving fishing and aboriginal communities greater responsibility and authority to manage the fisheries on which they depend. Co-management arrangements that involve cooperative ownership of major multistock resources like the Fraser River and Skeena River fisheries and community-based quota management of smaller fisheries provide ways to put species conservation much more directly in the hands of the communities most dependent on the well-being and resilience of these fisheries.

Climate change, forests, fire, water, and fish: Building resilient landscapes, streams, and managers

“…Resilience is shown in the ability of rainbow trout to rapidly recolonize habitats following disturbance, variable responses to changing environments (e.g., growth, age at maturity), and maintenance of large enough numbers of adults to avoid genetic drift in the face of disturbance. Lower resilience is evident when other constraints imposed by humans (e.g., movement barriers, nonnative trout) limit the species' ability to respond to disturbance (Bisson and others 2009;Healey 2009;Waples and others 2009;Greene and others 2010).…”

“…For example, if isolated populations lose substantial amounts of genetic variability or if genomes become compromised by hybridization with nonnative cutthroat trout these fish may have less capacity for evolutionary responses to their environment. Maintaining opportunities for natural expression of diverse phenotypes may be critical to long-term productivity, persistence, and continued evolutionary resilience of rainbow trout (Bisson and others 2009;Healey 2009;Waples and others 2009;Greene and others 2010).…”

“…One key to species resilience may be the expression of diverse and flexible life histories (Bisson and others 2009;Healey 2009;Waples and others 2009;Greene and others 2010). Our work on rainbow trout suggests the species is flexible in terms of how individuals and populations respond to variable environments, and that responses can be constrained by human influences that alter natural variability.…”

Climate change, aquatic ecosystems, and fishes in the Rocky Mountain West: implications and alternatives for management

“…Resilience might also be reflected in the capacity of populations to adapt to longer-term changes in environments by altering behavior, life history, or other characteristics in ways that allow them to recover and persist even though conditions remain fundamentally different than in the past. As suggested earlier, biological adaptation that contributes to the resilience of a population or species might occur either through behavioral or phenotypic plasticity or through natural selection and rapid evolution (Healey 2009;Waples and others 2009).…”

“…Maintenance of genetic diversity will depend largely on the size of local populations and potential for gene flow among populations (e.g., Neville and others 2009;Rieman and Allendorf 2001), so the extent and connection of habitats considered above will be important here as well. Genetic and phenotypic diversity will also depend on representation of populations (and their habitats) across diverse environments that reflect as much of the full genetic variation, local adaptation, and differential phenotypic expression as possible (Allendorf and others 1997;McClure and others 2008;Healey 2009 …”