BE/CNH: Linking Human Socioeconomic and Marine Ecosystem Dynamics Along the Pacific Coast of Baja California, Mexico

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Small-scale fisheries are dominant actors in coastal marine ecosystems, engaging more than 90 percent of the fishers in the world and producing more than half of the world's annual marine catch. The dynamics of their operations and decision making are poorly understood, however. Scarcity of data, the multi-species and multi-fleet nature of most small-scale fisheries, and complex feedbacks among human institutions at the local, regional, and global scale render existing fisheries models inapplicable to most small-scale fisheries. Small-scale fisheries typically exploit multiple stocks, have limited mobility, and vary widely in the types of economic drivers, cultural values, and management systems regulating extraction. Most small-scale fishing is concentrated in coastal areas characterized by high productivity and diversity, such as coral reefs, coastal lagoons, and estuaries. In turn, these locales are maintained by complex interactions between oceanographic processes in the nearshore marine environment and exchanges occurring at the land-sea interface. Only the simultaneous consideration of these different facets of complexity will allow examination of higher-level, emergent behaviors that are likely to characterize these complex and variable systems. Examples of crucial questions that can be addressed only through simultaneous consideration of different biological and socioeconomic sources of variability are: (1) How robust are different management systems in the face of environmental variability and variable amounts and type of data? (2) What are the social, cultural, and economic correlates of management enforcement and users compliance? (3) What are the effects of local and regional dynamics of small-scale fisheries on the persistence of ecosystem function and structure? This research project will begin the process of developing an integrated theoretical framework regarding the coupled dynamics among small-scale fishers, coastal resources, and their biophysical setting in marine ecosystems of the Pacific coast of Baja California, Mexico. A multidisciplinary group of researchers will develop models through the conduct of workshops and preliminary data-gathering activities. At the first workshop, researchers will initiate development of a series of stochastic, bioeconomic models that fuse ecological dynamics of benthic organisms with spatially and temporally explicit social and economic behavior of fishers. Researchers will assemble and synthesize existing physical, biological, economic, and anthropological data needed for parameterizing models and testing the model assumptions following the first workshop. The development of a framework for integrating models incorporating subsets of the complex interactions and feedbacks linking small-scale fisheries and their biological resources will be the focus of two additional workshops.The significance of this project are expected to be threefold. First, it will provide a holistic scientific understanding of the interactions between small-scale fisheries and their resources. Second, it will provide a better understanding of the drivers and consequences of human impacts in the coastal marine environment. Third, Baja California is a region of extraordinary productivity and biological diversity, currently considered one of the highest priorities for international conservation efforts. The study will provide a modeling framework for predicting the outcomes of new and future use of coastal resources in Baja California, including anticipated increases in population densities and coastal development in the region, and will start building a theoretical framework more broadly applicable to small-scale fisheries worldwide. In addition to enhancing fundamental scientific understandings, the project also offers prospects for practical implementation regarding the management of abalone and fisheries in the study region. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY 2002 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.