Resilience, Social-Ecological Rules, and Environmental Variability in a Two-Species Artisanal Fishery

Social-ecological resilience is an increasingly central paradigm for understanding sustainable resource management. In this study, we aimed to better understand the effect of environmental variability on the resilience of fishery systems, and the important role that social institutions and biophysical constraints play. To explore these issues, we built a dynamic model of the pen shell fishery of the indigenous Seri people in the Gulf of California, Mexico. This model included the dynamics of the two dominant species in the fishery (Atrina tuberculosa and Pinna rugosa), several institutional rules that the Seri use, and a number of ecological constraints, including key stochastic variables derived from empirical data. We found that modeling with multiple species, rather than the standard species model, uncovered more of the resilience that is present in the system. We also found that it is the combination of several social-ecological rules working in conjunction with the endogenous environmental variability that helps ensure the resilience of the system.