144th Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society

August 17 - 21, 2014

There is considerable evidence to suggest that aquatic and marine ecosystems can exhibit critical changes with threshold responses to human and environmental pressures. How these tipping points can be incorporated into management tools for aquatic ecosystems is less well understood. Management that is sufficiently robust to these critical changes depends on (a) an understanding of nonlinear responses of systems to environmental and human pressures, (b) methodology to identify critical points associated with ecosystem indicators and system pressures, (c) knowledge of the consequences of tipping points for ecosystem services, (d) mechanisms for accounting for changing reference points associated with alternative system states, and (e) tradeoffs in performance of management strategies that use information on regime change relative to those that do not.

This symposium will review current research in quantitative methods, synthesis, and application to evaluate how regime change or tipping points can be integrated into decision support tools for fisheries and ecosystem management. Presentations will cross disciplines and span geographic scale (i.e. include system-specific examples and empirical and theoretical analyses across multiple systems), and provide direction for management advice.

Confirmed Presentations:

• Matt Baker: Integrating autoregressive analyses of species interactions and responses to environmental variables to identify thresholds in Northeast Pacific marine ecosystems
• Carl Boettiger: Avoiding tipping points in the management of ecological systems: a non-parametric Bayesian approach
• Ashley Erickson: Provisional
• Gavin Fay: Management performance of ecological indicators using threshold-based fishery control rules
• David Finnoff: Opposing irreversibilities in environmental policy
• Mary Hunsicker: Threshold responses to environmental stressors: a meta-analysis
• Kendra Karr: Ecosystem thresholds and reference points for adaptive management of coral reef fisheries
• Scott Large: Quantifying critical points in ecological indicator responses to fishing and the environment
• David Lodge: Bioeconomic regime shifts and management of lake fisheries invaded by Rusty Crayfish
• Cody Szuwalski: Shifting population dynamics and potential management responses