The Evolution and Ecology of Biocomplexity as a Key to Fisheries Sustainability

Moderators: Lorenz Hauser, Lisa Seeb, Jim Seeb and Jeff Olsen
Emails: lhauser@u.washington.edu; lisa_seeb@fishgame.state.ak.us; jim_seeb@fishgame.state.ak.us and jeffrey_olsen@fws.gov

Date: Thursday, September 15, 2005
Time: 8:00 am to 5:40 pm
Location: Egan - Arteaga

Sustainability of exploited fish populations is the primary aim of successful management, yet the importance of biocomplexity in achieving this aim has only recently been recognized (Hilborn et al. 2003). This functional significance of biodiversity in maintaining the productivity of natural resources has brought further urgency to conservation efforts and has increased the necessity to understand the evolution, ecology and potential threats to complex systems. Such an understanding can only be achieved by interdisciplinary approaches to biocomplexity research. In this symposium, we aim to bring together evolutionary biologists, ecologists, geneticists and fisheries scientists, in order to evaluate our present state of knowledge on biocomplexity and its significance for the resilience of fish stocks to environmental perturbations and exploitation. Although examples will be drawn primarily from Pacific salmonids due to the large amount of data available, the symposium will include contributions from other species and from a variety of disciplines, including metapopulation ecology and computer modeling. We aim to accumulate a series of presentations showing the functional aspect of biocomplexity, potentially by looking at long-term data sets, and studies assessing interrelationships between different levels of biocomplexity, and their effects on fisheries sustainability. Primary, but not exclusive, questions are: (i) the significance of population structure, in particular metapopulation structure, for biocomplexity and resilience; (ii) spatial and temporal patterns of biocomplexity; (iii) the evolution of biocomplexity and its consequences for population resilience; (iv) anthropogenic selection and its consequences for biocomplexity; (v) management implications of biodiversity and the application of the metapopulation concept in fisheries management.

Link to list of presentations in this symposium