The Evolution of Cooperative Fisheries Management on Lake Erie through Stakeholder Engagement, Increased Transparency, and Structured Decision Analysis

Walleye (Sander vitreus) and Yellow Perch (Perca flavecens) in Lake Erie support one of the most valuable freshwater fisheries in the world, including commercial food fish, charter boat, and recreational fisheries.  As members of the Lake Erie Committee (LEC) four US states and Ontario share the management of these fisheries within a cooperative framework.  Vocal stakeholder groups in all jurisdictions ensure that management agencies are always balancing sustainable harvest with stakeholder expectations.  Over 15 years, this has resulted in increasingly rancorous communication between stakeholders and agencies.  This included challenges to the science of exploitation policy setting and government decision making authority through quasi-judicial hearings, judicial review, and international arbitration. To solve this problem and achieve balance between stakeholder interests, the LEC has implemented a new process for making allocation decisions.  This process relies on third party facilitation to implement structured decision analysis and management strategy evaluation (MSE) to develop and evaluate population models, population/exploitation targets and exploitation polies.  This is done within a transparent process involving stakeholders at every step. The presentation will provide an overview of the history of Percid management on Lake Erie with a focus on describing the benefits and lessons learned from the new management processes.