Seabirds as offshore wildlife resources have largely been unstudied by wildlife managers until recently. Brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis californicus) in Southern California Bight (SCB) have received special attention in the past under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). Special consideration is given to species with endangered status in commercial fishery management plans mandated...

Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce H.R. 1367, the Atlantic Highly Migratory Species Conservation Act of 2001. I am pleased to be here today to talk about such an important issue. We stand at an historic crossroads for the conservation of highly migratory species (HMS). The effective management of Atlantic HMS is one of the most complex and difficult challenges facing the Nationa...

The theory of maximum sustainable yield (MSY) underpins many fishery management regimes and is applied principally as a single species concept. Using a simple dynamic biomass production model we show that MSY can be identified from a long time series of multi-stock data at a regional scale in the presence of species interactions and environmental change. It suggests that MSY is robust and calcu...

Regulatory efforts to reduce bycatch fulfill multiple management goals -from protecting overfished and depleted species, to preventing over-harvest of species of unknown abundance, to acknowledging that vessels using different gear types require different harvest strategies, to matching within-year harvest rates to within-year abundance and congregation habits of managed species. These goals mu...

This document contains an Environmental Assessment (EA), Regulatory Impact Review (RIR), and Initial Regulatory Flexibility Analysis (IRFA) for two actions. The EA and IRFA analyze the impacts of the Federal actions to: 1) establishing the 2004 harvest specifications for groundfish target species in the groundfish fisheries of the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, and Gulf of Alaska fishery managem...

This document contains an Environmental Assessment (EA), Regulatory Impact Review (RIR), and Initial Regulatory Flexibility Analysis (IRFA) for two actions. The EA and IRFA analyze the impacts of the Federal actions to: 1) establishing the 2004 harvest specifications for groundfish target species in the groundfish fisheries of the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, and Gulf of Alaska fishery managem...

Global decline of marine resources has triggered a worldwide demand for changing the way ocean resources are managed. Ecosystem-based management approaches have emerged using marine protected areas (MPA) as the main tool. Several classifications of marine protected areas benefits have been made, but all have focused only on the benefits to humans, neglecting many important benefits accrued to n...

Marine no-take zones can have positive impacts for target species and are increasingly important management tools. However, whether they indirectly benefit higher order predators remains unclear. The endangered African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) depends on commercially exploited forage fish. We examined how chick survival responded to an experimental 3-year fishery closure around Robben Isla...

Atlantic bigeye is a highly migratory species widely distributed through the whole Atlantic. Recent assessments conducted by the ICCAT SCRS are highly uncertain due to the large uncertainties in biological parameters, such as M, as well as in fishery statistics (e.g., IUU fleets, juvenile catch) or abundance indexes. Similar uncertainties can be found in the Indian or Pacific stocks. The develo...