Executive Summary Introduction Recreational fishing represents a popular and highly valued use of marine resources, with participation by a large percentage of the U.S. population. Nonetheless, many recreational fisheries, including a number of fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) recreational reef fish complex, show trends towards shorter seasons, smaller bag limits and more restrictive size ...

Key components include support for extension of the data integration and management approach from West Hawaii to other islands in the MHI where DAR does coral reef monitoring (Oahu, Maui). The ultimate aim being to enhance DAR’s capacity to make better use of its own data together with external information (e.g. GIS layers for Hawaii). Research elements included assessing decadal-scale change a...

Ocean and coastal ecosystems provide critical fisheries, coastal protection, and cultural benefits to communities worldwide, but these services are diminishing due to local and global threats. In response, place-based strategies involve communities and resource users in management have proliferated. Here, we present a transferable community-based approach to assess the social and ecological fac...

  Artificial reefs are used to compensate the destruction of marine ecosystems. In the present study, the effects of artificial reefs were compared to natural sites. For this purpose, five treatments including four different forms (Reef ball (R), Laneh Mahi (L), used materials (U) and R+L+U) of artificial reefs and one control were established. The reefs were deployed at Bandar Lengeh, the Pers...

The deepwater chondrichthyan fauna of the Great Barrier Reef is poorly known and life history information is required to enable their effective management as they are inherently vulnerable to exploitation. The chondrichthyan bycatch from the deepwater eastern king prawn fishery at the Swain Reefs in the southern Great Barrier Reef was examined to determine the species present and provide inform...

We use a spatially explicit biogeochemical end-to-end ecosystem model, Atlantis, to simulate impacts from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and subsequent recovery of fish guilds. Dose-response relationships with expected oil concentrations were utilized to estimate the impact on fish growth and mortality rates. We also examine the effects of fisheries closures and impacts on recruitment. We vali...

While the species level effects of marine reserves are widely recognized, community level shifts due to marine reserves have only recently been documented. Protection from fishing of top predators may lead to trophic cascades, which have community-wide implications. Disease may act in a similar manner, regulating population levels of dominant species within a community. Two decades of data from...

INCIDENTAL CATCHES of wahoo, Acanthocybittm solandri (Cuvier and Valenciennes), have been made by the Pacific Oceanic Fishery Investigations, a branch of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, during experimental tuna fishing conducted from 1950 to 1956. The exploratory fishing, which extended from 180° to 130 W. longitude and from WON. to 13°S. latitude, has been carried out both close to the is...

Rotational harvesting is one of the oldest management strategies applied to terrestrial and marine natural resources, with crop rotations dating back to the time of the Roman Empire. The efficacy of this strategy for sessile marine species is of considerable interest given that these resources are vital to underpin food security and maintain the social and economic wellbeing of small-scale and ...

Although a consensus in marine science is developing on the need to adopt ecosystem-based fishery management, few studies try to quantify the contextspecific gains from implementing it. Using a multi-species bioeconomic model for a Caribbean reef community, we determine the optimal harvesting rates for predator and prey species and ask how this more comprehensive optimization differs from tradi...