DISES: Understanding dynamic social-environmental feedbacks in temporary fisheries closures

小规模渔业是海洋最大的雇主，为数十亿人提供营养，但它们正受到日益严重的过度捕捞的威胁。管理近岸渔业最著名的策略是在海洋保护区实施永久禁止捕鱼。由于缺乏渔民的遵守，这些关闭经常失败。为了重建渔业，世界各地的渔民往往更喜欢临时关闭。不幸的是，对它们的研究相对不足，对这些系统的生态和社会组成部分相互作用的方式知之甚少。本研究研究了临时渔业关闭所导致的社会和生态动态之间的相互作用。本研究将探讨墨西哥和法属波利尼西亚实施临时关闭的数十个地点的相互作用的社会和环境动态。它通过建立知识、能力和相关专门知识网络，促进小规模渔业的可持续管理。研究结果将直接为公共决策工具提供信息。这些工具将向非政府组织、政府机构和其他有关的保育实践者团体广播。这些模型可以作为网络和智能手机应用程序的基础，渔民可以使用这些应用程序来探索临时封闭的替代设计。这项研究还通过与当地渔业和管理组织的伙伴关系直接为政策提供信息。这将导致更加有效和公平的关闭。该项目最终为学生和博士后提供了一个一体化的培养环境。暂时禁止捕鱼引起的干扰对鱼类和生态系统的其他组成部分产生了重大影响。这是潜在的营养级联在不同时间尺度上发挥作用的结果。人们对这些生态关系的动态知之甚少。目标物种的数量，它们的生长速度，它们的流动性，以及底栖生物的变化，具有复杂的关系，这些关系将响应不同的关闭长度，在不同的物种组合之间产生潜在的权衡。就社会动态而言，临时区域有可能成为与海洋资源适应性共同管理理论相一致的学习和建立信任的工具，但在2019冠状病毒病大流行等大规模破坏之后，临时区域的临时性也使其容易受到腐败、不确定性和不稳定因素的影响。该项目以两个实施临时封禁的国家为中心，在一个综合社会、生态和模型研究项目中汇集了尖端技术。渔网调查、水下鱼类普查和水基无人机调查将提供有关底栖生物和鱼类种群状况的综合数据。这将与社会科学实地考察相结合，重点关注保护区的历史、利益相关者的异质性、当地知识以及影响利益相关者对保护区社会生态结果解释的产权配置。根据这些社会和生态数据，动态的基于主体的生物经济模型将根据其他情况进行调整，以产生关于临时关闭设计如何在短期和长期内影响鱼类生物量和渔民收入的可测试预测。这项研究的结果将用于调整决策工具模型，以帮助渔民设计临时关闭，并将在几个试点社区进行测试。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Small-scale fisheries are the ocean’s biggest employers and provide nutrition to billions, but they are threatened by mounting overfishing. The most well-known strategy to manage near-shore fisheries is to implement permanent bans on fishing in marine protected areas. Those closures often fail due to lack of fisher compliance. Temporary closures are often preferred by fishers around the world to rebuild their fisheries. Unfortunately, they are relatively understudied and there is little understanding of the way that ecological and social components of these systems interact. This research studies the interactions between social and ecological dynamics resulting from temporary fisheries closures. This study will explore the interacting social and environmental dynamics in dozens of sites in Mexico and French Polynesia where temporary closures have been implemented. It contributes to sustainable management of small-scale fisheries by building knowledge, capacity, and networks of relevant expertise. The results will directly inform publicly available decision tools. The tools will be broadcast to non-governmental organizations, government agencies, and other relevant conservation practitioner groups. The models can serve as the basis for a web and smartphone application that fishers can use to explore alternative designs for temporary closures. This research also directly informs policy through partnerships with local fisheries and management organizations. This will lead to closures that are more effective and equitable. This project finally provides an integrative training environment for students and a post-doctoral researcher.The disturbance induced by a temporary ban on fishing has significant consequences on fish species and other components of the ecosystem. This is a result of potential trophic cascades that play out over different temporal scales. The dynamics of these ecological relationships are poorly understood. The number of species targeted, their growth rates, and their mobility, as well as changes to the benthos, have complex relationships that will respond to the varying length of closures, creating potential trade-offs between different portfolios of species. In terms of social dynamics, temporary areas have the potential to serve as learning and trust-building tools aligned with theories of adaptive co-management of marine resources, but their temporality also opens them to corruption, uncertainties, and instability in the wake of large disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic. This project brings together cutting-edge techniques in an integrated social, ecological, and modeling research program centered on two countries where temporary closures have been implemented. Fisher creel surveys, underwater fish censuses and water-based drone surveys will be employed to provide comprehensive data on the state of the benthos and the fish populations. This will be combined with social science fieldwork focusing on the histories of the reserves, the heterogeneity of stakeholders, local knowledge, and the configurations of property rights that shape stakeholders’ interpretations of a reserve’s socio-ecological outcomes. Drawing from these social and ecological data, dynamic agent-based and bioeconomic models will be adapted from other contexts to generate testable predictions of how temporary closure design affects fish biomass and fisher incomes in the short- and long-term. The outcomes of this research will be used to adapt a decision-tool model to help fishers design temporary closures and it will be tested in several pilot communities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.