Inland fisheries are a vital component in the livelihoods and food security of people throughout the world, as well as contributing huge recreational and economic benefits. These valuable assets are jeopardized by lack of research-based understanding of the impacts of fisheries on inland ecosystems, and similarly the impact of human activities associated with inland waters on fisheries and aqua...

This chapter demonstrates that the ecosystems supporting the marine fisheries on Canada's east and west coasts have greatly changed under exploitation by industrial fisheries. These changes, reflected in the decline in the abundance of key species and the composition of the fisheries' landings, imply changes in the support provided by the ecosystems in which the fisheries are embedded. This fur...

I N T E R N A T I O N A L E X P E R I E N C E Around the world many fisheries have collapsed, including some in Australia. Consequently marine fisheries are under increasing pressure to adopt more precautionary management approaches. Although Australia’s fisheries are generally in good shape—few are overfished—many are fully exploited. Overseas experience tells us that even the best fisheries m...

Conventional management approaches have not been successful in protecting fisheries resources from decline either globally or in the Caribbean. Over the past 20 years co-management has emerged as a dominant paradigm when thinking about responsible fisheries in the Caribbean. At the same time there has been growing recognisition of the need for closer collaboration and cooperation among the coun...

Management science, the scientific study of problem-solving, has developed a body of literature and methodologies over the past four decades on decision theory methods, evaluation of management and systems performance, and analysis of systems under uncertainty. These methods have been influential and applied successfully to many industrial decision-making and strategic-planning settings. Fisher...

Meeting the widely expressed requirement that fisheries should somehow be managed on an ‘ecosystem basis’ implies that fisheries-relevant ecological processes, and the fisheries themselves, need to be documented in the form of maps. This allows recovery, in intuitive fashion, of at least some of the many dimensions of the complex ecosystems in which the fisheries are embedded. The implied trans...

Sea turtles interact with a variety of fishing gears across their broad geographic distributions and ontogenetic habitat shifts. Cumulative assessments of multi-gear bycatch impacts on sea turtle populations are critical for coherent fisheries bycatch management, but such estimates are difficult to achieve, due to low fisheries observer effort, and a single-species, single-fishery management fo...

Ongoing declines in production of the world's fisheries may have serious ecological and socioeconomic consequences. As a result, a number of international efforts have sought to improve management and prevent overexploitation, while helping to maintain biodiversity and a sustainable food supply. Although these initiatives have received broad acceptance, the extent to which corrective measures h...

IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) and University of Tasmania; U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, Southeast Fisheries Science Center, 3209 Frederic Street, Pascagoula MS 39567, USA; North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, 3441 Arendell Street, Morehead City, NC 28557, USA; WIDECAST and Duke University Marine Laboratory, 135 Duke Marine Lab Road, Beaufort, North ...

The ecosystem approach is being promoted as the foundation of solutions to the unsustainability of fisheries. However, because the ecosystem approach is broadly inclusive, the science for its implementation is often considered to be overly complex and difficult. When the science needed for an ecosystem approach to fisheries is perceived this way, science products cannot keep pace with fisheries...