Project Details

Measuring trade-offs in ecosystem services to support an ecosystem approach to fisheries management

The ecosystem approach to fisheries management has been widely promoted as a means to foster more sustainable management of marine resources by protecting vital and valued ecosystem functions. A central tenet of this approach is that fisheries decisions can be improved through a more holistic view that considers broader ecosystem impacts of fishing, and thereby directly considers trade-offs among conflicting demands for valued services that ecosystems provide.  A growing management and conservation issue directly concerns these trade-offs – the rapid growth in fisheries targeting small, schooling ocean fish, or forage fish, and squids.  Forage fish fisheries now comprise nearly 30 percent of all landings globally, and regionally squid account for as much as 40 percent of all fishery landings. These species play foundational roles in food webs as a primary means of energy transfer from small plankton, which these species consume, to larger species of fish, marine birds and mammals.  Thus, they have value both as commodities to be caught and as providers of essential ecosystem services.  Achieving the promise of ecosystem-based management is contingent on developing methods that can measure, identify and resolve these trade-offs. 

Tim Essington's Pew Fellowship project will advance methods for  valuing forage fish in marine ecosystems by developing tools to measure trade-offs between the essential ecosystem services they supply and their commercial value as commodities to be caught.  In collaboration with an economist, Essington will consider both economic and biological data and models for forage fish and squids, which play a similar ecological role as forage fish.  Essington will then apply the tools he develops to real fishery ecosystems. His project will provide a comprehensive empirical demonstration of the ecological and economic impacts of forage fish and squid fisheries. It will also provide new quantitative methods that may be adopted by managers for identifying, measuring and resolving ecological trade-offs in fisheries.