Species redistribution creates unequal outcomes for multispecies fisheries under projected climate change.

Climate change drives species distribution shifts, affecting the availability of resources people rely upon for food and livelihoods. These impacts are complex, manifest at local scales, and have diverse effects across multiple species. However, for wild capture fisheries, current understanding is dominated by predictions for individual species at coarse spatial scales. We show that species-specific responses to localized environmental changes will alter the collection of co-occurring species within established fishing footprints along the U.S. West Coast. We demonstrate that availability of the most economically valuable, primary target species is highly likely to decline coastwide in response to warming and reduced oxygen concentrations, while availability of the most abundant, secondary target species will potentially increase. A spatial reshuffling of primary and secondary target species suggests regionally heterogeneous opportunities for fishers to adapt by changing where or what they fish. Developing foresight into the collective responses of species at local scales will enable more effective and tangible adaptation pathways for fishing communities.

Social-ecological vulnerability of fishing communities to climate change: A U.S. West Coast case study.

Climate change is already impacting coastal communities, and ongoing and future shifts in fisheries species productivity from climate change have implications for the livelihoods and cultures of coastal communities. Harvested marine species in the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem support U.S. West Coast communities economically, socially, and culturally. Ecological vulnerability assessments exist for individual species in the California Current but ecological and human vulnerability are linked and vulnerability is expected to vary by community. Here, we present automatable, reproducible methods for assessing the vulnerability of U.S. West Coast fishing dependent communities to climate change within a social-ecological vulnerability framework. We first assessed the ecological risk of marine resources, on which fishing communities rely, to 50 years of climate change projections. We then combined this with the adaptive capacity of fishing communities, based on social indicators, to assess the potential ability of communities to cope with future changes. Specific communities (particularly in Washington state) were determined to be at risk to climate change mainly due to economic reliance on at risk marine fisheries species, like salmon, hake, or sea urchins. But, due to higher social adaptive capacity, these communities were often not found to be the most vulnerable overall. Conversely, certain communities that were not the most at risk, ecologically and economically, ranked in the category of highly vulnerable communities due to low adaptive capacity based on social indicators (particularly in Southern California). Certain communities were both ecologically at risk due to catch composition and socially vulnerable (low adaptive capacity) leading to the highest tier of vulnerability. The integration of climatic, ecological, economic, and societal data reveals that factors underlying vulnerability are variable across fishing communities on the U.S West Coast, and suggests the need to develop a variety of well-aligned strategies to adapt to the ecological impacts of climate change.

Harmful algal blooms and coastal communities: Socioeconomic impacts and actions taken to cope with the 2015 U.S. West Coast domoic acid event.

The 2015 U.S. West Coast domoic acid event was caused by a massive harmful algal bloom (HAB) that consisted mostly of the diatom Pseudo-nitzschia australis. It was unprecedented in its toxicity and geographic extent and resulted in extended and widespread closures of the lucrative commercial Dungeness crab and popular recreational razor clam fisheries. The fishery closures led to federal fisheries disaster declarations and generated an economic shock for coastal communities that depend on access to these marine resources. This study reports on the socioeconomic impacts of the 2015 HAB across 16 fishing communities on the U.S. West Coast using primary survey data. The survey instrument, deployed in the summer of 2017, collected information on sociodemographic and economic factors hypothesized to confer resilience or vulnerability to HABs, data quantifying individual impacts, and the coping and adaptive actions taken by individuals to deal with the event. The vast majority of survey participants (84%) were negatively impacted by the 2015 HAB, but individuals employed in fishing-related occupations experienced greater financial, emotional, and sociocultural impacts than those employed in other sectors. Further, those employed in fishing-related occupations were less likely to recover financial losses suffered as a result of the event. This study identifies the pathways through which HABs affect fishery-dependent and fishery-associated sectors of U.S. West Coast communities. The understanding gained can help inform efforts to prepare for future HABs, mitigate their socioeconomic impacts, and aid recovery.

Fishing to live or living to fish: Job satisfaction and identity of west coast fishermen.

Fishing is a dangerous and financially risky way to make a living, but it attracts many participants that prefer it to higher paying and safer jobs. Based on a survey of over 1400 U.S. West Coast fishing vessel owners we use factor analysis and structural equation modeling to quantify distinct latent variables representing job satisfaction related to non-monetary versus monetary aspects of fishing and measures of identity and social capital associated with being a fisher. We show that these latent variables have distinct effects on (stated) fishery participation behavior and that higher non-monetary job satisfaction, social capital, and identity, are associated with a willingness to forgo higher income to be a fisher. Understanding how these factors affect and are affected by participation in fisheries could be important to increase benefits from fisheries and to ensure sustainability of management regimes that rely on indirect controls on effort to limit catch.

Environmental awareness and public support for protecting and restoring Puget sound.

In an effort to garner consensus around environmental programs, practitioners have attempted to increase awareness about environmental threats and demonstrate the need for action. Nonetheless, how beliefs about the scope and severity of different types of environmental concerns shape support for management interventions are less clear. Using data from a telephone survey of residents of the Puget Sound region of Washington, we investigate how perceptions of the severity of different coastal environmental problems, along with other social factors, affect attitudes about policy options. We find that self-assessed environmental understanding and views about the seriousness of pollution, habitat loss, and salmon declines are only weakly related. Among survey respondents, women, young people, and those who believe pollution threatens Puget Sound are more likely to support policy measures such as increased enforcement and spending on restoration. Conversely, self-identified Republicans and individuals who view current regulations as ineffective tend to oppose governmental actions aimed at protecting and restoring Puget Sound. Support for one policy measure-tax credits for environmentally-friendly business practices-is not significantly affected by political party affiliation. These findings demonstrate that environmental awareness can influence public support for environmental policy tools. However, the nature of particular management interventions and other social forces can have important mitigating effects and need to be considered by practitioners attempting to develop environment-related social indicators and generate consensus around the need for action to address environmental problems.

Water water everywhere, but not enough for salmon? Organizing integrated water and fisheries management in Puget Sound.

Natural resource management has traditionally been organized within discrete land, water, and fishery resource sectors. However, emerging environmental problems often cross these boundaries, and managers have struggled to find effective planning approaches for multi-resource concerns. No case better exemplifies these challenges than efforts to ensure sufficient flows of water for salmon in the Pacific Northwest. In this study, we investigate the organizational experiences of collaborative water and salmon recovery planning groups in the Puget Sound region of Washington. Using conceptual frameworks from organizational sociology, we examine how different regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutional forces shape the structure and behavior of both water and salmon recovery planning groups. Data obtained through content analysis of planning documents and interviews with natural resource planners illustrate that legal structures, shared intra-group norms, and the distinct organizational cultures of water and salmon recovery groups constrain these organizations' ability to address linked water-for-salmon concerns. These findings illustrate that assessing institutional and organizational arrangements may be equally as important as understanding hydrology and biology when attempting to forward an integrated approach to water and fisheries management.

Social Sciences and landscape analysis: opportunities for the improvement of conservation policy design.

This article develops a methodology aimed at generating a systematic social diagnosis of social and natural landscapes. The analytical process is divided into six easily replicable and causatively connected steps. The goal is two-fold: first, to present the inextricable connections between physical landscapes and the communities that occupy them. And second, to provide a fundamental tool to public policy designers that should simultaneously improve social acceptability of conservation policies and policy efficiency and effectiveness. Finally, this methodology is consciously heterogeneous from a theoretical perspective. This article puts together, in fruitful dialogue, contributions from varying places on the social theory spectrum: from political economy to poststructural theory.