The Downeast Initiative: toward area-based management of groundfish stocks

An effort to link the scale of groundfish management in Eastern Maine to the spatial structure of groundfish stocks

Downeast Initiative

Funded through the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in partnership with the Penobscot East Resource Center, the Downeast Initiative (DEI) is an effort to establish a pilot program for area-based management of groundfish stocks in Eastern Maine.  Alia Al-Humaidhi and Derek Olson work as graduate research assistants to the project, with Dr. Jim Wilson serving as principal investigator.  DEI is driven by three basic principles: 

View original image 

1. The current approach to groundfish management has not worked.  Following a long period of overfishing, groundfish stocks in Eastern Maine finally collapsed during the 1980s and have not significantly recovered, despite actions of the New England Fishery Management Council to limit fishing effort and access to groundfish stocks under the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan.  As a result, the coastal economy of Downeast Maine has become almost entirely dependent on lobster, a vulnerable and potentially brittle single-resource system.  Moreover, the loss of large predatory groundfish has eroded the structure and functioning of coastal ecosystems in the Gulf of Maine.
2. Previous attempts at managing New England groundfish have failed largely because they operated at an overly broad scale and treated groundfish stocks as undifferentiated populations throughout the Gulf of Maine.  On the contrary, mounting scientific evidence points to the existence of locally adapted groundfish populations that must be managed at a local scale.  Failure to control fishing effort on local stocks creates incentives for fishermen to act as “roving bandits,” serially overfishing one local stock after another despite wider effort limitations at the scale of the entire Gulf of Maine.

3. The decline of groundfish stocks Downeast has been accompanied by the loss of small and mid-sized boats from the groundfish fishery.  Increasingly, groundfish permits have been captured by large, mobile vessels especially susceptible to incentives toward “roving banditry.”  Consequently, Downeast communities have lost access to the groundfish resources on their own doorsteps.

     The Downeast Initiative seeks to establish community-based co-management of localized fish stocks in order to create the incentives that will rebuild groundfish stocks Downeast and facilitate sustainable fishing of these stocks in the future.  Crucial to this effort will be recovery of community access rights to local stocks.

  Related Websties:1. http://www.penobscoteast.org     2. http://www.moore.org