Forward-looking management solutions are needed as climate change threatens to increase conflicts over natural resources. Pacific Hake, the most abundant groundfish in the California Current Ecosystem, migrates between the U.S.A. and Canada and its fishery is managed under an international treaty between the two countries. In two recent years, the Hake Treaty’s Joint Management Committee was unable to agree on a coastwide total allowable catch, largely due to differing perceptions of risk given uncertainty in stock status. We have been developing a management strategy evaluation (MSE) to better understand how changing environmental conditions could affect hake biology, stock assessment uncertainty and risk tolerance, and to evaluate the climate readiness of the binational treaty. This work addresses urgent needs of hake managers to investigate management procedures that are robust to environmental variability and supported by both parties, and it is broadly applicable to transboundary species with dynamics likely to be affected by climate change.

 

A research project under this opportunity could include expanding an existing hake MSE simulation model to include environmentally driven growth and exploring the combined consequences of climate-driven changes in recruitment, growth, and movement for the binational management of the hake fishery. Opportunities to collaborate and communicate with the Hake Treaty managers and stakeholders may be leveraged to develop scenarios of environmental variability and directional change and communicate model outputs to support their planning and decision-making. Climate change scenarios could include implicit modeling of climate change effects and/or applying projections from regional oceanographic models. This project offers an opportunity to integrate a growing body of NWFSC research linking hake to their environment in support of a more climate resilient hake fishery.

 

Keywords:

Management strategy evaluation; Hake; Climate Change; Fishing; Recruitment; Growth; Migration; Transboundary fisheries; Decision-making; Risk;

Citizenship:  Open to U.S. citizens, permanent residents and non-U.S. citizens

Level:  Open to Postdoctoral and Senior applicants