Across the globe, agencies are charged with managing inland and marine fisheries to promote their conservation and sustainable use into the future.  Fisheries themselves are diverse, including large-scale commercial operations in marine environments, large rivers, and large lakes; recreational fisheries in waterbodies across the United States; and subsistence fisheries that can directly support livelihoods and food security of rural populations.  Additionally, agencies charged with managing these fisheries operate at a variety of scales (local, regional, global) and have varying responsibilities.  However, in spite of their differences, all share one common goal:  to understand the condition of and limits to the fisheries that they are charged with managing.  While this is a global need, here in the United States, examples of agencies responsible for the Nation’s fisheries include state departments of natural resources, federal natural resource management agencies, tribes, international agencies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), to name a few.

Inland and marine fisheries are considered coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) in which humans and nature are linked via reciprocal interactions that operate at local, regional, and global scales. For example, fish populations are affected by natural factors and human users, producing impacts that, in turn, affect ecosystems and economies alike.  Unfortunately, the connection to human systems makes fisheries highly vulnerable to many different threats such as over-exploitation, invasive species and disease, and landscape stressors, including human land uses such as urbanization and agriculture as well as changing climate.  Additionally, due to our globalizing economy, the scale over which fisheries and human systems are connected is expanding and growing in complexity.  Because of these challenges, and because of the fact that inland and marine fisheries are central to food security, nutrition, and livelihoods globally, understanding the connections and the scale at which natural and human factors can affect fisheries is essential for their sustainable management and productivity.

The overall goal of this project will be to determine how fisheries function as CHANS, with a specific focus on understanding connectivity among fisheries systems with their natural and human processes over the scales at which they operate.  Specific objectives of our effort will include 1) collecting and analyzing ecological and/or socioeconomic data that will help inform scale dynamics and connectivities, 2) developing and evaluating emerging frameworks that address the complexities of scale and connectivities in CHANS such as telecoupling and metacoupling, 3) working in partnership with state, federal, tribal, NGO, industry and other groups to enhance their capacity to address complex scale and connectivity challenges in CHANS, and 4) using findings to address the issues of environmental justice and to inform policy related to equity and the conservation of US water and fisheries resources.  This proposed research on fisheries as coupled human and natural systems focuses on multiscalar social-ecological interactions that have rarely been studied in fisheries science. Without this important work to integrate fisheries as ecosystems and human systems, fisheries managers will not be appropriately equipped to address the diverse social-ecological tradeoffs and complexities that pervade fisheries management and governance. As stressors like climate change, land-use alteration, and species invasion continue to impact our fisheries resources, there is a pressing need for research on fisheries as coupled human and natural systems to address the challenges before us—challenges that are simultaneously social and ecological and hence require integrated social-ecological solutions.

The advantage in addressing this challenge as a multistate effort stems from the fact that US fisheries are highly diverse and represent multi-scale systems requiring a rich set of intellectual expertise and data to fully understand these systems and allow for enhanced management value to society, locally, regionally and globally.  Our multistate team represents such a diverse group of scientists with expertise in the ecological and social sciences that are ideally suited to investigate the complex issues threatening sustainable management of diverse fisheries.  We have expertise in inland and marine fisheries and expertise using the CHANS approach to address the socio-economic and ecological problems related to the diversity and scale of fisheries and aquatic resource problems and opportunities. Additionally, this team of scientists and practitioners have a history of working effectively together.

Besides yielding greater understanding of inland and marine fisheries and aquatic resources from a CHANS perspective, important outcomes of this work will include the dissemination of key findings on influences to fisheries to natural resource management agencies (Objective 3) and using findings to inform policy related to water and fisheries conservation (Objective 4).  The experience of our multistate research teams and the strength of our relationships with the natural resource management community positions our group to make important recommendations to aid in productive and sustainable management of inland and marine fisheries into the future.