Cross-scale Fisheries in the Gulf of California

Fish populations that span or move over large regional scales often represent fisheries with high uncertainty or high variability in access. The appearance of such transient regional fisheries is known to trigger the mobility (or migration) of fishers, who can change their fishing patterns in response to such temporary, higher incentives. Local fisheries, which operate in spatially explicit fishing regions, may experience reductions in effort during times that transient regional fisheries are present.

In this project we study the effects of differing fisher behavior between these different resource types (transient versus local) on the resources themselves as well as the local human populations that rely on them as a source of livelihood. We apply an Agent-Based Modelling approach based on the empirical case of the Gulf of California, Mexico, to investigate the effect of the interactions between local and regional fisheries on: i) the exploitation levels of local resources and ii) the economic inequality and resilience between local communities with different fishery types and between fishers that have different capacities to move to fish transient regional fisheries.

Understanding the movement patterns of fishers that emerge when transient fishery resources are present will help us highlight which circumstances lead to changes in resilience caused by shifting exploitation patterns and subsequent changes in revenue gains and recovery potential of local fish stocks. Our work has important implications for the design of regulations such as those that limit or enable fishing access.

Keywords: Social-ecological Systems, Complex adaptive systems, Natural resource management, Small-scale fisheries, Gulf of California, Mexico

• Paper: Cross-scale interactions between local and regional fisheries: Implications for local fishing communities (Manuscript)
• Model: To be published during 2019
• Main Participants: Emilie Lindkvist, Andrew F. Johnson, Alfredo Girón, Maja Schlüter, Blanca Gonzalez-Mon
• Funders: NSF USA, MuSES
• Want to know more? Email emilie.lindkvist — @ — su.se

MAREA Project page: NSF funded coupled-human nature project 2016-2019. The overarching goal of MAREA is to generate and share knowledge of the coupled social-ecological systems associated with small-scale fisheries, and to translate that knowledge into actions that contribute to more resilient, equitable societies and healthy coastal marine ecosystems. SES-LINK team members are responsible for the ABM part.