Catching diversity of fish species means more stable income for fishers

For people who make a living by harvesting natural

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resources, income volatility is a persistent threat. Crops could fail. Fisheries could collapse. Forests could burn. These and other factors—including changing management regulations and practices—can lower harvests, which depresses income for farmers, fishers and timber harvesters. But the ways that these forces interact to impact income have been difficult to track, especially at the level of the individual worker.

A team of scientists has now evaluated income volatility among those employed in an area with some of the largest, most valuable fisheries in the world—the waters surrounding the state of Alaska. The researchers—from the University of Washington, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game—analyzed nearly 30 years of revenue and permitting records for individuals fishing in Alaskan waters and tracked how their fishing choices, in terms of permits purchased and species caught, influenced their year-to-year income volatility.

Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that individuals who purchased multiple permits and diversified their catch had much less income variability than people who specialized by fishing one species or obtaining a single type of permit. Their paper is the first to track the effect of fishing practices on individuals, rather than fishing fleets or communities.

"Previous work has shown that individuals who fish commercially have higher income variability than farmers. Our analysis showed that fishers holding single permits expose themselves to exceptional risk of high year-to-year income variability" said lead author Sean Anderson, who conducted this research as a postdoctoral researcher in the UW's School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. "But individual fishers who bought multiple permits—which allows them to catch a diversity of species—showed significantly less income volatility."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-diversity-fish-species-stable-income.html#jCp