Understanding the Effect of Climate Change on Fisheries and Fishing Communities: A Theoretical and an Empirical Approach

摘要

This dissertation examines specific commercial fisheries in different geographic locations. The over-arching theme is to examine natural and/or anthropogenic perturbations in species dynamics. This dissertation also extends the association of species dynamics in perturbed systems to fisher based economies and human-health. Given the spatial and temporal nature of biological systems, spatial models and spatial-temporal models are applied to understand system dynamics with environmental stochasticity as a key determinant. An integrated nested laplace approximation spatial-temporal model explains fisheries abundance, (2) spatial bionomic models identify optimal management strategies in a changing fishery, (3) conditional auto-regressive models explain spatial differences in fisher well-being. This thesis will test whether distribution of the summer flounder can be explained by regional climate driven increase in ocean temperature in the Mid-Altantic Bight, USA; develops three models calibrated to the Maine, USA green sea urchin fishery since 1995, that is used to test whether periodic closures are optimal to permit stock regeneration, or whether the creation of a marine reserve is optimal; provide empirical evidence to demonstrate a relationship between malnutrition in artisanal fisher communities an degradation in coral reef ecosystems in Indonesia. The results suggest that all management decisions take into consideration a precautionary approach that account for stochastic environmental events. Local sources of anthropogenic stressors should be mitigated, given that regional policies have a higher chance of ameliorating and off-setting global climate change stressors.