A timeline of closures and other restrictions to the West Coast commercial Dungeness crab fishing from 2015-2024.

The California Dungeness crab season is delayed yet again due to elevated levels of the domoic acid neurotoxin. The fishery has been heavily squeezed by climate change since 2015. wildlife.ca.gov/News/Archive...

I should have put this above but the estimated bycatch is 1-4% of the potential biological removal and marine mammal populations are recovering.

As a result, she mapped bycatch risk to identify areas of high risk that disproportionately contribute to bycatch. These were areas of relatively low fishery importance, suggesting that temporary closures could curb bycatch risk with small fishery impacts, should managing bycatch become necessary

Are there other management levers we can pull to find more efficient solutions? Yutian used random forest models to explore the drivers of bycatch risk and found that regulating spatial-temporal dynamics of the fishery could have more impact than regulating things like mesh size and soak time (4/X).

However, this progress has been made through management-induced reductions in fishing effort, which have had huge impacts on particaption and revenues. See below (3/X).

First, she combined observer and logbook data to estimate bycatch of six species over time. Bycatch, high and unsustainable in the 1980s and 1990s, has fallen precipitously.

Estimates and potential drivers of protected species bycatch in the California set gillnet fishery The identification of efficient management strategies that reduce protected species bycatch while also minimizing impacts on fishing livelihoods is a …

My PhD student, Yutian Fang, just had her first chapter published! She shows that marine mammal & seabird bycatch has precipitously decreased in the California set gillnet fishery, but at high costs to fisheries participation and revenues. Read on for the evidence and more efficient solutions! (1/X)

Our new paper examines impact of historical warming on 521 freshwater fish populations. Warm water species benefitted while cool water species suffered. However, overfishing has a larger impact, indicating that fisheries mgmt can offset many negative climate impacts: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I'm thrilled to share our new Fish & Fisheries paper synthesizing U.S. fisheries quota allocation policies and best practices for advancing their equity and fairness goals under climate change: t.co/JqjYR32qHc