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 presentation summarizes research aimed at using a mix of primary and secondary data to develop and groundtruth socio-economic and fisheries-dependence indices to measure fishing community well-being in Alaska. Secondary 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. These indices are then compared with primary data collection in 13 communities to groundtruth the indices and assess their validity.  We find that groundtruthing is an important component in understanding how well the indices reflect conditions in the community and that creating performance measures, such as the indices presented here, provides a useful way to track the status of important fisheries and social variables over time.