Ray Hilborn's research while affiliated with Trinity Washington University and other places

Publications (32)

Article
Many foraging models assume “perfect information” and “free movement” when describing predator foraging behavior, although this is rare in nature. Here we quantified predation by brown bears (Ursus arctos, (Linnaeus, 1758)) on adult sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka, (Walbaum, 1792)) in a series of spatially proximate ponds that largely satisfied...
Technical Report
Full-text available
The main objective of the workshop was to review the recommendations of WKREF1 and consider how these might feed into a new reference points framework and guidelines for ICES. There were a number of presentations on the wider issues of best practice for reference points, the Allee effect, density dependence and the WKIRISH approach. The starting po...
Article
Salmon is a nutritious and popular food among consumers predominantly in wealthy countries around the world. Since the mid-1990s farmed salmon production has exceeded wild salmon harvest, and is now 80 % of total global salmon supply. Farmed salmon has been frequently criticized for its environmental impacts and consumers are faced with a multitude...
Article
Understanding the relative contributions of the environment to commercial fisheries and aquaculture systems is an area of intense importance as it quantifies the dependence these human dominated systems have on healthy and productive ecosystems. Measures of sustainability are required that include environmental support, use of nonrenewable resource...
Article
There is a gap in information in the literature regarding the energy and water embodied is seafood, especially wild catch fisheries. This work draws on primary and secondary data to assess, through a life cycle approach, the energy and water consumed to catch and process wild sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay, Alaska (USA). The Bristol Bay sockeye salm...
Article
The benefits of multinational agreements that address global problems, such as climate change, must not be diminished by uncritical acceptance that the action that is necessary to address all widespread problems, such as overfishing, is common, globally. Evidence-based identification of the nature and cause of threats to marine ecosystems is the es...
Article
Full-text available
Recent discussions of healthy and sustainable diets encourage increased consumption of plants and decreased consumption of animal-source foods for both human and environmental health. Seafood is often peripheral in these discussions. This paper examines the relative environmental costs of sourcing key nutrients from different kinds of seafood, othe...
Article
Small-scale fisheries (SSFs) provide food security, livelihood, and employment to millions of people around the world. Whereas the urgency of securing sustainable SSFs is widely recognized, the governance characteristics that promote sustainability are poorly understood. This study evaluates the performance and governance of SSFs in 20 countries in...
Article
Accurate forecasts of sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) in Bristol Bay, Alaska, play an important role in management and harvesting decisions for this culturally and ecologically vital species. We used a suite of parametric and non-parametric models to assess the frontiers in forecast accuracy of Bristol Bay sockeye salmon possible given currentl...
Article
Full-text available
Forage fish — small, low trophic level, pelagic fish such as herrings, sardines, and anchovies — are important prey species in marine ecosystems and also support large commercial fisheries. In many parts of the world, forage fish fisheries are managed using precautionary principles that target catch limits below the maximum sustainable yield. Howev...
Article
A new approach for estimating the fishing mortality benchmark F msy (fishing pressure that corresponds to maximum sustainable yield) is proposed. The approach includes density-dependent factors. The analysis considers 53 data-rich fish stocks in the Northeast Atlantic. The new F msy values are estimated from an ensemble of data sources: (i) applyin...
Article
How do we assess the performance of national and international fisheries management organizations? Many organizations produce measures of the extent of overfishing, typically classifying individual stocks as overfished if they are below some biomass threshold. Most agencies then report their overall status (i.e. percentage overfished, fully exploit...
Article
Full-text available
The trade-off between biodiversity and sustainable fish harvest with area-based management. While fisheries provide food and employment for hundreds of millions of people, they also can have significant impact on biodiversity. We explore the potential of area-based fisheries management to simultaneously maintain biodiversity and high levels of sust...
Article
In major mixed stock fisheries of the United States, the actual catch is well below the total allowable catch (TAC). In recent years, only 20–30% of the TAC is caught in the US West Coast non-whiting fishery, whereas 60–80% of the TAC is caught in the Gulf of Alaska groundfish trawl fishery. Possible explanations for the underutilization are (1) la...
Article
Ecosystem‐based management requires consideration of overlapping resource use between humans and other consumers. Pacific salmon are an important resource for both fisheries and populations of wildlife around the Pacific rim, including coastal brown bears (Ursus arctos); salmon consumption has been positively linked to bear density, body size, and...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Global fisheries catches can be increased in a sustainable way after rebuilding of fish populations, if ecosystem functioning is considered. A central biological reference point for fisheries management, Fmsy, the fishing pressure that gives the maximum sustainable yield, has been re-evaluated taking into account ecosystem functioning. This has bee...
Technical Report
Full-text available
The participants of the project “Ecosystem Based FMSY Values in Fisheries Management”, in short, the “FMSY project”, meet for the first time. The meeting took place at the facilities of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 31 October to 2 November 2017. An Agenda for the meeting was send out beforehand, and is given in Appendix 1....
Technical Report
Full-text available
The participants of the project “Ecosystem Based FMSY Values in Fisheries Management”, in short, the “FMSY project”, meet for the third time. The meeting took place at the facilities of the Bay Campus, University of Rhode Island, Narragansett, RI 02881, USA, 12-14 March 2018. An Agenda for the meeting was send out beforehand, and is given in Append...
Technical Report
Full-text available
The participants of the project “Ecosystem Based FMSY Values in Fisheries Management”, in short, the “MSY project”, meet for the first time. The meeting took place at the facilities of the Nordic Council of Ministers, Copenhagen, Denmark, 20-21 June 2017. An Agenda for the meeting was send out beforehand, and is given in Appendix 1. The list of par...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Global fisheries catches can be increased in a sustainable way after rebuilding of fish populations, if ecosystem functioning is considered.
Technical Report
Full-text available
Global fisheries catches can be increased in a sustainable way after rebuilding of fish populations, if ecosystem functioning is considered.
Article
Fisheries provide food. In industrialized nations, the overwhelming portion of seafood comes from a small number of commercial fishers and increasingly aquaculture (1). Fisheries also contribute to leisure and recreation. In developed nations, 1 in 10 people fishes for pleasure, amounting to at least 220 million recreational fishers worldwide (2, 3...
Article
Most reporting of stock status accumulated at a national or regional level gives statistics on what proportion of the stocks are below some abundance threshold or above some fishing mortality rate threshold. This approach does not convey useful information on the performance of the fisheries management system in maximizing long-term sustainable yie...
Article
Glaubt man den Berichten und Pressemitteilungen prominenter Umweltorganisationen, stehen die Weltfischbestände vor dem globalen Kollaps. Auch sollte man beliebten Einkaufsratgebern zufolge von vielen marinen Fischbeständen die Finger lassen. Zweifellos war und ist der Befischungsdruck auf viele ökonomisch wichtige marine Fischpopulationen hoch, was...

Citations

... The majority of the carbon footprint of capture fisheries comes from the fuel used, and Parker and Tyedmers (2015) as- (Fissel et al., 2016 ); scallop fishery (Bloor et al., 2021 ); Impossible Burger (Khan et al., 2019 ); New Zealand (Mazzetto and Ledgard 2023, ); Norwegian farmed salmon (Ziegler and Hilborn, 2023 ). ...
... Geographic and temporal scale issues have been recognized more often in terrestrial systems, perhaps because their boundaries are readily observable (e.g. Cumming et al., 2006;Kearney and Hilborn, 2022); fisheries are more difficult to deal with in this respect. However, issues of scale underpin many fisheries research and managerial actions although they often go unnoticed: the result is the failure to realize that many situations are likely to be operating at several scales, including conflicting or mismatching geographical, temporal, technological, and institutional scales. ...
... As a tool for emergy-based sea area capital assessment, the model is of great significance for quantifying the ecosystem service value and accounting for marine/land natural capital value. the last decades, it has been widely applied in the valuation of terrestrial and costal ecosystems [8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Some scholars have realized the spatialization of emergy-based natural capital assessment by combining it with geospatial information technology [5,[15][16][17][18]. ...
... Seafood has high-quality protein and other indispensable nutrients with low saturated fatty acids and high Omega-3 fatty acids (Kakara et al., 2016). As a good protein source, seafood accounts for 14-16% of the animal-sourced protein consumed worldwide by over one billion people (Tidwell and Allan, 2012;Viglia et al., 2022). ...
... The use of MPAs as a management tool is likely to increase worldwide as nations (currently over 100) sign on to the "30 by 30" approach, which aims to protect 30% of the Earth's land and ocean by 2030 (Dinerstein et al. 2019;Roberts et al. 2020;Sala et al. 2021). However, MPAs need to be carefully monitored to evaluate their conservation and socioeconomic benefits and to balance the potentially negative effects of displacing human activities into surrounding areas (Agardy et al. 2011;Hilborn and Kaiser 2022). ...
... Hegland et al. (2012) further proposes a Regional Fisheries Co-Management Organizations model where stakeholders, scientists, and member states' administrators would work together in the regional decision-making process. Recent work by Ouréns et al. (2022) show that the all-stakeholders involvement co-management model that has been dominant in the literature is perceived by her study's respondents as linked to poorer fishery performance, in contrast to governance systems that involve fewer stakeholder groups. The absence of artisanal and small-scale fishers from coastal states in RFMO discussions has resulted in other stakeholders' interests taking precedence in shaping the RFMO agenda. ...
... Aquaculture can help meet multiple Sustainable Development Goals, including reducing hunger, improving nutrition, and creating sustainable economic growth and has been identified as a key way to reduce the environmental impacts of animal-based foods [2,41]. Previously, studies have shown that aquaculture generally has lower freshwater use, carbon emissions, and nutrient pollution than traditional livestock [9,18]. However, impacts such as freshwater use and carbon emissions can vary by over two orders of magnitude based on factors such as species farmed, production methods, and land-use change [13]. ...
... The study compared small-scale farmland to the adjacent Serengeti National Park and to biodiversity in a nearby national park. Hilborn and Sinclair (2021) found that the primary producers, grasses, shrubs, and trees on farmland had been reduced by 80-90%, and the ungulates, birds, and predators that depend on the primary producers were all reduced by over 80%. Only rodents were more abundant in the farmland. ...
... While this approach is straightforward in principle, obtaining agreement between all stakeholders and managers on the level of adjustment required could prove difficult. For example, while the concept of a lower target depletion for small pelagic fish compared to other species is well accepted, the selection of the MSC's level of 75% has been debated (e.g., Smith et al. 2011;Free et al. 2021). ...
... Penelitian terdahulu menunjukkan bahwa keberadaan kawasan konservasi dapat meningkatkan hasil tangkapan (Cabral et al. 2020, Hilborn 2021, Cabral et al. 2021. Barceló et al. (2021) mensimulasikan bahwa kawasan konservasi berdampak terhadap peningkatan hasil tangkapan tidak hanya dalam kawasan konservasi tapi juga di luar wilayah kawasan konservasi. ...