Amber Himes-Cornell

Resilience strategies in the face of short- and long-term change: out- migration and fisheries regulation in Alaskan fishing communities

Historically, communities persisted in remote, isolated areas of Alaska in large part because of the abundance of marine and terrestrial resources, as well as the ability of local people to opportunistically access those resources as they became available. Species switching and the ability to shift effort away from fisheries during poor years allowed local residents to diversify their livelihoods in the face of uncertainties and ecological change. The advent of modern fisheries management, which views Alaskan fisheries as the property of all citizens of the United States, has fundamentally altered the relationship of place-based communities to fishery resources. Local access to fisheries has been particularly affected by the development of transferable fishing privileges, making it possible for fishing rights to leave place-based communities through the choices of individual community members to sell or to move away. When fishing communities in Alaska lose active fishing businesses, over time the loss of various types of community capital will follow, including human, social, cultural, technical, and financial capital. In some cases, communities are able to adapt or transform through diversification of their local economies. In other cases, no alternatives to a fishery-based economy are accessible. We have used resilience theory to explore drivers of change affecting Alaskan fishing communities. Emphasis was placed on two primary change drivers, the regulatory environment and rural out-migration, as well as their interconnections and their impacts on individuals, communities, and the larger social-ecological system. We summarized several government programs that have been implemented to support the continued participation of communities in Alaskan fisheries. In addition, we reviewed informal and private-sector efforts to generate resilience strategies that can facilitate new entry into fisheries or retain fishing businesses and fishing rights within communities, as well as respond to increasing uncertainty related to the global market and climate changes.

Using Socioeconomic and Fisheries Involvement Indices to Understand Alaska Fishing Community Well-Being

abstract Over recent years, fisheries managers have been going through a paradigm shift to prioritize ecosystem-based management. With this comes an increasing need to better understand the impacts of fisheries management decisions on the social well-being and sustainability of fishing communities. This article summarizes research aimed at using secondary data to develop socioeconomic and fisheries involvement indices to measure objective fishing community well-being in Alaska. Data from more than 300 communities in Alaska were used to create a database of socioeconomic and fisheries involvement indices of objective well-being and adaptability for Alaska communities dependent on marine resources. Each index was developed using a principal components factor analysis to assess the relative position of each community compared to all other communities in Alaska. We find that creating performance measures, such as the indices presented here, provides a useful way to track the status of socioeconomic conditions and fisheries involvement by communities over time.

Involviing fishing communities in data collection : a summary and description of the Alaska community survey, 2010

A review of existing fisheries data collected by the State of Alaska and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) shows that many Alaskan communities are highly engaged in commercial, recreational, and subsistence fisheries. These resources are frequently affected by fisheries management decisions and anthropogenic effects on resource distribution and abundance that can either threaten or enhance community well-being. However, much of the existing economic data about Alaskan fisheries is collected and organized around units of analysis such as counties (boroughs), fishing firms, vessels, sectors, and gear groups that is often difficult to aggregate or disaggregate for analysis at the individual community or regional level. In addition, some relevant community level economic data have not been collected historically. As a result, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC), the Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC), and community stakeholder organizations identified the ongoing collection of community level socio-economic information, specifically related to commercial fisheries, as a priority. To address this need, the AFSC Economic and Social Sciences Research Program (ESSRP) began implementing the Alaska Community Survey – a voluntary data collection program to improve the socio-economic data available for consideration in North Pacific fisheries management using the community as the unit of reporting and analysis. ESSRP social scientists partnered with community-based organizations and individuals from fishing communities around Alaska to ensure that detailed community level information is collected and made available for the socio-economic impact assessment of communities involved in North Pacific fisheries (initially focused on Alaska communities for feasibility reasons). An additional goal was to ensure that community level socio-economic and demographic data are collected at comparable levels of spatial and thematic resolution to commercial fisheries data. Such data will facilitate analysis of the impacts of proposed changes in commercial fisheries management, both within and across North Pacific communities involved and engaged in various types of fishing. These data will also help scientists and NPFMC staff to better understand Alaskan communities’ social and economic ties to the fishing industry and facilitate the analysis of potential impacts of catch share programs and coastal and marine spatial planning efforts. This survey was designed to gather information about Alaskan fishing communities and to help determine each community’s capacity to support fishing activities. The types of data collected from communities include recommendations from community representatives that participated in our community meetings. The survey was intended to collect information that is currently lacking about individual community involvement in fishing. This report gives an

Linking ecosystem processes to communities of practice through commercially fished species in the Gulf of Alaska

Marine ecosystems are complex, and there is increasing recognition that environmental, ecological, and human systems are linked inextricably in coastal regions. The purpose of this article was to integrate environmental, ecological and human dimensions information important for fisheries management into a common analytical framework. We then used the framework to examine the linkages between these traditionally separate subject areas. We focused on synthesis of linkages between the Gulf of Alaska marine ecosystem and human communities of practice, defined as different fisheries sectors. Our specific objective was to document the individual directional linkages among environmental, ecological, and human dimensions variables in conceptual models, then build qualitative network models to perform simulation analyses to test how bottom-up and top-down perturbations might propagate through these linkages. We found that it is both possible and beneficial to integrate environmental, ecological, and human dimensions information important for fisheries into a common framework. First, the conceptual models allowed us to synthesize information across a broad array of data types, representing disciplines such as ecology and economics that are more commonly investigated separately, often with distinct methods. Second, the qualitative network analysis demonstrated how ecological signals can propagate to human communities, and how fishery management measures may influence the system. Third, we found that incorporating multi-species interactions changed outcomes because the merged model reversed some of the ecological and human outcomes compared with single species analyses. Overall, we demonstrated the value of linking information from the natural and social sciences to better understand complex social-ecological systems, and the value of incorporating ecosystem-level processes into a traditionally single species management framework. We advocate for conceptual and qualitative network modelling as efficient foundational steps to inform ecosystem-based fisheries management.

Making Landfall: Linkages between Fishing Communities and Support Services

ABSTRACT The relationship between the fishing industry and the fisheries-related support service sector creates economic benefits for communities through the strong linkages between fishermen and their land-based suppliers and the induced or multiplier effects from fisheries revenue. The support service sector is embedded within fishing communities where the impacts of fisheries management changes are perpetuated. This article examines the potential for such impacts by evaluating the diversity of fishing gear use, ex-vessel revenue, presence of processing plants, public moorage, and haul-out or tidal grids, and the number of vessels in a community, in relation to the availability of support services in communities in Alaska. The results show that the presence of a processor and haul-out facilities in a community significantly affects the number of support service businesses; however, there is not a strong association with the number of vessels or ex-vessel revenue. One hypothesis is that fishermen often travel to other communities to obtain services. We evaluate this hypothesis using social network analysis to evaluate transfers of revenue for fishery-related goods and services. Ultimately, this informs the exploration of the importance of support service businesses and fishery-support infrastructure to the continued well-being of fishing communities.

Do Active Participation Measures Help Fishermen Retain Fishing Privileges

ABSTRACT In numerous fisheries management programs, managers have implemented measures to ensure that the benefits of the fishery accrue to those who are actively fishing. Although active participation measures are common in fisheries management, there has been limited research on these measures. This study highlights the variety of objectives that motivate the development of active participation measures and how they have been implemented. We examine the application of these measures in four case study fisheries management programs—the Alaska Halibut and Sablefish Individual Fishing Quota, the Pacific Coast Sablefish Permit Stacking, the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Crab Rationalization, and the Alaska State Limited Entry programs—and, based on the experiences in these programs, provide recommendations for instituting active participation measures in other management programs.

Social baseline of the Gulf of Alaska groundfish trawl fishery : results of the 2014 social survey

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