Recreational fisheries provide direct connections between Gulf of Mexico biological resources and the economies, health and well-being of coastal communities. These systems can be strongly impacted across spatial and temporal scales by disturbances such as oil spills. For example, an oil spill and associated responses such as oil removal activities and fishery closures affecting one region of the Gulf may impact other regions through partial loss of recruitment to a shared stock, or through re-distribution of fishing pressure to other regions. Restoration initiatives must likewise be implemented in spatially explicit contexts (e.g. specific state shorelines, regions or habitats), but success of these programs may depend on Gulf-wide processes (e.g. healthy offshore Gulf fish stocks). Successful restoration and continued management of recreational fisheries therefore depends on a good understanding of linkages between broader processes and local dynamics in the interlinked ecological and human components of this social-ecological system. Unfortunately, even though detailed spatially explicit information is routinely collected in fisheries monitoring programs and research projects, this information has not been collated, synthesized and made useful to the evaluation of restoration options.

The project will provide a first Gulf-wide synthesis of the spatial dynamics of a recreational fisheries system: the red drum fishery which is of major economic and cultural significance throughout the region. The objectives of the project are: (1) to collate and synthesize habitat, fish population and angler behavior data from routine monitoring programs and individual research projects; (2) to develop spatial models of red drum recruitment and angling effort dynamics; (3) to develop an integrated, spatially explicit social-ecological systems model for the red drum fishery; (4) to evaluate potential restoration strategies following disturbances such as oil spills; (5) to make data and modeling tools available to other researchers in the Gulf and encourage their use in restoration measures.

The project addresses Goal 3 of the Gulf Research Program (Advance understanding of the Gulf of Mexico region as a dynamic system with complex, interconnecting human and environmental systems, functions, and processes to inform the protection and restoration of ecosystem services). Knowledge of the spatial scales at which red drum recruitment varies and is regulated should inform the spatial scales of restoration activities useful for supporting specific coastal communities and help determine if and how spatially explicit management regulations are enacted. Similarly, understanding the spatial dynamics of anglers pursuing red drum is necessary to predict how successful local red drum population recovery or augmentation can be expected to influence market activity, catch rates, and carry-on effects on fish populations. Integrating recruitment and angler effort spatial dynamics into a social-ecological model will for the first time allow evaluating fisheries restoration strategies in way that is both location-specific and takes account of spatial and social-ecological feedbacks. Project outputs will break new ground scientifically and be directly useful to support management, restoration and monitoring decisions. While this project focuses on red drum as a case study, the approach will serve as a template readily applicable to multiple fisheries of interest.

The project is supported by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine – Gulf Research Program under Grant Agreement # 2000006433. The content of this website is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Gulf Research Program or the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.