Comprehensive Ecosystem Management Models to Move Forward

by Laurie Schreiber

EBFM Committee chairman John Pappalardo said the plan must evolve with enough space to plug in new information as it becomes available. Fishermen’s Voice photo

DANVERS, Mass.—At its September meeting, the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) decided to commission a broad-based peer review on proposed Georges Bank operating models for ecosystem-based fishery management (EBFM).

NEFMC also decided the approach should include establishing catch caps and developing methods of setting catch limits by “fishery functional groups” of species—a group of species that are typically caught together in a particular type of gear and feed on similar food items.

“Going into this, we did not know what issues would come up or how this would structured,” said NEFMC staffer Andrew Applegate, who chairs the EBFM Plan Development Team. “People had different perceptions of what’s legal and what’s not. There’s uncertainty about mixed species and whether they can be managed together. So we wanted to see this develope in a way that we could flag things that were not easy to do under existing or revised guidelines and laws. We can either identify what they are and work around them as appropriate, or we can seek change in those guidelines and laws that make sense in managing an ecosystem. At this stage, we didn’t want to constrain that process.”

EBFM Committee chairman John Pappalardo said the plan must evolve with enough space to plug in new information as it becomes available.

Michael Fogarty, with the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, said the goal of the committee is to find an approach that offers avenues for simplification and allows a way forward for dealing with complexity.

“It seems like an overwhelming topic,” said Fogarty. “So we need a way to deliberately confront complexity and how we try to treat this as a management problem.”

Fogarty noted NEFMC has tackled the question of ecosystem-based management in the past. In 1980, a statement of NEFMC’s Northeast Fishery Management Task Force said, “To avoid the deficiencies of a single-species approach, management might address itself to the productivity and harvest potential of an entire ecosystem, since the ecosystem in the long run has greater stability than any of its components.” Fogarty also cited a 2004 statement from the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy: “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.”

“So these are issues the council itself has understood and recognized for a very long time,” Fogarty said. “The heart of this issue is that we’ve got a deeply interconnected system.”

NEFMC already manages for interconnection, to some extent, through its multi-species management plan, he said.

“Some of the connections and strength of interactions are stronger than others,” he said. “But it’s been recognized for quite some time that if we ignore these interconnections, we can miss the big picture of what’s going on.”

Studies around the world, he said, show that trying to apply single-species policies almost invariably results in that species, or others, running into problems.

“It’s arguably the case that the problem we’ve been dealing with here, in the seemingly intractable nature of dealing with the multi-species fishery, relates to the heart of the problem” said Fogarty. “That’s why we’re exploring avenues to move to recognize these key issues. Many species are caught together and they’re interacting overall. That’s the heart of the issue.”

Also problematic, he said, is that “We’re dealing with a system that has been deeply perturbed due to interventions starting in the 1960s. When the distance water fleets arrived, we had massive perturbation. A lot of fishing was going on that was clearly unsustainable. So we’re working with a system that’s undergone a really sharp perturbation overall.” Further profound disturbance of the ecosystem can be found going much further back, he said. “So we’re dealing with a deeply disturbed system, and for that reason a lot of the work we’re doing…does deliberately pick up the story after the Magnuson Act came into play and the foreign fleets were no longer there, because we don’t want to be misled into thinking that peak harvests” at the time were being done at a sustainable level.

The committee is also trying to build on existing management structures, including NEFMC’s management of the multi-species fishery.

“There’s already a precedent in thinking about species that are bundled together in a management plan,” Fogarty said. But what managers don’t currently do, he said, is take the next step to understand interactions within or between different plans. “That’s the next step we’re building into the process now.”

According to Fogarty’s presentation to NEFMC, “The need to adopt a more holistic view of human impacts on and benefits derived from the marine environment is now widely recognized. Global initiatives are now underway to implement integrated management strategies for ocean resource management recognizing the complexity of these systems, the role of humans as part of the ecosystem, and attempts to formulate strategies for sustainable use of natural resources in response to the cumulative effects of multiple stressors in the marine environment. Sectoral management issues, including fisheries management, fall under the broad remit of Ecosystem-Based Management.”

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) recently issued a policy statement defining EBFM as a “systematic approach to fisheries management in a geographically specified area that contributes to the resilience and sustainability of the ecosystem; recognizes the physical, biological, economic, and social interactions among the affected fishery-related components of the ecosystem, including humans; and seeks to optimize benefits among a diverse set of societal goals.”

“Ecosystem” is defined as “a geographically specified system of fishery resources, the persons that participate in that system, the environment, and the environmental processes that control that ecosystem’s dynamics. Fishermen and fishing communities are therefore understood to be included in the definition.”

That statement, said Fogarty, emphasizes that EBFM is inherently place-based, identifies the need to consider the interaction among system components in management and highlights the ways in which human communities both influence and are affected by changes in the ecosystem. Also, because the properties of an ecosystem are different from those of its parts, EBFM will necessarily differ from traditional single species approaches while maintaining some elements of more traditional management structures and tactical tools.

According to a draft “Operational Framework and Operating Models to support an Example Fishery Ecosystem Plan for Georges Bank,” prepared by the EBFM PDT, a Fishery Ecosystem Plan will be implemented for the “Georges Bank Ecosystem Production Unit” as a proof of concept, and will provide core elements of a Fishery Ecosystem Plan for further development.

“The overall approach is to assign species to functional groups using a combination of feeding guilds, technical interactions with fisheries and other ecosystem components, as well as biological characteristics,” the draft says. “The strategy would employ an overall Ecosystem Production Unit (EPU) catch cap based on the estimated energetics of the system and observed primary productivity. Catch limits by functional group would be allocated, but in aggregate should not exceed the EPU catch cap that would define overfishing. Biomass ‘floors’ would be established to protect species from becoming unacceptably overfished or depleted. These floors could be developed using survey information and could be based on a low percent of maximum stock size, considering the effect on risk and economic return.”

Seventy-four species are commonly found in the Georges Bank EPU and have been assigned to functional groups. Three operating models, or ecosystem simulations, have been applied to Georges Bank species—the so-called Hydra, Atlantis, and Ecosym/Ecopath models.

“We want to develop a virtual world to test ideas before we recommend anything to the council in terms of a particular management action,” said Fogarty. The use of several models will allow the team to look at the problem from different perspectives, he said.

“We have to be humble about saying what we do and do not understand about the how the system is structured,” he said.