Aquaculture and Fisheries Commons^™

Using Grizzly Bears To Assess Harvest-Ecosystem Tradeoffs In Salmon Fisheries, Taal Levi, Chris T. Darimont, Misty Macduffee, Marc Mangel, Paul C. Paquet, Christopher C. Wilmers

Aquaculture and Fisheries Collection

Implementation of ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) requires a clear conceptual and quantitative framework for assessing how different harvest options can modify benefits to ecosystem and human beneficiaries. We address this social-ecological need for Pacific salmon fisheries, which are economically valuable but intercept much of the annual pulse of nutrient subsidies that salmon provide to terrestrial and aquatic food webs. We used grizzly bears, vectors of salmon nutrients and animals with densities strongly coupled to salmon abundance, as surrogates for ‘‘salmon ecosystem’’ function. Combining salmon biomass and stock-recruitment data with stable isotope analysis, we assess potential tradeoffs between fishery yields and …