Katrin Daedlow

Social-ecological interactions, management panaceas, and the future of wild fish populations

We explored the social and ecological outcomes associated with emergence of a management panacea designed to govern a stochastic renewable natural resource. To that end, we constructed a model of a coupled social-ecological system of recreational fisheries in which a manager supports naturally fluctuating stocks by stocking fish in response to harvest-driven satisfaction of resource users. The realistic assumption of users remembering past harvest experiences when exploiting a stochastically fluctuating fish population facilitates the emergence of a stocking-based management panacea over time. The social benefits of panacea formation involve dampening natural population fluctuations and generating stability of user satisfaction. It also maintains the resource but promotes the eventual replacement of wild fish by hatchery-descended fish. Our analyses show this outcome is particularly likely when hatchery-descended fish are reasonably fit (e.g., characterized by similar survival relative to wild fish) and/or when natural recruitment of the wild population is low (e.g., attributable to habitat deterioration), which leaves the wild population with little buffer against competition by stocked fish. The potential for release-based panacea formation is particularly likely under user-based management regimes and should be common in a range of social-ecological systems (e.g., fisheries, forestry), whenever user groups are entitled to engage in release or replanting strategies. The net result will be the preservation of a renewable resource through user-based incentives, but the once natural populations are likely to be altered and to host nonnative genotypes. This risks other ecosystem services and the future of wild populations.

Disturbance, Response, and Persistence in Self-Organized Forested Communities: Analysis of Robustness and Resilience in Five Communities in Southern Indiana

We develop an analytic framework for the analysis of robustness in social-ecological systems (SESs) over time. We argue that social robustness is affected by the disturbances that communities face and the way they respond to them. Using Ostroms ontological framework for SESs, we classify the major factors influencing the disturbances and responses faced by five Indiana intentional communities over a 15-year time frame. Our empirical results indicate that operational and collective-choice rules, leadership and entrepreneurship, monitoring and sanctioning, economic values, number of users, and norms/social capital are key variables that need to be at the core of future theoretical work on robustness of self-organized systems.

Understanding and Managing Freshwater Recreational Fisheries as Complex Adaptive Social-Ecological Systems

ABSTRACT The state of knowledge on the science and management of freshwater recreational fisheries is reviewed, with the objective of integrating insights from disparate fields such as fisheries science, environmental complexity theory, common-pool-resource theory, and resilience theory. First, freshwater recreational fisheries are characterized as complex adaptive social-ecological systems (SESs). Subsequently, two interrelated frameworks, drawing on the Ostrom framework for the analysis of SESs and adaptive management as key foundations, are presented. These frameworks are useful to structure the complexity and apprehend the various feedbacks and links inherent in any particular recreational fisheries system. Moreover, the frameworks help to identify operational management strategies in the face of substantial social-ecological uncertainty. It is concluded that to understand and manage freshwater recreational fisheries as complex adaptive SESs, a sustained shift from disciplinary to inter- and sometimes transdisciplinary research as well as a focus on flexible, adaptive and generally enabling rather than command-and-control type governance and management are needed. Understanding and managing recreational fisheries as complex adaptive SESs will benefit from an increasing focus on (i) managing social-ecological feedbacks and processes, (ii) managing critical slow variables that either drive the system or maintain it in potentially undesirable states, and (iii) managing and maintaining social and ecological diversity. It is hoped that the frameworks presented in this article may guide future interdisciplinary inquiry to manage for sustainability by building resilience.