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Conference Theme:Toward Resilient Recreational Fisheries Background to the Conference and the Host Organization The 6th World Recreational Fishing Conference (WRFC) is a scientific forum to present cutting-edge insights from researchers, managers and industry orally or in a poster format on pertinent topics in recreational fisheries from all around the world. The conference is held on a triennial basis with previous locations being Dublin – Ireland (1996), Vancouver – Canada (1999), Darwin – Australia (2002), Trondheim – Norway (2005) and Fort Lauderdale – USA (2008). The next WRFC is held from 1 to 4 August 2011 at the central building of Humboldt-University of Berlin (Germany), located in the heart of the capital city with a long history of fish and fisheries research within the Faculty of Agriculture and Horticulture, in collaboration with the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries and the German Angler Association (both located in Berlin). Background to the Conference Theme The theme of the 6th WRFC revolves around the emerging idea of developing and fostering resilient recreational fisheries that are capable of adapting to ecological, environmental and societal change and disturbance, while maintaining structure and function. It is now widely appreciated that development and management of recreational fisheries depends on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and solid partnerships among research, management and the fisheries industry as well as other stakeholders. Interdisciplinarity involves tackling issues or questions from a range of scientific disciplines and perspectives, ideally in teams of diverse expertise and background working together to answer common questions or solve common problems. Transdisciplinarity goes a step further emphasizing the need to integrate scientific and non-scientific knowledge for problem solving through cooperation of anglers, managers and researchers in problem-solving partnership approaches. While these ideals are increasingly appreciated in the applied scientific community, most conferences still revolve around disciplinary boundaries (e.g., economics, non-economic social science – called Human Dimensions, or biology-oriented conferences), and much of the past research on recreational fisheries has been mostly biological in orientation. The 6th WRFC will be a forum to attract all disciplines and approaches to a common venue to jointly discuss common issues from multidisciplinary, and if possible, interdisciplinary perspectives with a goal for fostering resiliency and adaptability in recreational fisheries to deal with societal, ecological, climate-driven and other changes. To achieve this, the program of the 6th WRFC hopes to attract papers that are thematically joined and directed at key topics that have social, economic and biological dimensions, and thus, will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, managers and fishing industry professionals and avid anglers from around the world. Sessions are termed knowledge interfaces because they are arranged around a small set of unifying issues to foster abstract submissions from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives, with the issue serving as an attraction point (i.e., interface) for knowledge exchange. Preference will be given to oral presentation of papers that fit the issues mentioned below. Issues revolved around four key conference theme sessions and additional contributed sessions. Abstracts can be submitted to any of these sessions. The final conference topics will be arranged into parallel sessions depending on the number of abstracts submitted. Theme sessions The following symposium sessions will form the core of the conference. Oral presentations or posters will be favored that address these themes from a variety of perspectives as well as from applications in management and the private and public angling sector. Preference will be given to talks putting forward interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary perspectives that cross scientific disciplines, but high quality disciplinary papers are equally welcome. In each session various disciplines are solicited. 1. Globalization of recreational fisheries Recreational fishing is increasingly a global endeavor. Globalization creates its own challenges resulting from tourism development, cross-cultural interactions, value conflicts among user groups, spread of angling tackle innovations as well as pervasively changing angler expectations. This session invites papers dealing with globalization and cross-country and cross-cultural issues offering an outlook for resiliency and sustainability of recreational fisheries on a global scale. 2. Space, place and recreational fisheries A single-fishery, biology-centered perspective has dominated much of the literature and management efforts in recreational fisheries. The traditional assumption is that understanding the biology of a target species and how it reacts to fishing pressure is sufficient to allow derivation of an appropriate management response (e.g., implementation of a harvest regulation). This perspective, however, is not only naïve towards the potential responses of anglers to altered management action (e.g., shifting effort to substitute sites in a region) but also disregards the psychological bonding by anglers and other stakeholders towards particular places (i.e., fisheries or sites). This can result in misguided management practices, stakeholder conflict, loss of resilience und ultimately unsustainable fisheries management. While it is intuitive that the interplay of places (i.e., single fisheries) nested in a landscape of multiple spatially segregated fisheries ultimately shape the behaviours, attitudes and reactions of anglers to any management intervention (e.g., marine protected areas, harvest regulation, stocking), there is little dedicated research on this topic in the literature. This session aim at understanding the importance of space and place for determining the dynamics of recreational fishing. Abstracts can come from any area such as spatially-explicit models, agent-based modeling, spatial effort dynamics or quantitative or social science qualitative research on the “psychology of place” and how this relates to the spatial dynamics of fish-angler-interactions, influences rule compliance and affects the development of informal rules, taboos and norm among anglers to conserve special places against “outsiders” or its biodiversity “for their own sake”. 3. Change, adaptation and evolution in recreational fisheries Change is the rule rather than the exception in recreational fisheries. Change can encompass disease outbreaks, spread of non-native fish, altered management schemes, environmental change, changing societal values (e.g., spread of animal rights philosophies), political changes, fisheries-induced evolution, ecological change, biological and cultural evolution as well as climate change. The questions asked in this session are: How can or could recreational fisheries adapt to change? What limits or facilitates successful adaptation, socially, economically and biologically? What are the social, biological or economic consequences of various adaptation strategies? Under what conditions are recreational fisheries resilient to change, although change would be desirable? 4. Stock, stocking and the future of recreational fisheries Stocking or introduction of fish is a widespread response to real or perceived fish stock declines. It has mainly been used in freshwater fisheries, but its importance in saltwater fisheries is increasing. Stocking can provide the answer to recruitment failures and thus maintain viable fisheries, or it might result in loss of resilience and fishery collapses, including the spread of non-native fishes and loss of genetic variability within or among populations. Stocking has socio-economic and ecological and evolutionary dimensions. In this session, papers are solicited that emphasize the social motivation, economic dimension as well as the extent, causes and consequences of stocking and introduction practices, both accidental and deliberate, in recreational fisheries with a view to enhancing the resiliency of recreational fisheries in the face of changing societal values and conservation concerns. Papers should be directly related to recreational fisheries. Contributed sessions Other paper submission (oral or posters) are welcome that fit one or more of the following issues. Presenters from different scientific disciplines (fisheries biology, sociology, anthropology, geography, economics etc.) are asked to tailor their papers to one of the respective contributed sessions to facilitate multi-disciplinary audiences and thereby facilitate that divergent disciplines listen to each other around a common issue. Final sessions will be developed depending on the number of high quality abstract submissions, and these sessions might run in parallel to the core theme sessions mentioned above.
Publication plan All papers presented at the 6th WRFC will be published in an abstract book distributed to all participants and made available online in perpetuity. Presenters interested in having their papers peer-reviewed and potentially published in Fisheries Management and Ecology will be asked shortly after the conference for submitting full papers with a submission deadline of November, 1, 2011. This will allow presenters to incorporate comments received during the conference in their papers. It is intended to prepare one special issue, preferably revolving around a coherent theme. The final decisions on the proceedings theme will be announced prior to the conference after evaluating the abstract submissions. Potentially, a second journal issue will be developed in a different journal (e.g., Fisheries Research – needs to be confirmed).
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