气候变化领域集成服务门户

According to the state, Alaska’s herring management has been a success story. The Department of Fish and Game began performing consistent surveys of Sitka herring populations in 1974, and the resulting data show steady growth in herring stocks since then. State statisticians use this historical data to set a “harvest threshold,” the number of tons of herring that can be sustainably fished each year. But the state’s approach, Thornton says, is flawed; it reflects a “shifting baseline syndrome” common to modern commercial fisheries. The term describes how regulators use the already diminished stocks to establish baselines of historical abundance. In Sitka, the last reduction fishery closed in 1966, which means that by the time the state started keeping track, the herring population was already suffering. While the state also uses data collected by the federal government beginning in the 1920s as a way to extend its historical timeline, critics point out that the data were collected with a hodgepodge of methods across ever-shifting areas and seasons.