Spatial complexity, resilience and policy diversity: fishing on lake-rich landscapes

By Stephen R. Carpenter, William A. Brock. 2004

279 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The dynamics of and policies governing spatially coupled social-ecological mosaics are considered for the case of fisheries in a lake district. A microeconomic model of households addresses agent decisions at three hierarchic levels: (1) selection of the lake district from among a larger set of alternative places to live or visit, (2) selection of a base location within the lake district, and (3) selection of a portfolio of ecosystem services to use. Ecosystem services are represented by dynamics of fish production subject to multiple stable domains and trophic cascades. Policy calculations show that optimal policies will be highly heterogeneous in space and fluid in time. The diversity of possible outcomes is illustrated by simulations for a hypothetical lake district based loosely on the Northern Highlands of the State of Wisconsin. Lake districts are frequently managed as if lakes were independent, similar, endogenously regulating systems. Our findings contradict that view. One-size-fits-all (OSFA) policies erode ecological and social resilience. If regulations are too stringent, social resilience declines because of the potential rewards of overharvesting. If regulations are too lax, ecological resilience is diminished by overharvesting in some lakes. In either case, local collapses of fish populations evoke spatial shifts of angling effort that can lead to serial collapses in neighboring fisheries and degraded fisheries in most or all of the lakes. Under OSFA management, the natural resources of the entire landscape become more vulnerable to transformation because of changes in, e.g., human population, the demand for resources, or fish harvesting technology. Multiplicity of management regimes can increase the ecological resilience, social resilience, and inclusive value of a spatially heterogeneous social-ecological system. Because of the complex interactions of mobile people and multistable ecosystems, management regimes must also be flexible over time. A rights-based scheme may facilitate policy regimes with appropriate spatial patterns and intertemporal fluidity. In lake fisheries, habitat protection adds an important dimension to policy design. Habitat is a slowly changing variable that creates ecological resilience and thereby provides managers with a broader range of options.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4974cd741eb8a6c437a54d75ae2df2550c65c391

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In Global and Planetary Change

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Citations in the corpus

Governance and the Capacity to Manage Resilience in Regional Social-Ecological Systems (2006, background): “Flexible lake-specific management appears more likely to lead to resilient outcomes in terms of maintaining revenue generated from fisheries without triggering collapse from overfishing than do attempts to harmonize management across all lakes (Carpenter and Brock 2004).”
NEW HORIZONS FOR MANAGING THE ENVIRONMENT: A REVIEW OF COUPLED SOCIAL‐ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS MODELING (2012, background): “These questions may be addressed, as suggested by Carpenter et al. [1999a], by developing institutional designs or system structures that can respond flexibly to unexpected conditions.”
Guest Editorial, part of a Special Feature on Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems Through Comparative Studies and Theory Development: Introduction to the Special Issue (2006, background): “…of theory development and generalization has worked so far includes research on lakes and wetlands (Carpenter et al. 1999a,b, Gunderson 2001, Carpenter and Brock 2004, Olsson et al. 2004), rangelands (Perrings and Walker 1997, Janssen et al. 2000, Anderies et al. 2002, Janssen et al. 2004),…”
Social–ecological systems and adaptive governance of the commons (2006, background): “…are emerging on cross-scale interactions in social–ecological systems (e.g. Gunderson and Holling 2002; Young 2000; Brown 2003; Anderies et al. 2004; Carpenter and Brock 2004; Cash et al. 2006), including dynamics of social and economic drivers of land use change (Lambin et al. 2003), and on…”
Robustness Trade-offs in Social-Ecological Systems (2007, background): “…concept in the study of both particular SES’s (Carpenter et al. 1999a 1999b; Scheffer et al. 2000; Anderies et al. 2002; Janssen et al. 2004; Carpenter and Brock 2004; Walker et al. 2004; Anderies 2005; Anderies et al. 2006; Folke 2006; Gunderson et al. 1995; Berkes and Folke 1998; Berkes…”
Turning back from the brink: Detecting an impending regime shift in time to avert it (2009, background): “Changes in the populations of adult piscivores (A), planktivores (F) and juvenile piscivores (J) are modeled on 2 times scales (26, 36).”
Dynamic angling effort influences the value of minimum‐length limits to prevent recruitment overfishing (2013, background): “Management actions on one system could displace the problem from one location to another, thereby resulting in domino-like overfishing patterns under high regional fishing effort (Carpenter & Brock 2004; Post et al. 2008; Hunt et al. 2011).”
Diffusion-Induced Instability and Pattern Formation in Infinite Horizon Recursive Optimal Control (2008, unknown): “∂x (t, z) ∂t = Sx (t, z)−Gu (t, z) +D (2)x (t, z) ∂z2 S,G > 0 (12) x (0, z) = x0 (z) given, z in a circle z ∈ [0, L] (13) x (t, 0) = x (t, L) for all t (14)”
Using Fast and Slow Processes to Manage Resources with Thresholds (2007, background): “For spatially heterogeneous fisheries it is more likely that h = qE(H)H, where E is an effort function, which is increasing in H, and q is some catchability coefficient (Carpenter and Brock 2004).”
Diversity and complexity of angler behaviour drive socially optimal input and output regulations in a bioeconomic recreational-fisheries model (2010, background): “A key finding of this study and related work (Carpenter and Brock 2004) is that ‘‘one-size-fits-all’’ policies are likely to produce suboptimal management outcomes because they cannot account for the diversity and complexity of angler behaviour that is inherent to most of the world’s recreational fi”
Resilience and Regime Shifts: Assessing Cascading Effects (2006, background): “Walker and Meyers (2004) and Carpenter and Brock (2004) also illustrate the possibility that regime shifts can occur because of interactions across social, ecological, and economic domains, and not just as the result of interactions across scales within a particular domain.”
Research, part of a Special Feature on A Framework for Analyzing, Comparing, and Diagnosing Social-Ecological Systems Application of the SES Framework for Model-based Analysis of the Dynamics of Social-Ecological Systems (2014, methodology): “Recreational fisheries are a well-studied SES (e.g., Carpenter and Brock 2004, Biggs et al. 2009, Horan et al. 2011) in which social-ecological interactions between natural resources (fish), harvesters, and their institutions are strong and intimately coupled.”
Documented and Potential Biological Impacts of Recreational Fishing: Insights for Management and Conservation (2006, background): “Anglers are often expected to abandon fishing opportunities that do not satisfy their expectation of quality angling and instead choose other recreational opportunities or shift their effort to populations with higher catch rates (Carpenter and Brock, 2004).”
Fish life history, angler behaviour and optimal management of recreational fisheries (2013, unknown): “suggest that species-specific considerations when setting minimum-size limits could generate 721 greater social benefits from a fishery, supporting concerns that “one size fits all” policies may 722 erode ecological and social resilience (Carpenter and Brock, 2004).”
The adaptive capacity of lake food webs: from individuals to ecosystems (2016, background): “…biodiversity and function (Chapin et al. 2000 , DeFries et al. 2004 ), scientists and governments have begun the intrepid task of developing policy that helps sustain ecosystem functions in the face of ongoing environmental change (IPCC 2001 , Carpenter and Brock 2004 , Friberg et al. 2011 ).”