Freshwater and near shore fisheries management

Fishing the oceans is a significant human enterprise. Fisheries employ more than 200 million people and account for 20% of total human consumption of animal protein. Increasingly, natural resource management agencies are taking an ecosystem approach to fisheries management to deal with world overfishing and stock depletion. Fishing activities can alter and degrade marine ecosystems both directly (trough dredging, trawling, long-hauling, and igniting explosives in coral reefs) and indirectly (food web interactions induced by fishery removals). Current fisheries management practices rely on stock assessment to estimate population parameters of the focal species from the age or length structure of past catches, biomass of past catches, past fishing effort, and fishery-independent surveys. More holistic, ecosystem-based approaches require integrating information from a wide range of disciplines, levels of ecological organization, and temporal and spatial scales.