R reports have raised serious concerns about the rapid declines of historically productive marine fishery resources and the degradation of essential fish habitats. This global crisis has spurred development of innovative management strategies to rebuild depleted fisheries and marine ecosystems. One highly touted strategy involves the design and creation of marine reserves (areas off limits to e...

Fishery management is widely perceived to be failing, and proposals for new approaches abound. However, evidence is accumulating that traditional approaches, where properly applied, do work. European management of fish stocks in the north-east Atlantic may be the latest case in point.

The sea scallop resource of Georges Bank supports one of the largest commercial fisheries in the United States. The objective of this research was to develop a technique to examine different management strategies for the sea scallop resource of Georges Bank and compare these strategies to the optimal. A simulation model followed the sea scallop population dynamics using information from recent ...

There is great variation in discarding practice among fisheries in different parts of the world. Management systems result in some fisheries discarding mostly fish offal, much of which is macerated into small chunks, while other fisheries discard large (ca. 25 cm) whole fish. Scavenging seabirds consume high proportions of most categories of discarded fish and offal (typically 60 to 80% of disc...

The primary evidence about the factors determining successful self-governance of common-pool resources (CPR) has come from case studies. More recently, this observational evidence has been complemented by insights from economic experiments. Here we advance a third approach in which the role of local deliberation about the management of a fishery resource is investigated in a field experiment. U...

We describe the process used in the fisheries management system of the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) to minimise seabird bycatch, and the risk-assessment methodology developed to assist this. We examine the progress of several Regional Fishery Management Organisations in taking steps to address seabird bycatch. CCAMLR has the most advanced system ...

Implementation of ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) requires a clear conceptual and quantitative framework for assessing how different harvest options can modify benefits to ecosystem and human beneficiaries. We address this social-ecological need for Pacific salmon fisheries, which are economically valuable but intercept much of the annual pulse of nutrient subsidies that salmon prov...

Spatial closures are widely used in marine conservation and fisheries management and it is important to understand their contribution to achieving management objectives. Many previous evaluations of closed area effects have used before-after comparisons, which, without controlling for a full range of factors, cannot ascribe changes in fleet behaviour to area closures per se. In this study we us...