What is Historical Ecology
Pre-exploitation biomass, often termed virgin biomass, is critical to determining sustainable yield in current fisheries. Current abundance is modeled using National Marine Fisheries Service landings, trawl data and fishing effort dating back to the 1960s. Yet the U.S. fishing industry, especially on the Atlantic coast, began centuries before this (Figures, and many more, are available from the NOAA Photo Library). Historical ecology allows improved understanding of long-term changes due to human interaction directly with a species, and indirectly through changes in the environment. By evaluating historical abundance and the changing conditions of a species' environment, the baseline of a stock's abundance can be shifted to one prior to industrial fishing and environmental alteration. Such research depends on quantifying anecdotes or "non-scientific" reports, which can be problematic if not carefully considered. Despite the challenges of historical ecology, research from the tropics to the North Sea has demonstrated that many species were more abundant in pre-industrial and pre-colonial times. As Ecosystem-Based Management becomes used to establish management parameters for sustainability and biodiversity, these historically-derived baselines become increasingly relevant.
There have been dramatic changes to animal and plant populations over the past 400 years as a result of european expansion across the Americas, acting together with other environmental changes. Historical ecology research can help evaluate long-term abundances and distributions of species, how anthropogenic changes have effected them, and what are appropriate targets for restoration. Cod in the Gulf of Maine and neighboring Bay of Fundy occupy fewer spawning areas and fruitful fishing grounds than in the past (see Graham et al. 2002; Ames 2004; Rosenberg et al. 2004, all references below). Lotze and Milewski (2004) , categorized human impacts as "top down" (exploitation), "bottom up" (nutrient loading), and "side-in" (habitat destruction, pollution) to demonstrate degradation of the food web at all trophic levels that has reduced salmon and river herring abundance more than 99% over the past 200 years. We have long period of restoration to erase the types of changes that have occurred.
This project will estimate historical abundances of river herring in all of the principal river systems of the Gulf of Maine, and then correlate those values to historical coastal cod populations. In his 2004 study, Ames found the coastal cod populations disappearing before two waves of state-wide efforts to restore anadromous fish populations through fishway installation, restoration and stocking upstream spawning sites in 1940-1950 and 1980s (Rounsefell and Stringer 1945; Maine Department of Marine Resources et al. 1982). Data from the 1800s, as dam construction was escalating in Maine, could provide another view of this predator-prey relationship before the extirpation of coastal cod populations and increased fishing pressure on river herring. This is the objective of this study: to estimate historical abundance of river herring relative to available spawning site area using documentation of early Americans' dam constructions on Maine's rivers.
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