Reducing uncertainty in fisheries management: The time for fishers' ecological knowledge.

摘要

This dissertation work presents a novel method for addressing system uncertainty to improve management of a small-scale fishery in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. Using fishers' ecological knowledge (FEK) and fishing behavior, this research uses the Q-Method to identify regulatory inefficiencies in the management framework and strengthen the rationale for including fishers into the management process, develops a coupled behavior-economics model to predict the likelihood of fishing the preferred grounds under a range of physical and regulatory conditions, establishes a baseline assessment of a spawning aggregation of mutton snapper following 16 years of protection, and uses the discrete choice method to examine public support for FEK-based proposed regulatory alternatives. Results show that fishers largely comply with existing management strategies, as seen in the Q-Method analysis and preliminary evidence of mutton snapper population rebounding. FEK successfully was incorporated into proposed management alternatives for St. Croix that were largely supported by the public. This overarching result supports the argument for fisheries co-management.;This work contributes to a much-needed area of fisheries management, that of incorporating socioeconomic motivations within an ecosystem-based framework. Ecological goals of fishery sustainability and continued habitat function cannot be achieved without first understanding how fishers view and respond to any regulatory environment and then developing a framework that achieves the greatest support for those regulations. The time has come for incorporating FEK into ecosystem-based fisheries management.