The snow crab is an iconic species in the Bering Sea that supports an economically important fishery and undergoes extensive monitoring and management. Since 2018, more than 10 billion snow crab have disappeared from the eastern Bering Sea, and the population collapsed to historical lows in 2021. We link this collapse to a marine heatwave in the eastern Bering Sea during 2018 and 2019.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
January 2022
Fisheries managers have increasingly adopted rights-based management (i.e., "catch shares" or "individual transferable quotas" [ITQs]) to address economic and biological management challenges under prior governance regimes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProtecting biodiversity has become a major goal in managing coastal forests in the Pacific Northwest--an area in which human activities have had a significant influence on landscape change. A complex pattern of public and private forest ownership, combined with new regulations for each owner group, raises questions about how well and how efficiently these policies achieve their biodiversity goals. To develop a deeper understanding of the aggregate effect of forest policies, we simulated forest structures, timber production, and socioeconomic conditions over time for the mixture of private and public lands in the 2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFForest biodiversity policies in multi-ownership landscapes are typically developed in an uncoordinated fashion with little consideration of their interactions or possible unintended cumulative effects. We conducted an assessment of some of the ecological and socioeconomic effects of recently enacted forest management policies in the 2.3-million-ha Coast Range Physiographic Province of Oregon.
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