NFCC Sponsors Panel at AFS in Anchorage

What have we learned from a decade or more experience with marine protected areas? Expert panelists will share their most useful experiences about science, fishery management, process planning, public policy, stakeholder participation and monitoring of the effects of marine protected areas at an NFCC symposium in September.

The meeting takes place at the annual conference of the American Fisheries Society in Anchorage, Alaska on September 15. The AFS Conference theme this year is Creating a Fisheries Mosaic: Connections Across Jurisdictions, Disciplines, and Cultures. All sessions are at the Egan Center in downtown Anchorage.

NFCC’s mission has been to create venues for disparate voices to come together for dialogue and creative problem-solving; the symposium is another opportunity for exchanging information and opinion on a topic that is highly visible, sometimes contentious and thoroughly current on the fishery management scene.

"Marine Protected Areas are themselves a mosaic," said Suzanne Iudicello, NFCC board member who will moderate the symposium. "They encompass marine organisms, habitats and processes; resources and users; science and culture; multiple jurisdictions." Iudicello said the panelists include diverse presenters from as far away as Alaska and Fiji, state and federal managers, fishermen and marine ecologists.

The objective of this half-day symposium is to present lessons learned from designations of marine protected areas—lessons in scientific integration, management overlap, stakeholder engagement, and communication. Panelists are Jim Reynolds, of the Institute of Applied Sciences, University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji Islands; Michele Buckhorn, University of California; Jim Taggert, U.S. Geological Survey, Juneau, Alaska; Brock Bernstein, President of NFCC; Lisa Wooninck, NOAA Fisheries Santa Cruz Lab; Susan Golding, member of California's MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force; Bill James, California nearshore fisherman, and Loren Wenzel, NOAA MPA Center in Charleston, SC.

Over the past several years, the National Fisheries Conservation Center has worked with the National MPA Center, NOAA Fisheries and the State of California on several projects that have examined the interface between creation of protected areas and fisheries management. The application of tools new to fisheries, such as the scientific consensus conference, decision analysis and joint fact-finding, as well as cross-jurisdictional case study approaches to distill lessons learned from various designation processes would offer symposium attendees a summary of the most current thinking about the science of MPAs, designation processes, stakeholder engagement, and integration of conventional fishery management and marine reserve ecology. The half-day symposium brings together perspectives that span not only multiple jurisdictions, disciplines and cultures, but points of view and approach that have not always intersected easily in the designation of marine protected areas.