The success of fisheries management measures depends on the ability of the management agency to understand, measure, and anticipate human behavior. Regulatory changes impact fishers directly and fish stocks indirectly, and can complicate development and interpretation of data inputs to stock assessments, the use of assessments in management advice, and ultimately the effectiveness of regulations in achieving their goals.
Socioeconomic information could improve fishing opportunities advice in multiple ways. Social scientists can provide insights on the quality of fishing effort and landings time series when data reporting forms have changed over time. Knowledge of market demands for co-caught species and fishers’ incentives to participate in different fisheries could improve stock assessment forecasts. Considering socioeconomic data streams may also improve catch per unit effort standardization, and the characterization of fleets and métiers in multispecies assessments.
A focus on the importance of collaborating with the fishing industry when managing fisheries, and integrating fishers’ experiential knowledge into marine science and management continues to increase. However, relatively less effort has been devoted towards developing novel methods to include results from socioeconomic models or surveys in stock assessments and fishing opportunities advice.
This theme session provides an opportunity to show the added value of joint knowledge production between biologists, economists, and other social scientists, with the aim to use socioeconomic data to inform stock assessments and fishing opportunities advice. We will discuss best practices for integrating human dimensions data in stock assessments and advice, and showcase innovative approaches via presentations and posters describing how socioeconomic information has influenced advice in quantitative and qualitative ways, what needs to happen to incorporate socioeconomic data in stock assessments and advice, and what barriers are preventing further integration.
We recognize the diversity of social-ecological fisheries systems and that socioeconomic information considered useful in one fishery may be less useful in another. We welcome all submissions that integrate human dimensions in the inputs to and outputs from stock assessments and/or in advice, and evaluate or demonstrate the added value of such integration for successfully addressing fisheries management challenges.
