Fish and fisheries resilience to disturbances

My research beginnings invoke a key early goal for the social-ecological systems (SES) field: characterize complex feedbacks, like drivers and responses, between environments and people. Studying social-ecological resilience to disturbances (press and pulse, as well as natural and technological) is one key research theme in this space. I applied this approach to study how fisheries in the United States northern Gulf responded to the most costly environmental disaster in US history: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. I compiled catch and economic impacts data for northern Gulf commerical, recreational, and mariculture fishing industries to examine pre- and post-spill trends, and found that economic trends in these fishing sectors remained stable or improved following the spill. Contrary to early projections of fishery decline, these industries showed remarkable resilience in the face of unparalleled oiling, likely aiding recovery of stressed northern Gulf coastal communities in the post-spill era (Swinea & Fodrie, 2021).

I next moved from oil spills to tropical cyclones: a major type of pulse disturbance becoming more frequent and intense, with uncertain implications for the structure and stability of ecosystems. We evaluated the impact of tropical cyclones on a seagrass-associated estuarine fish community by harnessing a 10-year trawl database. Using a before-after-control-impact approach, we found that seagrass persistence likely underpinned fish abundance and community resilience, but greater cyclone intensity inhibited this response (Zhang et al., 2022).