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ABSTRACT We examine the coloniality of Alaska pollock (Walleye Pollock Gadus chalcogrammus) trawl fisheries governance and its role in enabling salmon bycatch, highlighting the resulting impacts on Alaska Native communities and subsistence practices. We expose how the systemic marginalization of Alaska Native voices and knowledge in federal fisheries management perpetuates dispossession, oppression, and is a barrier to food sovereignty and environmental justice. Alaska Native communities have long attributed the decline of salmon populations, particularly Chinook Salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha and Chum Salmon O. keta, to bycatch from the pollock trawl fishery—a concern ignored for over a decade. The repeated failure to meet salmon escapement goals has led to subsistence and commercial fishery closures, deepening food insecurity, health crises, and cultural disruption for Alaska Native peoples. Meanwhile, industrial trawl fisheries persist with minimal accountability, exacerbating ecological harm by capturing nontarget species, such as salmon, halibut, and crab, further impacting local, nonindustrial fisheries. We advocate for urgent reform of Alaska’s federal fisheries governance to center Alaska Native voices, integrate Indigenous knowledge, and address inequities in salmon allocation. Specifically, we call for revisions to the national standards of the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to ensure policies that respect Native sovereignty, promote sustainability, and mitigate the ecological and social consequences of industrial trawling. This approach is critical to achieving equitable and sustainable fisheries management that upholds environmental justice and Alaska Native rights.
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Assessing impacts of bycatch policies and fishers’ heterogeneous information on food webs and fishery sustainability
Ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) has emerged as a promising framework for understanding and managing the long-term interactions between fisheries and the larger marine ecosystems in which they are nested. However, successful implementation of EBFM has been elusive because we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the network of interacting species in marine ecosystems (the food web) and the dynamic relationship between the food web and the humans who harvest those ecosystems. Here, we advance such understanding by developing a network framework that integrates the complexity of food webs with the economic dynamics of different management policies. Specifically, we generate hundreds of different food web models with 20–30 species, each harvested by five different fishers extracting the biomass of a target and a bycatch species, subject to two different management scenarios and exhibiting different information in terms of avoiding bycatch when harvesting the target species. We assess the different ecological and economic consequences of these policy alternatives as species extinctions and profit from sustaining the fishery. We present the results of different policies relative to a benchmark open access scenario where there are no management policies in place. The framework of our network model would allow policymakers to evaluate different management approaches without compromising on the ecological complexities of a fishery. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Connected interactions: enriching food web research by spatial and social interactions’.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2224915
- PAR ID:
- 10556157
- Publisher / Repository:
- The Royal Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Volume:
- 379
- Issue:
- 1909
- ISSN:
- 0962-8436
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0181
