A number of new students and researchers have joined the OceanCanada partnership over the last 4 months. Over the next year we endeavour to profile this outstanding community of High Quality Personnel (HQP) and the research contributions they are making to our partnership. This month, we are profiling 4 new additions to the Atlantic working group.
By: Evan Andrews. PhD student at the School of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo
Partnerships are critical to understand complexity and help reduce uncertainty in Canada’s marine systems. As a new PhD student working in OceanCanada, the role for connecting with other graduate students and faculty to inform my own research is an attractive idea. For example, I have almost no practical understanding of how oceans work and how fisheries function. I mean, I have never really even fished. Well that is not entirely true…
This article compares the law and policy frameworks for protecting marine species at risk in Australia and Canada. The sea of practical challenges is examined, including achieving listing of threatened commercial species; attaining timely and effective recovery planning; and identifying and protecting critical habitats.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) states that climate change and ocean acidification are altering the oceans at a rate that is unprecedented compared with the recent past, leading to multifaceted impacts on marine ecosystems, associated goods and services, and human societies. AR5 underlined key uncertainties that remain regarding how synergistic changes in the ocean are likely to affect human systems, and how humans are likely to respond to these events. As climate change research has accelerated rapidly following AR5, an updated synthesis of available knowledge is necessary to identify emerging evidence, and to thereby better inform policy discussions. This paper reviews the literature to capture corroborating, conflicting, and novel findings published following the cut-off date for contribution to AR5. Specifically, we highlight key scientific developments on the impacts of climate-induced changes in the ocean on key socioeconomic sectors, including fisheries, aquaculture, and tourism. New evidence continues to support a climate-induced redistribution of benefits and losses at multiple scales and across coastal and marine socio-ecological systems, partly resulting from species and ecosystem range shifts and changes in primary productivity. New efforts have been made to characterize and value ecosystem services in the context of climate change, with specific relevance to ecosystem-based adaptation. Recent studies have also explored synergistic interactions between climatic drivers, and have found strong variability between impacts on species at different life stages. Although climate change may improve conditions for some types of freshwater aquaculture, potentially providing alternative opportunities to adapt to impacts on wild capture fisheries, ocean acidification poses a risk to shellfish fisheries and aquaculture. The risk of increased prevalence of disease under warmer temperatures is uncertain, and may detrimentally affect human health. Climate change may also induce changes in tourism flows, leading to substantial geospatial shifts in economic costs and benefits associated with tourism revenue and coastal infrastructure protection and repairs. While promising, ecosystem-based coastal adaptation approaches are still emerging, and require an improved understanding of key ecosystem services, and values for coastal communities in order to assess risk, aid coastal development planning, and build decision support systems.
The need for effective multi-level governance arrangements is becoming increasingly urgent because of complex functional interdependencies between biophysical and socioeconomic systems. We argue that social capital plays an important role in such systems. To explore the relationship between social capital and participation in resource governance arenas, we analyzed various small-scale fisheries governance regimes from the Gulf of California, Mexico. The components of social capital that we measured include levels of fishers’ structural ties to relevant groups and levels of trust in different entities (i.e. cognitive component). We collected data using surveys and interviews with residents of small-scale fishing communities adjacent to marine protected areas. We analyzed the data using a logistic regression model and narrative analysis. The results of our quantitative analysis highlight the multidimensional nature of social capital and reveals complex relationships between different types of social capital and fisher participation in monitoring, rulemaking and MPA design. Furthermore our qualitative analysis suggests that participation in fisheries conservation and management is not fully potentialized due to the social and historical context of participatory spaces in Mexico.
The federal government has set promising new directions for the sustainability of Canada’s fisheries and oceans. Among various commitments, Minister Hunter Tootoo will increase the extent of marine protected areas and review legislative changes made by the previous government. These initiatives will help bring Canada in line with other major coastal nations.
The southern and Atlantic bluefin tunas are highly valuable and heavily fished, such that there are concerns over the biomass of each species. While sharing some similarities, the species are managed in different geographical, political, and socioeconomic contexts. This article examines the complexities of managing these highly migratory species, recognizing that developments in science, most notably in ocean tracking, have a significant potential to improve management. Notwithstanding such developments, the critical element in management of bluefin tuna species remains political commitments to sustainable catches.
Haley Milko, Masters of Resource Management student at Simon Fraser University has completed her thesis work identifying best practice in fisheries monitoring and stewardship training for First Nations Youth.
The Marine Affairs Program at Dalhousie University is seeking a candidate for an interdisciplinary PhD. Successful candidates will apply for admissions through the Interdisciplinary PhD Program at Dalhousie University.
This dataset is an integrated list of marine-related assessments and reports produced for the Canadian Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. These include stock assessments, fisheries statistics, spatial use data, research frameworks, and ecosystem evaluations and projections, compiled from Canadian government, intergovernmental, non-government, and academic sources. Subjects covered include marine species and ecosystem service production, value, and status, and data contained in each assessment may be available for use as indicated.