Scholars Award to Model Uncertainty in Fishering Research Combining Anthropology and Fishery Science

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

Coastal fisheries worldwide are experiencing profound ecological changes due to increased human exploitation, pollution and broader economic and social developments along shorelines. Assessments of the challenges to developing sustainable fisheries consistently call for the integration of traditional and commercial fisher knowledge with science-based research, with the goal of creating new management approaches that sustain fish populations and coastal fishing communities. This Scholars Award in Methodological Training seeks to integrate anthropological study of commercial fishers' knowledge and experience with current efforts by marine scientists to estimate fish population dynamics and sustainable harvest rates. The anthropologist researcher will study fishery science in order to better model scientists' estimation techniques. The geographical focus of the research is the Chesapeake Bay region, with a particular focus on the blue crab fishery. The theoretical focus of the research is cognitive and environmental, and argues that the integration of commercial fisher knowledge and scientist expertise requires an understanding of the underlying cognitive and cultural models each group implicitly uses to understand each other and blue crabs. Furthermore the project focuses on how commercial fishers and scientists both model uncertainty in the fishery and fish population, an area of keenly shared interest that has not been sufficiently studied from a comparative perspective for different stakeholders for the same fishery or fish population. The project has broader implications in terms of informing and educating other scientists and natural resource user groups, including farmers and ranchers for example, on how underlying cognitive models of nature, livelihoods and community can be used to promote the exchange of valuable environmental information useful in our efforts to manage fisheries, rural lands, reserves and other areas of high ecological and economic value to diverse stakeholders.