from Assessment of the Cross-cutting Issues: Food Security and Food Safety
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2017
Definition
Fish stock propagation, more commonly known as fisheries enhancement, is a set of management approaches involving the use of aquaculture technologies to enhance or restore fisheries in natural ecosystems (Lorenzen, 2008). “Aquaculture technologies” include culture under controlled conditions and subsequent release of aquatic organisms, provision of artificial habitat, feeding, fertilization, and predator control. ”Fisheries” refers to the harvesting of aquatic organisms as a common pool resource, and “natural ecosystems” are ecosystems not primarily controlled by humans, whether truly natural or modified by human activity. This places enhancements in an intermediate position between capture fisheries and aquaculture in terms of technical and management control (Anderson, 2002).
The present chapter focuses primarily on enhancements involving releases of cultured organisms, the most common form of enhancements often described by terms such as ‘propagation’, ‘stock enhancement’, ‘sea ranching’ or ‘aquaculture-based enhancement’.
Enhancements in marine resource management
Enhancements are developed when fisheries management stakeholders or agencies take a proactive, interventionist approach towards achieving management objectives by employing aquaculture technologies instead of relying solely on the protection of natural resources and processes. Enhancement approaches may be used effectively or ineffectively in resource management. To understand how enhancement initiatives can give rise to such different outcomes, it is important to consider not only the technical intervention but the management context in which the initiative has arisen, including ecological and socioeconomic factors as well as the governance arrangements (Lorenzen, 2008).
Effective enhancements
Enhancement approaches may be employed towards different ends commonly referred to as sea ranching, stock enhancement and restocking (Bell et al. 2008). Sea ranching entails releasing cultured organisms to maintain stocks that do not recruit naturally in the focal ecosystem. This may involve stocks that once recruited naturally but no longer do so due to loss of critical habitat, or it may involve creation of fisheries for desired “new” species for which the focal system provides a habitat suitable for adult stages but not for spawning or for juveniles.
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