Climate variations within the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME) have impacts on marine fish populations. It is proposed that these impacts will be reflected in recreational fishing catches which is explored in this study. A Pearson correlation analysis compares data from El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events and upwelling...
Washington State fisheries and Washington State Treaty Tribes are becoming increasingly restricted in harvest of wild salmon due to US Endangered Species Act listings of salmon species, marine mammal predation by both ESA listed Southern Resident Killer Whale (SRKW) and US Marine Mammal Protection Act protected pinnipeds, salmon habitat destruction,...
Short-tailed albatrosses (Phoebastria albatrus, hereafter "STAL") migrate throughout the North Pacific, overlapping with multiple large scale fisheries. In the Bering Sea, documented bycatch of this species is a focal conservation concern, due to the fact that this species is listed as "endangered" under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. We conducted...
Collaborative decision-making is often promoted as a means to achieve socially acceptable and enduring solutions to natural resource management issues, and one that holds promise for resolving “wicked” problems. However, success rates for implementation of collaborative recommendations are unknown. This paper explores challenges to collaborative salmon fishery management in Prince...
The relationship between population characteristics and population productivity is fundamental to sustainable fisheries management, but predicting productivity remains a challenging task. Proposed mechanisms driving the variability in productivity at a given population size have included environmental and demographic factors related to the age structure of the population, but the broad-scale...
Pacific salmon are culturally and economically important species to Southeast Alaska, where there is a history of large wild runs and supplemental production from hatchery programs. Salmon management in Alaska is divided amongst various governmental agencies. Non-governmental organizations also play a pivotal role in salmon management. To fulfill the requirements...
Globally, the number of threatened species is increasing and conserving them is a high priority to the scientific community. Assessing the status of these protected species is challenging due to missing, contested, and or contradictory data streams. Integrated models (IMs) provide a statistical framework for combining disparate data sources to...
Emerging infectious diseases in wild animals threaten global biodiversity as well as domestic animal and human health. Their unprecedented increase in conjunction with anthropogenically induced range shifts of endemic pathogens exposes hosts to novel parasite combinations, lending urgency to research on disease dynamics in wildlife systems. In natural populations, hosts...
Management strategies to prevent overfishing while achieving optimum yield vary according to the available data and life history of the fished stock. I evaluated two sets of management strategies for Pacific coast rockfish: strategies to set harvest limits for data-poor stocks, and strategies intended to protect the age structure of...
In this dissertation, new theory and its applications are developed to predict three properties of complex ecological communities: stability, equilibrium response, and non-equilibrium dynamics. First, a graph-theoretic analysis identifies the interconnections in a complex ecosystem that promote or diminish stability (Chapter 2). The hierarchy of interactions that influences stability and...