This project aims to develop an effective citizen science program for monitoring rocky intertidal sites along the West Coast of the United States. The primary goal of this project is to create a monitoring protocol for volunteers to collect useful, high-quality data that evaluates perturbations in these rocky intertidal sites. These data will provide important insight about coastal ecosystem health and could serve as a reference for policymakers to make informed management decisions. The group will be working closely with its client, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), and its Multi-Agency Rocky Intertidal Network (MARINe) partners.

The group’s approach begins with conducting a literature review to highlight advantages, challenges, resources, emerging technologies, and costs of citizen science programs. The team will then develop a citizen science data collection protocol to be tested by public participants at Coal Oil Point and Carpinteria State Beach. This protocol will be a modified version of the current MARINe monitoring protocol so that data collected by citizen scientists can be integrated into MARINe’s existing database. A group of volunteers will be trained to test the citizen science protocol, and evaluate and compare the data they collected with those collected by professional MARINe scientists. The citizen science protocol will be designed with the intent of creating an app for data collection on a smartphone or tablet device. The team believes that this approach will help address some common concerns about data collected by volunteers, and pave the way for a successful citizen science monitoring program.

The goal of this project is to develop, assess and make recommendations for viable solutions to overcome critical economic barriers to recovering one of Chile’s principal yet notoriously troubled fisheries, the common hake (Merluccius gayi gayi). Collaborating with the Environmental Defense Fund, the more specific objectives in this goal are to: (a) introduce options for finance strategies that catalyze management reforms to enable the recovery and sustainability of the Chilean hake fishery; and (b) provide novel recommendations (for policy, investor and industry audiences) for how investment capital can be deployed to finance fisheries recoveries in other regional applications. Specifically, the project will focus on providing the following deliverables:

1. A financial landscape analysis, including stakeholder analysis and value chain mapping to assess opportunities and barriers for how existing and new sources of private, public and philanthropic capital can be used to catalyze recovery of the Hake fishery.
2. Robust bio-economic assessment that considers relevant indicators for investors and fisheries stakeholders, with emphasis on a structure that can be generally informative (to regional fisheries recovery) but developed specifically to the case of Chilean Hake.
3. Recommendations for viable investment strategies and pathways that can support a recovery of Chile’s hake fishery.

The Gulf of Mexico is the United States’ second largest recreational fishery in both landings and profit. With this scale, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council has been under pressure to find a management strategy that is biologically, economically, and socially optimal. One recently proposed plan is sector separation, which would divide the recreational sector into two components: for-hire, and private. Currently, there is no scientific literature about the impacts of sector separation on recreational fisheries. Therefore, this project will produce an assessment of sector separation using surveys and bio-economic modeling of red snapper, an important reef fish in the recreational sector, and provide a recommendation on the feasibility of sector separation based on biological, economic, and social impacts.

The team provided a recommendation of the feasibility of sector separation as a fisheries management strategy to the Gulf of Mexico’s recreational fishing community. This Group Project team consisted of 2013 Bren alumni Aristoteles Stavrinaky (LAFF fellow), Jessi Doerpinghaus, Katie Hentrich, and Molly Troup. Faculty Advisors included Sarah Anderson and Chris Costello.

The population of the Catarina scallop, a high value species for artisanal fishers in Baja California Sur, collapsed in 1978 in the Ensenada de La Paz and has never recovered. Habitat degradation and overfishing are some of issues preventing scallop recovery. Noroeste Sustentable (NOS), a non-governmental organization focused on community development, is working with the El Manglito fishing community in La Paz to repopulate the Ensenada with Catarina scallops, and eventually reopen the fishery.

This Group Project team developed different scenarios for the restoration effort, focusing on major population bottlenecks for recovery, including the lack of lagoon habitat, illegal fishing, and population enhancement through aquaculture. They tested the cost-benefits of each scenario using a bioeconomic model that was created to simulate conditions influencing scallops in the lagoon. To better parameterize the model, a field experiment was conducted to assess the survival rate of the scallops on the Ensenada seafloor in different habitat types. They compared a total of 15 restoration scenarios, each a unique combination of different levels of habitat restoration, aquaculture intensity, surveillance, and seeding.

The results indicate that habitat and its restoration has the greatest influence on the population biomass of scallops. The results also suggest that aquaculture is not economically feasible. The team recommend that NOS focus their efforts on carrying out a pilot habitat restoration project in the historical fishing grounds, and that restoration efforts would also benefit from continued surveillance to discourage illegal fishing and scallop seeding from aquaculture production for a minimum of 3 years, preferably at a higher quantity of scallops per year than 340,000.

This Group Project team consisted of 2014 Bren alumni Mary Luna (LAFF fellow), José Zenteno (LAFF fellow and current PhD student), and Mary Luna. Hunter Lenihan was the team’s Faculty Advisor.

A growing global demand for seafood coupled with a pattern of overexploited fisheries worldwide implies livelihood stress for fishermen, retailers, and consumers. There is a need for novel approaches to encourage legal fishing and meet the increasing demand for sustainably caught fish. This project will explore fishery dynamics and seafood supply chains in Costa Rica. The project will focus on how small scale fishing communities can sell their legal catches to large retailers, which have promised to support sustainable fisheries through their purchasing policies. This project seeks to assess the feasibility of linking small-scale fishers with these large retailers, and therefore provide incentives for small-scale fishers to adopt sustainable practices and catch legal fish – such a partnership would benefit the fishermen by providing a secure source of income, and would also benefit large retailers by linking them to a supply of sustainable seafood.

The group is focusing on two fisheries -- nearshore corvina and pelagic mahi-mahi -- because of their commercial importance and Conservation International’s connection to communities that fish these two species. 

This project aims to explore the effects of past management interventions over marine resources and the local communities in the Gulf of Nicoya. Based on what they will learn studying past experiences, they will provide policy recommendations for the future and help the recovery of artisanal fisheries in the Gulf of Nicoya. The specific objectives of the project are to:

A) Model the future effects of potential policy interventions over the catch of some of the main targeted species in the artisanal fisheries of the Gulf. They will base their model on the studied effects of past interventions.

B) Evaluate the performance of Marine Responsible Fishing Areas in improving community welfare considering social and ecological benefits.

C) Synthesize model outputs and social-ecological evaluation into policy recommendations for improved management.

This project aims to quantitatively measure the cost of maintaining status quo by not implementing marine reserve policy in the Midriff Islands in the Gulf of California in terms of biological, economic (social) and political capital. More specifically, in collaboration with local parterners and community steakholders, this project aims to: 

1. Explore the implications of maintaining status quo on biological, economic, and political capital; 

2. Develop a standardized method and calculate the cost of delayed intervention; 

3. Develop a “procrastination thermometer” tool to adaptively quantify and communicate yearly economic cost. 

The Peruvian anchoveta fishery is the largest single species fishery in the world and is a significant contributor to Peru’s economy. The Peruvian anchoveta fishing fleet is separated into three sectors: industrial, low-scale, and artisanal. At the time of this study, nearly 100% of industrial and low-scale catch was processed into fishmeal, most of which is exported for use in the growing global aquaculture and livestock industries. In contrast, the government requires the artisanal sector to sell its entire catch for human consumption in an effort to lower domestic malnutrition rates and increase jobs. Despite this restriction, the potential for economic gains and poor enforcement incentivize fishers to illegally sell most of their catch to fishmeal plants and misreport landings. This, combined with both fleet overcapacity and an unregulated growth of fishmeal plant businesses, creates a fishing pressure that threatens the biomass and therefore the socioeconomic value of the fishery.

In response to these challenges, this project developed a bio-economic model to assess the tradeoffs between the current restricted open access system and alternative management scenarios. Results suggest that increases in both the biomass and certain economic indicators can be achieved by managing the artisanal sector under a total allowable catch (TAC). The results also suggest that both the industrial and artisanal sectors can increase profits while decreasing yields as harvest efficiencies improve with a larger biomass, which translates to ecosystem benefits throughout the Peruvian Humboldt Current System. The group provided their recommendations to The Nature Conservancy – Peru, members of the Peruvian government, and industry representatives.

This Group Project team consisted of 2013 Bren alumni Matias Caillaux (LAFF fellow), Miguel Cosmelli (LAFF fellow), Jessica Fuller, Yoel Kirschner, Tracey Mangin, and Stephanie Thornton. Steve Gaines was the team’s Faculty Advisor.