Bridging the Gap Between Social and Natural Fisheries Science: Why Is This Necessary and How Can It Be Done?

摘要

This paper examines some of the reasons why social and natural fisheries scientists need to work together with fish harvesters to improve our understanding of communities of fish and fishery communities. It identifies some tools and methods with the potential to promote such collaborations and hence our capacity for better management of our marine resources as well as to support the legitimate skills and requirements of fishing communities. In this paper, we seek to do three things. First, we identify the need for a more holistic system of fisheries management; then, we identify the challenges this presents; and last, we propose a solution to this issue. The story of the collapse of the cod stocks in the northwest Atlantic provides a useful case study of inadequate management of marine fisheries and its consequences for fish and fishing communities. On the east coast of Canada, international high-technology fleets were in operation by the 1960s, resulting in a massive dragger effort and serious depletion offish stocks. As the international and Canadian offshore fleets expanded in the 1970s, the . small inshore fisheries of the nation were increasingly seen as out of date, inefficient, and of low productivity, labels that gained in credence as dragger fleets intercepted stocks causing inshore landings to declined. Also, by the 1970s, fisheries management had come to rely heavily on a combination of biological and economic modeling, which was used to estimate the optimal catch that could be taken in any given fishery, based on measures of the biomass of commercial species in conjunction with the economic returns to the fishery sector.