DISES: Understanding dynamic social-environmental feedbacks in temporary fisheries closures

Small-scale fisheries are the ocean’s biggest employers and provide nutrition to billions, but they are threatened by mounting overfishing. The most well-known strategy to manage near-shore fisheries is to implement permanent bans on fishing in marine protected areas. Those closures often fail due to lack of fisher compliance.

Temporary closures are often preferred by fishers around the world to rebuild their fisheries. Unfortunately, they are relatively understudied and there is little understanding of the way that ecological and social components of these systems interact. This research studies the interactions between social and ecological dynamics resulting from temporary fisheries closures.

This study will explore the interacting social and environmental dynamics in dozens of sites in Mexico and French Polynesia where temporary closures have been implemented. It contributes to sustainable management of small-scale fisheries by building knowledge, capacity, and networks of relevant expertise. The results will directly inform publicly available decision tools.

The tools will be broadcast to non-governmental organizations, government agencies, and other relevant conservation practitioner groups. The models can serve as the basis for a web and smartphone application that fishers can use to explore alternative designs for temporary closures. This research also directly informs policy through partnerships with local fisheries and management organizations.

This will lead to closures that are more effective and equitable. This project finally provides an integrative training environment for students and a post-doctoral researcher.

The disturbance induced by a temporary ban on fishing has significant consequences on fish species and other components of the ecosystem. This is a result of potential trophic cascades that play out over different temporal scales. The dynamics of these ecological relationships are poorly understood.

The number of species targeted, their growth rates, and their mobility, as well as changes to the benthos, have complex relationships that will respond to the varying length of closures, creating potential trade-offs between different portfolios of species. In terms of social dynamics, temporary areas have the potential to serve as learning and trust-building tools aligned with theories of adaptive co-management of marine resources, but their temporality also opens them to corruption, uncertainties, and instability in the wake of large disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic.

This project brings together cutting-edge techniques in an integrated social, ecological, and modeling research program centered on two countries where temporary closures have been implemented. Fisher creel surveys, underwater fish censuses and water-based drone surveys will be employed to provide comprehensive data on the state of the benthos and the fish populations.

This will be combined with social science fieldwork focusing on the histories of the reserves, the heterogeneity of stakeholders, local knowledge, and the configurations of property rights that shape stakeholders’ interpretations of a reserve’s socio-ecological outcomes. Drawing from these social and ecological data, dynamic agent-based and bioeconomic models will be adapted from other contexts to generate testable predictions of how temporary closure design affects fish biomass and fisher incomes in the short- and long-term.

The outcomes of this research will be used to adapt a decision-tool model to help fishers design temporary closures and it will be tested in several pilot communities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.