Fishing for Resilience

Abstract

Management approaches that focus on social–ecological systems—systems comprised of ecosystems, landscapes, and humans—are needed to secure the sustainability of inland recreational fisheries without jeopardizing the integrity of the underlying social and ecological components. Resilience management can be useful because it focuses on providing recreational capacity for fishermen under a variety of conditions while assuring that the social–ecological system is not pushed to a critical threshold that would result in a new, undesired system regime. Resilience management is based on a system perspective that accounts for the possible regimes a system could manifest. It aims to enhance system properties that allow continued maintenance of the system in a desired regime in which multiple goods and services, including recreational capacity, are provided. In this forum paper, we provide an overview of the potential of a resilience approach to the management of recreational fisheries and highlight the scientific and administrative challenges to its successful implementation.

Received October 30, 2012; accepted January 2, 2014

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors acknowledge the support of the August T. Larsson Foundation of the Faculty of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Additional funding from the U.S. Geological Survey's Powell Center is also acknowledged. Earlier drafts of this manuscript were improved by comments provided by S. Bonar, J. Cinner, and one anonymous reviewer. The Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit is jointly supported by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, the University of Nebraska, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Wildlife Management Institute.