Using Socio-Economic and Fisheries Involvement Indices to Understand Alaska Fishing Community Well-Being

Over recent years, fisheries managers have been going through a paradigm shift to prioritize ecosystem-based management. With this comes an increasing need to better understand the impacts of fisheries management decisions on the social well-being and sustainability of fishing communities.  This paper summarizes research aimed at using secondary data to develop socio-economic and fisheries-dependence indices to measure fishing community well-being in Alaska. Data from more than 300 communities in Alaska were used to create a database of socio-economic and fisheries dependence indices of well-being and adaptability for Alaskan communities dependent on marine resources. Each index was developed using a principal components analysis to assess the relative position of each community compared to all other communities in Alaska. We find that creating performance measures, such as the indices presented here, in fisheries provides a useful way to track the status of important fisheries and social variables over time.