Case Study: Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management

You have just been hired on as an intern to the Fisheries Management division of the Chesapeake Bay Program, a group dedicated to making the Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding coastal waters thrive again, while maintaining a competitive and sustainable seafood industry in the region. Your boss understands that you are new to this, but wants to see how a new perspective approaches the problems of managing the harvest of a specific organism, that shares a habitat and food resources with many other organisms. She asks you to choose a Chesapeake/Mid-Atlantic fishery and create an outline for an Ecosystem Based Management strategy to regulate the catch and create a sustainably harvestable stock.

Step 1: Choose a Stock
You will focus on a single stock. Your choices are:
– Blue Crabs (Callinectes sapidus)
– Striped Bass (Morone saxtalis)
– Atlantic Menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus)
– Eastern Oyster (Crassostrea virginica)

Step 2: Perform a Stock Assessment for your Individual species
Obviously you cannot do a complete assessment in the time allotted to you or with the resources available. However, there is extensive catch data available from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission at NOAA. Use these data and expert opinions to formulate your ideas about whether the stock is healthy, over or under fished and why. You will also need information about the life history of the species to determine when, where, and how it reproduces to replenish the stock.

Write your stock assessment. It should be APPROXIMATELY 1 page, double spaced and include proper CSE style in-text references. This portion of the assignment is due Tuesday, October 27

Step 3: Create a food web diagram
You will need to create a food web diagram for the species from step 1, as well as Chesapeake Bay producers (plants & algae) and decomposers. Secondary feeding relationships may also be included. You will need to consider all the life stages of your organism.

Step 4: Create a framework for an Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management Plan

Using your understanding of sustainability and the research you have collected in Steps 1-3, describe in 1 PAGE how you would regulate the harvest of the organism in the food web diagram you created focusing on the stock of interest from Step 1. Would you increase or decrease total catch? Would there be size/age restrictions? Would you regulate the gear used to catch the organism(s)? Would you regulate a ‘season’ during which animals could be caught? Be sure to include this type of information for your regulated stock as well as a justification based in scientific evidence.

The remaining information (Steps 3 & 4) are also due Tuesday, October 25.

27 Oct 2019 12:16

Don forgot the works cited in the least page Please

27 Oct 2019 12:14