Ecotrust's Fisheries Program

Overview

The Groundfish Fleet Restructuring Information and Analysis Project aims to bring the harvest capacity of the fishery in line with resource productivity.

Ecotrust seeks full public disclosure of the status of Pacific salmon as well as fundamental institutional changes in the way fisheries, marine ecosystems and watersheds are managed.

Key Objectives

Create the most credible single source of information about salmon and salmon-dependent communities, protect and restore critical salmon watersheds, and produce new models for socio-economic and ecological analysis, particularly for new marine protected area strategies.

Salmon

As indicators of the health of social, economic and ecological systems, salmon are icons of this region and have been a critical component of coastal communities over the course of human history. Faced in recent times with large-scale extinctions and declines, the time has come to create a carefully strategic approach to protecting and restoring Pacific salmon.

Ecotrust's salmon strategy includes:

The first mapping of North American Pacific salmon stocks across their North American range (1998);
A continuous prioritization for restoration in the Pacific Northwest;
Identification of salmon refugia, or anchors, key areas in need of formal protection;
Working with the Wild Salmon Center to launch State of the Salmon, extending our stock status research to cover the entire range of salmon in the North Pacific;
Initiate large scale conservation strategies in the Copper River, Alaska (in a 3E context);
Establish salmon research and monitoring biostations in pristine watersheds in AK and BC.

Marine

Like salmon, groundfish harvests in the continental U.S. have seen precipitous declines. There is now general agreement among fishers, scientists, environmentalists and regulators that there are too many boats chasing too few fish.

In October 2000 a strategic plan entitled "Transition to Sustainability" was adopted by the Pacific Fishery Management Council with the objective of bringing the harvest capacity of the coastal fishery in line with resource productivity.

In 2002 we began work with the Pacific Marine Conservation Council on the Groundfish Fleet Restructuring Information and Analysis Project (GFR), an effort to mitigate the effects of a difficult transition to more sustainable coastal fisheries.

Mitigating the effects of this transition requires systematic information about the coast-wide fishery system and the communities whose livelihoods depend upon it. The GFR project is assessing options for the reduction of fishing capacity from a coast-wide port and community perspective, in the context of important issues such as future fleet diversity, social impacts, small business viability, and potential interactions with stocks of other target species such as Dungeness crab or salmon.

Ecotrust's marine strategy is to:

Apply its OCEAN tools to the analysis of social and economic impacts related to emerging marine protected area strategies coastwide from Alaska and British Columbia to California.
Apply the results of the GFR project at community and regional scales interacting with state and federal entities to affect management policies within a "3E" framework.