Coastal Conservation Association (CCA)

Ecosystem Management

By Dick Brame
Atlantic States Fisheries Director
From the January/February 2006 Issue
of TIDE Magazine

Ecosystem Management (EM) is a buzzword often heard in fishery management circles today and, like most buzzwords, there is little substance and a lot of opinions connected to the concept. EM is a catchall concept that most people believe actually means something. Sure, the thought of managing all the different organisms in an ecosystem as a single unit is an appealing and attractive idea but, like most great ideas, the devil is in the details.

What exactly is an ecosystem? How do you define it?

We know a fair amount about each level in any given ecosystem, about the bottom strata, the invertebrates living there, the organisms that eat the invertebrates, etc. The problem is, we do not know very much about the connections between those different levels. We can model a single species and, in the near future, several species together, but not entire systems.

What can we do?

I believe all fisheries management will tend toward ecosystem management in the future, even if they cannot define it. Most managers are already thinking in those terms. But the change will be evolutionary, not revolutionary. Small steps adding different components to management that eventually will lead to a more holistic approach. There a couple of things we can begin to do now:

1. Fishermen are part of the ecosystem, so manage them more holistically. For example, if you regulate fishermen out of one fishery, since you are only managing a single species, into what fishery will the fishermen shift? Is it one that already has too much effort?

Commercially, we need a global licensing system to compare with known fisheries to ensure that seasonal closures and other management measure have less unintended consequences. Recreationally, we need to be aware of the same thing, if we close the season on fluke, for example, are they going to shift onto weakfish, a species of concern right now?

2. We have management plans for the vast majority of well known predator species (striped bass, red drum, king mackerel, etc) but what about the prey they eat? There are precious few forage fish under management presently, and a lot of what we do know gives cause for concern.

While judged healthy, the abundance of menhaden in the Atlantic is at near-historic low levels; river herring and alewife are similarly at very low levels of abundance. We need to do stock assessments on all important prey species and begin to look at prey abundance in the entire ecosystem.

Managers need to start making value judgments on the amount of prey needed to sustain restored predator populations. If we are managing for the maximum yield out of a fishery, perhaps more prey should be left in the water. The way we are currently managing some species is like managing a herd of cattle for beef production on a pasture while you are also trying to sell the grass they eat. You simply cannot maximize for two variables.

These two items towards a more holistic approach to fisheries management will be the critical steps forward in the shift toward ecosystem management and, fortunately, they are steps we can begin to take now.