Abstract

Adult fishery production is influenced by juvenile demographics, including post-settlement cohort variability in mortality and growth. These processes are directly influenced by the quantity and quality of juvenile habitats: key resources for both feeding and shelter. Even with well-designed, fully-connected, and fully-resourced MPA networks, a situation that is not imminent, fishery production will not be well-sustained if juvenile mortality and growth rates are compromised by degradation of key nursery habitats. Management arenas are full of phrases that seemingly capture the urgency of the habitat component. Examples include: “ecosystem-based management”, “precautionary management”, “no net loss of wetlands”, “compensatory mitigation”, “sustainable tourism”, and a parent phrase that all of these fit under: “integrated coastal management (ICM)”. However, construction projects that directly eliminate habitat continue to occur at high rates with relatively few constraints on the issuance of new permits. The Habitat Conservation Division of NMFS has tried to improve the quality of new projects, particularly since implementation of the federal essential fish habitat mandate in 1998. However, primary authority ultimately rests with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or state/commonwealth agencies that have been consistently reluctant to say no, or to seek major reductions in project impacts. A variety of problems, widely known in the permitting world, yet absent from workshops and conferences, are present and require attention. Commonly, environmental impact assessments are little more than explicit efforts to justify any project, any time – how can a consultant get many more jobs if inherently precautionary? Cumulative impacts are still rarely considered in any detail, even in large, expensive documents regarding sites that have already endured a dozen prior disturbance events. Millions of dollars have been spent on project monitoring, often with protocols that do not meet minimum standards of scientific rigor. Mitigation is simply the cost of doing business with a similar absence of quality monitoring. Lobbyists for various construction industries commonly have an order of magnitude more influence with decision makers than any other expert- or user-group. Without explicit recognition and action regarding these badly under-discussed issues, ICM and its component phrases will remain theoretically robust and functionally hollow paradigms.

PDF Preview