Ecosystem-based Management Dropping Single-species Approach

by Laurie Schreiber

PORTLAND — Managing single species of fish ignores their role as part of a total ecosystem.

That idea is leading to an ecosystem-based approach to manage fisheries around the nation.

As part of that push, the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) recently formed an Ecosystems Based Management Committee. The committee had its first meeting in May.

Reporting to NEFMC the following month, committee chairman Tom Dempsey said, “Part of our work is to learn as much as we can how ecosystem-based fisheries management [EBFM] is handled in other regions and, wherever possible, to duplicate the success and avoid mistakes other regions have encountered.”

Ecosystem management as a national goal goes back to the late 1980s, according to a 1994 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). By 1994, the GAO was recommending several steps toward implementing ecosystem management principles: to delineate the boundaries of geographic areas to be managed as ecosystems; to understand an area’s “ecology needs” in order to determine how the ecosystem’s integrity could be maintained or restored; and to devise management measures for the future.

In 2008, NEFMC tasked its Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) with developing and implementing an EBFM plan. According to an SSC white paper produced in 2010, the task was driven by increasing recognition that, throughout the world, “fisheries management focused on single stocks in isolation of the broader ecosystem has been one of the factors leading to resource declines and damaged ecosystems, with negative repercussions for fishing participants and communities.”

The white paper continues, “Single species management, despite its best intentions, has fostered the entrenchment of single species interests at the expense of broader practices that utilize and relate to the marine environment. Significant efforts have been made to include ecosystem considerations within single species management, but these have generally been grafted onto existing management plans to address specific issues, leading to an increasingly complex and often unwieldy management system. This trend has motived EBFM efforts to both address the broader ecosystem implications of fisheries and to be more flexible and adaptive to the ongoing needs of management.”

Since the 1990s, the white paper says, the U.S. has undertaken a number of initiatives and developed legislation in support of EBFM. In 2004, the federal Commission on Ocean Policy recommended, “U.S. ocean and coastal resources should be managed to reflect the relationships among all ecosystem components, including human and nonhuman species and the environments in which they live. Applying this principle will require defining relevant geographic management areas based on ecosystem, rather than political, boundaries.”

NEFMC has authority for nine fishery management plans. “Of these,” the white paper says, “six are single-species plans and the remaining three include multiple species.” For example, the northeast’s groundfish plan covers 13 species and a total of 20 stocks.

“Adopting EBFM would substantially consolidate the number of individual fishery management plans administered by the council and would facilitate consideration of important interactions among species and fisheries now under separate management plans,” the white paper says. “To the extent that fishery interactions and climate change effects are important but not directly taken into account in current management, issues such as the simultaneous rebuilding of stocks and the choice of long-term target levels remain in question. Adoption of EBFM would allow these issues to be addressed within an integrated framework.”

The paper articulates the human dimensions of EBFM: “Ecosystem-based approaches to management consider humans to be a fundamental part of the ecosystem. This means that humans not only impact the environment, but more broadly interact with it, having both positive and negative effects, and engaging with it on the basis of a diverse suite of sociocultural values and meanings….The change from single species management to an EBFM will necessitate a change in how the human dimensions to fishing are considered.”

In 2012, NOAA named Jason Link as its first senior scientist for ecosystem management. Link’s previous work with NMFS revolved around the scientific underpinnings for ecosystem-based marine resource management, including essential fish habitat, multi-species models, ecosystem models, and developing resource management tools and systems with a strong ecological basis.

As the agency’s senior authority on ecosystem science, Link was charged with leading approaches and models to support development of ecosystem-based management plans throughout the agency.

A key element of the work will be to address the impacts of climate change, according to a NOAA press release.

At its first meeting, which was accessible to online observers, NEFMC’s EBFM Committee heard about efforts to develop EBFM plans in other regions, and discussed how to begin the development of an EBFM plan in New England. Among the presentations, Link said NMFS “has a commitment to make EBFM an operational reality,” according to a meeting memo.

The memo continues, “Climate changes and pressures are a real threat facing ecosystems. In fact the Northeast region is facing some of the greater changes in ocean temperature. In some recent cases, climate and predation interactions have been explicitly incorporated into stock assessments and management recommendations.”

In June, NEFMC discussed two approaches to the development of EBFM plans for “ecosystem production units” (EPU). An incremental or “evolutionary” approach would take place within the existing fishery management plan (FMP) structure, addressing specific ecosystem issues and special circumstances by area. This approach would allow for informal public meetings, would not require NMFS approval, and would be implemented as part of an existing FMP.

A “revolutionary” approach would adopt full-fledged ecosystem plans in, for example, the Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank, Southern New England, and the Mid-Atlantic. This would require formal scoping meetings and NMFS approval.

Ecosystem-based management approaches are underway in other countries, to various extents. According to NEFMC information, Australia has a formal EBFM approach, including an annual ecosystem risk assessment that provides guidance to individual regional fishery management plans. Iceland has a non-formal EBFM approach. Canada has an ecosystem policy and a director, but it is unclear how polices are applied in regional fishery management plans. Internationally, there is an Antarctic ecosystem plan under development.

In New England, existing fishery management plans currently incorporate ecosystem-based approaches, to some extent. These include management measures that have ecosystem effects; i.e. gear regulations, closed areas (habitat conservation and other purposes), limited access, effort limits (gear, DAS); measures to protect and enhance essential fish habitat; and bycatch management.

Dempsey spoke to the need to develop short-term and long-term goals, beginning first with defining the terms of reference that will guide the development of an EBFM plan.

“There’s significant range in how different regions approach this,” said Dempsey. “We don’t have a truly revolutionary approach that’s been implemented, but we have a number of evolutionary approaches, and some lessons in each of them. Each has a different focus, different goals and objectives, different processes. We’re not at the point where we’ve learned enough to say, ‘We like’ this or that. We’re still in the information-gathering phase. This will take some time to work through.”

Short-term, said Dempsey, the committee plans to move forward on reviewing its plan development team membership, and will seek advisory input. The committee has discussed development of two short-term initiatives on the evolutionary spectrum – a strawman model for ecological indicators “of what’s going on in the ocean that year,” and the development of standardized terms of reference for all NEFMC stock assessments.

A representative from Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC) said his region deals with a “strong mismatch between political boundaries and biological/ecosystem boundaries” that make area management an unlikely prospect for now. In conjunction with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, MAFMC manages a number of state-by-state allocations that could become a political quagmire if brought into an area-based scheme. For now, he said, MAFMC is building up background information through a series of workshops on topics such as climate change relative to fishery management and governance issues, forage fisheries, species interactions, and social and economic issues.

“A lot has changed the last three or four years,” noted one NEFMC member. “While we’re in the information-gathering stage, there will be a lot of interest. It behooves us to go out there and see what stakeholders are interested in doing” given the dynamic climate-related changes seen in a short period of time.

“We all recognize the need for public input early in the process,” said Dempsey.