Resilience Management for Conservation of Inland Recreational Fisheries

Edward V Camp,Mark A Kaemingk,Kevin L Pope,William E Pine,Olaf L F Weyl,Warren M Potts,Robert N M Ahrens

doi:10.3389/fevo.2019.00498

Abstract

Resilience thinking has generated much interest among scientific communities, yet most resilience concepts have not materialized into management applications. We believe that using resilience concepts to characterize systems and the social and ecological processes affecting them is a way to integrate resilience into better management decisions. This situation is exemplified by inland recreational fisheries, which represent complex socioecological systems that face unpredictable and unavoidable change. Making management decisions in the context of resilience is increasingly important given mounting environmental and anthropogenic perturbations to inland systems. Herein, we propose a framework that allows resilience concepts to be better incorporated into management by (i) recognizing how current constraints and management objectives focus on desired or undesired systems (specific fish and anglers), (ii) evaluating the state of a system in terms of how both social and ecological forces enforce or erode the desired or undesired system, (iii) identifying the resilience-stage cycles a system state may undergo, and (iv) determining the broad management strategies that may be viable given the system state and resilience stage. We use examples from inland recreational fisheries to illustrate different system state and resilience stages and synthesize several key results. Across all combinations of socioecological forces, five common types of viable management strategies emerge: (i) adopt a different management preference or focus, (ii) change stakeholder attitudes or behaviors via stakeholder outreach, (iii) engage in (sometimes extreme) biological intervention, (iv) engage in fishery intervention, and (v) adopt landscape-level management approaches focusing on achieving different systems in different waters. We then discuss the challenges and weaknesses of our approach, including specifically the cases in which there are multiple strong social forces (i.e., stakeholders holding competing objectives or values) and situations where waters are not readily divisible, such as rivers or great lakes, and in which spatial separation of competing objectives will be difficult. We end with our vision of how we believe these types of operationalized resilience approaches could improve or transform inland recreational fisheries management.

Highlights

The idea of resilience has become widely attractive, and it is recommended that governance systems “manage for resilience” (Garmestani and Allen, 2014; Cosens and Gunderson, 2018; Burnetta et al, 2019)
We believe that the utility of our conceptual approach lies in recognizing that certain combinations of management system preference, socioecological forces, and resilience stages will result in a limited number of viable management strategies
Desired system states with synergistic enforcing (+/+) social and ecological forces should sustain themselves with minimal intervention because the socioecological systems already tend toward the preferred management focus (Table 2, cells 1–2)

Summary

Introduction

The idea of resilience has become widely attractive, and it is recommended that governance systems “manage for resilience” (Garmestani and Allen, 2014; Cosens and Gunderson, 2018; Burnetta et al, 2019). Though the term resilience is used differently across disciplines, the concept related to natural resource management was made notable by Holling (1966) and the primary concepts were summarized by Holling (1973) This and subsequent works detailing aspects of resilience (many from the Resilience Alliance) have generally defined resilience as the magnitude of a disturbance that will trigger a shift between alternative stable states of a system. The concept of resilience has been supported by development of and adaptation to complementary processes, including adaptive management (Walters, 1986) and panarchy (Gunderson and Holling, 2002) These developments have likely propelled resilience concepts beyond scientific investigation to be at least superficially embraced by diverse institutions involved in the governance of natural resources, from forestry and fisheries to coastal human communities (Benson and Garmestani, 2011; Rosati et al, 2015). This is further evidenced by management agencies proclaiming their goals of “managing for resilience,” as well as by requests for proposals prompting investigation of resilience concepts

Objectives

Results

Conclusion