Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Small-scale fisheries are a part of the coastal heritage of the Maritimes, yet a paucity of research exists on the linked and cumulative impacts of various fisheries on at-risk or other fishes. For effective conservation, more information is required and is accessible if more sophisticated studies are completed. Societal involvement is a key element to establishing and maintaining sustainable and healthy fish stocks. Many citizens enjoy recreational angling, and their activities can have a profound effect on fish populations because fish harvesting can greatly affect conservation efforts. Predicting risks to future fish stocks is fundamental to developing conservation plans, and understanding the interactions of anthropogenic effects and fish population dynamics is currently a barrier to this goal in small-scale fisheries. Fisheries science can no longer be conducted in isolation because of the growing influence of human actions on declining fish stocks and the need for more data to characterize effects.My long-term research goals are to better understand aquatic ecosystem regime shifts as they are affected by changing environments and human influences, and to account for stochastic processes in modeling such systems. My short-term research goals will focus on assessing the uncertainty associated with long-term monitoring strategies and analysis methods in fisheries. Citizen Science volunteers are overlooked as an important source for historic and new information that can help conservation efforts. I have created a stewardship fisheries network consisting of commercial fishers and recreational anglers to increase and enhance data collection on at-risk marine fishes. My objectives are 1) To collect suitable data to fill gaps in population metrics for ecological studies in at-risk marine fish species through field sampling and 2) growing and supporting my stewardship fishers network to collect new, and compile historical data. This data will then be used in integrated population models and simulation studies to 3) explore long-term population changes by testing conservation actions within the model framework. My students and I will collect spatial and temporal information on at-risk fishes through my fisheries network. Volunteers will provide fish catch records including tag returns from a fish tagging program. The strength of my research program is in leveraging volunteers to contribute substantially more information in a large spatial area than would otherwise be realized through researcher only sampling.My proposed modeling and simulation research integrates ecological processes and sampling regimes into conservation planning. This approach will help identify critical knowledge gaps in population metrics that are currently at the heart of understanding declining Canadian fish stocks.