Marine Ecologist & Social Scientist

Examining the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of the Atlantic sea scallop fishery to climate change

I am currently collaborating on a multi-year project with an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation (CFRF), the University of Connecticut, and Rutgers University. We are assessing the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of the Atlantic sea scallop fishery to changing ocean conditions. My work involves reviewing the regulatory history of the fishery, analyzing commercial landings data, conducting oral histories with fisheries stakeholders, and developing scallop community profiles.

​Read more about the project from NOAA, NOAA's Ocean Acidification Program (OAP), CFRF, and UConn.

Evaluating community-based fishery management in Belize

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Here I pose with a Belizean fisher and his granddaughter, one of my field assistants. This photo was taken after interviewing fishers in Seine Bight, Belize, May 2019.
In 2011, Belize began establishing a TURF program--or "Territorial User Rights for Fishing"--where in exchange for being given rights to fish in particular areas, fishers must report their catch to management officials. This type of fishery management system can encourage environmental stewardship and prevent the "race to fish" paradigm. As of June 2016, a nation-wide TURF system was implemented by the Belize Fisheries Department--known as Managed Access--and seven additional TURFs were added to pre-existing marine reserves. Research to examine the impact of TURFs from social and ecological impacts is limited, despite catch improvements reported by fishers in the program. 

In 2019, I interviewed fishers in southern Belize about their knowledge, attitudes and perceptions towards the Managed Access Program, and compared their responses to a 2016 survey. We found that fishers in both time periods understand the rules to getting licenses, but those in 2019 perceive a lack of enforcement as a barrier to the success of the program. This paper is currently under review at Marine Policy.

Quantifying long-term changes in Belize's coral reef communities

Overfishing of marine ecosystems threatens biodiversity and the viability of fisheries. In recent decades, coral cover has declined on many Caribbean reefs due to disease and ocean warming. Other invertebrates and macroalgae have replaced corals as the most dominant taxa and the remaining coral are nearly all weedy species, negatively altering reef ecosystem functioning.

The primary management response to this global phenomenon has been the design and implementation of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). MPAs restrict fishing access in select locations, but poaching and lack of enforcement limit their broader success.  A recent 16-site, 4-year study (Cox et al. 2017) found that the establishment of MPAs did not restore coral reef communities in Belize.
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​We expanded this work by analyzing a 20-year time series of underwater benthic video transects across the Belizean Barrier Reef (BBR). Roughly half the sites were in MPAs or no-take marine reserves. We documented stark declines in coral cover and increases in macroalgal cover, regardless of management status.  This suggests that just management alone is not enough to restore marine populations, but initiatives must be developed to more directly involve and incentivize local communities to sustain marine resources. This paper was published in PLOS ONE (Alves et al. 2022).
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Here, our team of researchers prepare to SCUBA dive to select sites along the BBR to count and identify fish species and obtain videos of the seafloor for analysis.
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This is an example of one of the images extracted from the underwater video transects. It was analyzed for percent cover of coral, algae, and other seafloor elements.

Institutional analysis of fisheries governance in Belize

An important component to determining the efficacy of fisheries management decisions is understanding the institutions involved. This requires describing the actors represented by the institutions, including governmental and non-governmental agencies, fishers, and even researchers. It also includes documenting the formal and informal rules in place for the access, use and extraction of natural resources.

I described fisheries management in Belize from an institutional analysis perspective (left), and how marine resource management has changed in Belize since the early 1980's. This paper was recently published in Ocean and Coastal Management (Alves 2021).