A measure of port-level resilience to shocks in commercial fisheries

Abstract

Marine and aquatic environments provide a range of tangible and intangible benefits to human communities. Ecosystem-based approaches to fisheries management, particularly those that characterize ecosystems as socio-ecological in nature, are often intended to capture and incorporate these benefits into integrated monitoring and management. A central conceptual concern of both the biophysical and socioeconomic elements of these integrated ecosystem approaches is the notion of resilience. Although system resilience to perturbation has been discussed and applied in ecological contexts, its use in social and economic contexts is less well developed within integrated ecosystem research and retains distinctive differences from its use in ecological contexts. Conceptions of community resilience in terms of commercial fishing and marine ecosystems benefit from empirical analyses. Accordingly, the research here develops a metric of port-level commercial fishing resilience, adapted from approaches in regional science and economic geography, to analyze US West Coast fishing ports in terms of their sensitivities to ecological and management shocks during a thirty year period. In doing so, resultant analyses suggest both the limitations of these approaches and the ways in which they can be applied within the context of ecosystem-based fishery management.