Science to Inform the Management of Bluegill Fisheries as a Social-Ecological System Under a Changing Climate Active
Recreational fisheries offer invaluable benefits to the communities they serve, including economic support, food security, and enhanced social connection with natural areas. In North America, bluegill are one of the most important species in terms of providing accessible, harvest-oriented recreational fisheries. In Wisconsin, they are the most caught, most harvested, and second-most targeted species in the state’s recreational fishery. Climate change offers further challenges. Warming temperatures and associated impacts have the potential to affect fish communities and their habitat with unpredictable implications for angler behavior, which can then cause further impacts on fish populations.
Significant knowledge gaps exist in understanding ecological drivers of bluegill population dynamics. Questions that remain are how bluegill fisheries may respond to climate change and how anglers will respond to changes in bluegill populations and their management. Filling these gaps will support the development of management strategies to prevent problems like stunting (i.e., high abundances of small fish) or growth overfishing (i.e., overfishing at average sizes smaller than sizes at full maturity). Therefore, recreational fisheries should be considered as social-ecological systems (SES), in which complex interactions between ecological conditions and social actions ultimately determine management strategies. This project will develop an SES model to inform the management of bluegill across the Midwest U.S. in the face of climate change. Extensive datasets on bluegill growth across the Midwest will be leveraged to develop statistical and process-based simulation models to determine important factors structuring bluegill populations and predict their responses to climate change impacts.
The SES model will be used to predict the effects of climate change on bluegill fishery outcomes and identify management strategies that best provide robust bluegill populations, satisfied anglers, and diverse angling opportunities. These results could identify important, currently unknown dynamics in bluegill fisheries that will allow managers to develop best management practices not only for current bluegill populations, but also as climate change alters their growth and abundance in the future.
- Source: USGS Sciencebase (id: 616db865d34e653770013036)
Recreational fisheries offer invaluable benefits to the communities they serve, including economic support, food security, and enhanced social connection with natural areas. In North America, bluegill are one of the most important species in terms of providing accessible, harvest-oriented recreational fisheries. In Wisconsin, they are the most caught, most harvested, and second-most targeted species in the state’s recreational fishery. Climate change offers further challenges. Warming temperatures and associated impacts have the potential to affect fish communities and their habitat with unpredictable implications for angler behavior, which can then cause further impacts on fish populations.
Significant knowledge gaps exist in understanding ecological drivers of bluegill population dynamics. Questions that remain are how bluegill fisheries may respond to climate change and how anglers will respond to changes in bluegill populations and their management. Filling these gaps will support the development of management strategies to prevent problems like stunting (i.e., high abundances of small fish) or growth overfishing (i.e., overfishing at average sizes smaller than sizes at full maturity). Therefore, recreational fisheries should be considered as social-ecological systems (SES), in which complex interactions between ecological conditions and social actions ultimately determine management strategies. This project will develop an SES model to inform the management of bluegill across the Midwest U.S. in the face of climate change. Extensive datasets on bluegill growth across the Midwest will be leveraged to develop statistical and process-based simulation models to determine important factors structuring bluegill populations and predict their responses to climate change impacts.
The SES model will be used to predict the effects of climate change on bluegill fishery outcomes and identify management strategies that best provide robust bluegill populations, satisfied anglers, and diverse angling opportunities. These results could identify important, currently unknown dynamics in bluegill fisheries that will allow managers to develop best management practices not only for current bluegill populations, but also as climate change alters their growth and abundance in the future.
- Source: USGS Sciencebase (id: 616db865d34e653770013036)