FISHERIES OCEANOGRAPHY
12:4/5, 513–522, 2003
Scale issues in marine ecosystems and human interactions
R. IAN PERRY1,* AND ROSEMARY E. OMMER2
1
Fisheries & Oceans Canada, Pacific Biological Station,
Nanaimo, British Columbia V9T 6N7, Canada
2
Special Projects, University of Victoria, Victoria, British
Columbia V8W 2Y2, Canada
ABSTRACT
Understanding the reciprocal interactions between
humans and marine ecosystems has several funda-
mental difficulties, in particular compatible method-
ologies and different analytical scales. The issue of
scale is central, as the scales chosen for studies of
marine systems and human interactions can constrain
recognition of the drivers and responses of these sys-
tems to global changes. The essential task is to dis-
cover how to combine social and natural science scale
analyses to understand the impact of natural systems
on people and the impact of people on natural systems.
We identify characteristic spatial, temporal and
organizational scales in marine ecosystems and human
interactions, and the difficulties inherent in their
cross-disciplinary application. An approach is sugges-
ted focusing on communities of fish and fishers that
makes explicit: (1) the need to manage marine re-
sources in such a way as to encompass global to local
scales; (2) recognition of the complementary nature of
organizational scales between the natural and social
sciences and use of appropriate natural science scales
in the development of management policies; (3) the
need to be aware of shifting temporal baselines and the
representative nature of the data over time, for both
social and natural sciences; and (4) caution regarding
predictive models when humans are included. In terms
of methodologies, good scale matches occur across
large-scale social and natural science models and sur-
veys, but problems remain in small-scale qualitative
social studies and in cross-scale studies. Cumulative
case studies appear to provide the best approach, al-
though ‘integrating up’ remains a challenge. Natural
and social scientists need to work together to identify
*Correspondence. e-mail: perryi@pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca
(Equal Authorship)
Received 25 October 2002
Revised version accepted 1 June 2003
! 2003 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Fish. Oceanogr.
these issues of ecosystem processes and human inter-
actions, and their appropriate scales.
Key words: fisheries, inter-discipline, management,
natural science, scales, social science, space, time
INTRODUCTION
Changes in marine ecosystems are seen, in marine
science, to be driven by three general classes of pro-
cesses: natural environmental forcing such as climate;
human-induced forcings such as fishing, habitat deg-
radation and contaminants; and internal processes
such as density-dependent or predator–prey mecha-
nisms. These internal processes are the usual subject of
marine ecology and, in systems that are in ‘steady-
state’ over some time period, are generally assumed not
to lead to large or long-lasting variations. Climate
change and direct human-induced forcings such as
fishing have received the most attention in the recent
literature on drivers of changes in marine ecosystems
(see, e.g. McKinnell et al., 2001, on climate variability
in the North Pacific Ocean, and Pauly et al., 1998,
Hollingworth, 2000, on the ecosystem effects of fish-
ing), probably because it appears as though they may
lead to large, and perhaps long-lasting, changes in the
future.
What is missing, however, are the feedbacks
involved when changes in marine ecosystems have
major impacts on, and consequences for, coastal
communities and the broader human societies of
which they are a part. Consider, for example, the
impact of the collapse of the northern cod on the
outport communities of Newfoundland and Labrador
(Ommer, 2002), the social transitions resulting
from shifts in the composition of marine resources in
historical Greenland (Hamilton et al., 2000), or the
implications for the fishery and the local society of
effective dissemination of climate information in Peru
during the recent El Niño (Broad et al., 2002).
The interaction between humans and the oceans is
an important issue that GLOBEC (the Global Ocean
Ecosystem Dynamics program) seeks to identify,
comprehend, and build into its analyses and recom-
mendations. This is a major challenge and accepting it
means coming to grips with several difficulties. Among
the most fundamental of these challenges is finding
513
514 R.I. Perry and R.E. Ommer
compatible methodologies, which in turn means
finding how to cope with different (and perhaps
incompatible) analytical scales. The spatial and tem-
poral scales chosen for studies of marine ecosystems
can constrain recognition of what it is that drives their
responses to global changes. For example, studies of
basin scale atmospheric indices (such as the Pacific
Decadal Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscilla-
tion) take large-scale responses as a starting assump-
tion. Indeed, we suspect that the natural marine
sciences accept implicitly as a broad generalization
that large-scale impacts result from natural (climatic)
forcings while small-scale impacts are because of hu-
man forcings. If so, this is naı̈ve, as large- as well as
small-scale impacts are also important in human sys-
tems: consider, for example, the difference between
managing a fleet made up of large capital intensive
vessels, and one comprising small local fishing fleets; or
the different scales involved in local, regional,
national and transnational corporations and the
varying impacts of these with respect to political
power. Studies of marine ecosystem changes in a small
bay have often assumed small-scale forcings (such as
intense local fishing pressure) because large-scale
forcings (such as climate change) are more or less
unobservable at that scale: yet, the latter may be
vitally important even if not visible in such a small
scale of study. In this paper, we define what we mean
by scale in the natural and social sciences, discuss why
it is a critical issue, and offer an approach that iden-
tifies explicitly the scales at which we are currently
ineffective and on which we must now focus our efforts
if we are to do a better job of managing the ocean
ecosystems of this planet.
DEFINITIONS OF SCALE
A typical dictionary definition of scale is ‘relative size
or magnitude’. It is usually understood to be the
characteristic dimensions in space and/or time of an
observation or process (Lovell et al., 2002). While
space and time are the usual domains of scale in the
marine sciences, we must add the concept of organ-
izational or social scale when thinking about human
interactions with the oceans. This concept includes
the idea of ‘institutional scale’ proposed by Lovell
et al. (2002) but goes beyond it to capture all levels of
human interaction with marine resources, not merely
those associated with formal jurisdictions and man-
agement arenas. The process of changing measure-
ments across scales, or of applying relationships
developed at one set of scales to another, is termed
‘scaling’. Scaling can go ‘up’ or ‘down’, to link
! 2003 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Fish. Oceanogr., 12:4/5, 513–522.
processes at different (larger or smaller) dimensions of
space, time and society. It is a conscious effort on the
part of the observer, who must also recognize that
processes can cascade or cross scales and produce
effects in which events at one scale have consequences
for processes at smaller or larger scales.
Gibson et al. (2000) suggest the most important
issues related to scale for any science are (1) how choice
of scale affects the identification of patterns; (2) how
diverse levels on a scale affect the exploration of natural
and social phenomena; (3) how theoretical proposi-
tions derived about phenomena at one level on a scale
may be generalized to another level (smaller or larger,
higher or lower); and (4) how processes can be opti-
mized at particular levels of a scale: optimization of
carrying capacity of an ecosystem in the natural sci-
ences, for example, or debates around optimal size and
spacing of community fishing gear in the social sciences.
CONCEPTS OF SCALE IN ANALYSES OF
MARINE ECOSYSTEMS
Measurement and, by extension, scale are at the heart
of the biophysical sciences. Measurements of physical
quantities are defined in units of mass, length and
time. In physical oceanography, length ranges from
the scale at which viscous drag forces begin to smooth
out turbulent fluctuations (the viscous or Kolmogoroff
length scale) to the sizes of ocean basins. Character-
istic spatial scales for ocean basins are 10 000 km
wide, with average depths of 3800 m and upper mixed
layer depths of 100 m (Mann and Lazier, 1991, p. 3).
Living marine organisms range from viruses and bac-
teria, with lengths of microns or less, to large whales
with lengths in the tens of meters. Time scales in the
biophysical sciences are generally related to spatial
scales: the circulation about ocean basins, for example,
occurs at the longest time scales, turbulent fluctuations
at the shortest; the life span of whales is many times
greater than that of bacteria. Generally, the smaller
the spatial scale, the shorter the temporal scale in
which the phenomenon is in operation. In addition to
the characteristic length scales determined by the
body dimensions of organisms, biological entities have
length and time scales associated with their daily
movements and seasonal or life cycle migrations. This
is somewhat analogous to human behaviour and in
contrast to physical systems, as biological organisms
are discrete (more like points), whereas physical
quantities tend to be continuous (at least when com-
pared with organisms).
Space–time scale diagrams are useful tools to con-
ceptualize and explore these relationships (Fig. 1a,b).
 Scale issues in ecosystems and human interactions 515

Figure 1. Space/time-scale diagram of characteristic pro- stratification and fronts) that may influence various
cesses from the natural sciences: (a) physical; (b) biological biological behaviours (such as feeding, schooling and
and from the social sciences; (c) fishing; (d) fishing com- vertical migration) (Perry et al., 2000). These kinds of
munities. Modified after Perry et al. (2000). cross-scale and cross-disciplinary comparisons present
fruitful analytical challenges to marine science as it
(a)
Turbulence seeks both to understand specific behaviours and to
10000 Tide Inter-- identify the processes that underlie them. Scale-
Water mass decadal dependent relationships are also central in physiolo-
1000 exchanges oscillations gical processes (e.g. Peters, 1983), and in the concepts
100 underlying island biogeography (MacArthur and
Currents Wilson, 1967) and metapopulation dynamics (Smed-
10 Fronts bol et al., 2002). Indeed, in the past few decades, scale
1 Stratification has become a central organizing concept for marine
ecology and Schneider (2001) goes so far as to argue
Hr Day Wk Mo Season Yr Decade Century
that scale is not only central, but may become a uni-
(b) fying concept of ecology.
10000
Feeding
Spatial scale (km)

1000 Stock CONCEPTS OF SCALE IN ANALYSES OF

Vertical Migration abundance HUMAN SOCIETIES
100 migration
Spawning Social science and humanities environmental research
10 is now increasingly moving towards an understanding
Bottom fidelity
of human behaviour, and its consequences, as integral
1 Schooling to natural ecosystems. In this paper, we recognize that
humans can consciously both cause change, and have
(c)
an effect on existing changes, and that this can be an
10000
iterative process involving complex feedback loops.
Price fluctuations
1000 and economic What people do is therefore an integral part of
cycles understanding marine ecosystems and the causes and
100 Human consequences of change. Those branches of social
working
10 Fishing trip science and humanities research that deal with human
lifespan
uses of natural systems operate at many different social
1 Fishing tow scales, ranging from individuals, to families, neigh-
bourhoods, communities, cities, regions, provinces,
(d) nations and supra-national organizations (Gibson
Political
Business et al., 2000). Examples include individual interviews
10000 Investment with fishers to national surveys, or international policy
1000 analyses, in the present or over sometimes consider-
Employment able periods of time. Like the physical and biological
100
sciences, each level of such a hierarchy has an implicit
Management Human
10 regulation or explicit temporal and spatial dimension, individuals
being the smallest and supra-national organizations
1
the largest. Scale, however, is not always explicitly
Hr Day Wk Mo Season Yr Decade Century measured in the social sciences, although it is funda-
Temporal scale mental to much analysis. The emphasis frequently is
on qualitative, rather than quantitative aspects, as in
Such diagrams were initially developed by Stommel (for example) the conception of ‘community’ as being
(1963) to describe physical oceanographic processes, a ‘small’ (not numerically defined) group who are tied
but have since been extended by Steele (1978) and together by bonds of kinship, or interest, or some other
others to include characteristic space and time scales feature.
for a variety of physical and biological oceanographic Temporal scales in the social sciences tend to be
phenomena. They can be used, for example, to iden- similar to those of the natural sciences (minute, hour,
tify the physical processes (such as turbulence, tides, day, week, etc.) although the perception of time is
! 2003 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Fish. Oceanogr., 12:4/5, 513–522.
516 R.I. Perry and R.E. Ommer
much more fluid for humans than strict measurement
would suggest. Nothing takes longer than waiting for
the watched pot to boil! Technological change also
alters the temporal component in human activity and
the perception of the spatial as well. For example, as
the time required to travel between cities is less now
than 50 years ago, and vastly less than prior to the
Industrial Revolution, the world seems to be getting
smaller. This is an example of shifting temporal
baselines (Pauly, 1995), to which we will return later.
In the social sciences, the relationship between tem-
poral and spatial scale depends on the nature of the
study. For example, community histories can stretch
over a period of centuries (small geographical scale,
long temporal one), while voter preferences at the
national level can at least appear to change overnight.
CENTRAL ISSUES
A central issue is to figure out how to combine social
and natural system scale analyses in such a way as to
enhance understanding of the impact of natural sys-
tems on people and the impact of people on natural
systems. This should aid us when we seek to develop
policy guidelines for marine ecosystem management
that will protect both the ecosystems involved from
excessive human depredations, and human commu-
nities that depend on these ecosystems from economic,
social and cultural collapse. From a purely scientific
point of view, this approach should also help us dis-
entangle some of the complex inter-relationships
involved, and permit us to identify and then clarify
some of the misunderstandings that can lurk behind
the analyses of different disciplines with respect to, for
example, fisheries.
Fisheries management science has tended, because
of the requirements of rigorous modelling and the
pragmatic needs of marine management, to see human
participation in fisheries as purely economic, and then
to define that economic function, and the potential
ways it interacts with the biophysical environment, in
terms of the operations of fishing ‘firms’ or ‘fleets’ (e.g.
where and when to fish; Fig. 1c). This implies, how-
ever, that the only human organizational structures
that are relevant to natural system interactions are
industrial in nature. Such a premise privileges indus-
trial fleets, which are these days usually large-scale,
capital intensive and geographically footloose, being
able to roam international waters more or less at will. It
is a perspective that confines analysis of human
involvement to large-scale activities and organizations.
It is, moreover, an analytical focus that rapidly presents
us with management problems if it is accepted as real.
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This is because calculations based on this view leave
out the multitude of smaller-scale local fisheries that
are geographically and historically tied to a particular
location, usually less capital-intensive, but culturally
and socially vital to the societies in question.
The omission is serious, even from a point of view
restricted to fisheries management. Fishing communi-
ties, for example, have (to greater or lesser degrees
depending on history and circumstance) significant
local knowledge and often environmental sensitivity
at the level of the local ecosystem in which they work,
and which has been developed as a consequence of (at
the very least) people’s need to know and preserve
over an extended period of time the fishing grounds on
which they and their communities depend (Johannes,
1981). From a community perspective, management
policies may not be appropriate for the scale at which
small boat fishers operate. As a result, community
understanding of the ecosystem is lost to management
while, at the same time, management decisions can
appear nonsensical to the community. This mismatch
of scales of comprehension and organization creates
conflict between fishers and managers, generating
feelings of marginalization and resentment at the
community level (and a consequent unwillingness to
agree to management conservation initiatives), while
managers become impatient and frustrated with what
they see as community intransigence. Small commu-
nities also perceive themselves as having less political
‘clout’ than do the large-scale industrial firms, as a
result of the relatively local returns to capital of
community-level fisheries and their smaller employ-
ment effects. Such industrial and institutional scale
mismatch makes small fishing communities policy
‘takers’, not policy ‘makers’. It reinforces their sense of
not being heard and of their informal expert voice, on
such matters as the state of a local stock, unappreci-
ated.
Failing to comprehend and deal with scale issues
like these creates a rich breeding ground for commu-
nity rebellion against regulations, promoting various
kinds of illicit practices that thwart the legitimate
aims of fisheries management. The situation is further
complicated by the often conflicting aims of local,
provincial/regional and national governmental poli-
cies, which seek local employment, or local rights, or
regional balancing of ‘benefits’ and the like. All these
political scale issues may also combine to make
rational fishing management extremely difficult.
Finally, we cannot ignore the rich confusion of juris-
dictions over fresh and salt water fisheries, to say
nothing of international jurisdictions and straddling
stocks, taking scale to its global dimensions.

The long-term result of this complex of mismatch-
ing scales of analysis, comprehension and practice is,
all too often, human community collapse with the loss
of important cultural and social networks and know-
ledge, and collapse of marine biological communities
with the replacement and potential loss of important
ecosystem components. Finding a way, therefore, to
comprehend in an integrated manner the various for-
ces that impact on fishers, and then to further com-
prehend the impact that fishers in their turn have on
the oceans, and finally to tie all of this into one unified
analytical model, is a huge challenge.
TOWARDS AN INTEGRATING FRAMEWORK
Biological conservation must be the foundation of
fisheries scientists and fishing communities. Recently,
effort in fisheries science is moving from single species
analyses to ecosystem-based analysis as an improved
way of achieving this goal. If we recognize ecosystems as
a third ‘scale dimension’ of biophysical systems (i.e.
organizational units from individuals to populations,
communities, ecosystems and seascapes), then there is a
direct analogy with the organizational scales of the
human fishing community system. This is a perception
shift that has the potential to move social and natural
science analysis closer together, as there is a comple-
mentarity in the scale of analysis between studying
communities of fish and fishing communities. The
potential benefit from this shift in focus in the natural
sciences is that it will move natural scientists from
thinking of ‘the firm’ (with its emphasis on single spe-
cies) to the community (with its broader view of its
resource base) as the unit of analysis. At the same time,
social scientists should be able to work more easily with
their natural science counterparts as the complexity of
understanding ecosystems as natural phenomena and
ecosystems as resource bases develops. That is, we
should now be able to study jointly the best ways in
which communities of fishers will be able to exploit
communities of fish without destroying either commu-
nity. This would be a fundamental scale-related ana-
lytical shift and it is potentially a very promising one.
Thinking in terms of communities of fish and
communities of fishers will help to link the human and
natural science issues into a shared analytical frame-
work that is concerned with the management of
marine ecosystems. Moving up to the ecosystem scale
of marine biological analysis overcomes many of the
different perceptions and understandings of manage-
ment issues that currently exist among oceanogra-
phers, biologists, fisheries managers, economists, the
fishing industry, business and communities.
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Scale issues in ecosystems and human interactions 517
What happens to the apparent poor ‘fit’ of biolo-
gical and socio-humanist research methodologies if we
shift the shared scale of analysis to the ecosystem/
community level? Including the key socio-economic
components of fishing communities into the same
space–time scale diagram for biophysical processes
(Fig. 1d) allows us to begin to identify the overlaps
between biophysical processes and human social
responses, and the impact of biophysical and socio-
economic processes on one another. For example, a
change in migration patterns of fish at scales of months
to seasons and 100–1000 km can have an impact on
the success of fishing, management policies and
investment decisions. We can go further and compare
the spatial and social scales directly, with respect to
the daily movements of fish and the scale of various
fisheries (Fig. 2). This figure illustrates the corres-
ponding spatial scales of assemblages of species of low
mobility and local human communities and sets that
against the large spatial scales of highly mobile and
migratory fish (often single species) and large indus-
trial fleets. It also locates organizational time and space
scales, including those of business and political power.
The diagram shows that formal (i.e. not community-
level) fisheries management actually operates at an
intermediate scale, and therefore cannot deal effect-
ively with either global changes or local needs.
Figure 2 also indicates the potential vulnerability of
small- and large-scale fisheries to global changes.
However, one must also consider the scaling-up issue,
that is, some apparently highly mobile species may in
fact be composed of several spatially distinct sub-
populations of more limited mobility, and that fisher-
men displaced from smaller-scale communities can
participate in highly mobile fisheries.
There may also be an implicit distinction between
the scale dimensions (temporal, spatial, organiza-
tional) on which natural and social scientists tend to
focus. The concepts indicated in Fig. 2 imply a focus
on the spatial and organizational scales. This may be
appropriate for the social aspects, for which the key
questions are often where to fish with the assumption
(hope?) that fishing next year will be like this year or
better. Much of business planning in industrial fish-
eries is also based on stability among years. In natural
systems, however, the biologically determining factors
are often temporal, for example, annual recruitment,
decadal regime shifts. The perception by coastal
communities of variability in natural systems may not
be constant across scales: variability in fish populations
on short (seasonal, sometimes annual) time scales may
be too short to be of real consequence, and can often
be easily accommodated. Similarly, variability in
518 R.I. Perry and R.E. Ommer
Organizational
Scale
Large
Highly mobile
species
es
ang
Fishery ch
bal
management lo
tog
y
lit
abi
Species er
ln
of Vu igh
limited H (note that these rectangles are overlap-
mobility
Small
Small
Spatial Scale
marine ecosystems at long time scales, for example,
decades, is too long to be of immediate concern to
coastal communities, and so it may get ignored. This
implies that coastal communities may be most aware
of marine ecosystem changes that occur at interme-
diate time scales, for example, from 2–3 years to 1–2
decades. These are also scales that are often outside
the usual time horizon of fisheries management.
Temporal variability on such scales in the marine
environment is most likely to affect species with
intermediate (5–15 years) life spans or population
doubling times. Such species include salmon; gadids
such as Pacific and Atlantic cod and Pacific hake; and
pelagic fishes such as tunas, herring and sardines (e.g.
Musick et al., 2000). These are often key commercial
species and ones that have experienced significant
management problems. Processes on such intermedi-
ate time scales, and how they interact with spatial
scales (e.g. Fig. 1), may provide the most fruitful
problems on which to focus initial collaboration
among natural and social scientists. However, against
this must be set the historical knowledge of long-
established coastal communities, which does recognize
differences between the present and ‘the old days’. The
temporal span of such knowledge can reach back over
at least three generations (75 years) in settler com-
munities in Canada, and much longer in First Nations’
communities. Such knowledge often incorporates
explanations for environmental changes that may
differ from scientific perspectives. Reconciling com-
munity and scientific explanations of long-term
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Number of
people
Small
w
Lo
Figure 2. Diagram illustrating the con-
ceptual relationships of species and fish-
eries of low mobility and highly mobile
species and fisheries, in relation to spatial
and organizational scales and the number
of people involved in these activities
ping, such that highly mobile species
Large occupy the entire space, whereas species
of limited mobility occupy only the
Large lower left quadrant). The hypothesized
gradient of vulnerability to global chan-
ges is also indicated.
change represents a significant challenge for interdis-
ciplinary research.
EXAMPLES
An example is provided by the collapse in the early
1990s of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in New-
foundland (in the NAFO Area 2J3KL). A resident
codfishery has existed in Newfoundland since the late
1700s. It was commercial in some aspects, but the
underlying household economy of fishers was sub-
sistent and usually multiple-species, while the com-
mercial component dealt almost exclusively with cod.
When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, the
commercial fishery was modernized, in that it started
to become more technologically sophisticated at the
scale of the firm. At the same time the small boat
‘inshore’ commercial fishery was discouraged. In the
1950s and 1960s, international offshore fishing on the
Grand Banks reached huge proportions, peaking in
1968 with an historic reported maximum of 810 000
metric tonnes landed. By 1977–85, large Canadian
capital-intensive and high-technology deep-sea fleets
were in operation, and the small commercial boat
fishery was attempting to expand offshore to offset
declining inshore catches. In 1992, the groundfish
stocks collapsed, and a fishing moratorium was put in
place. Reasons given for the collapse of these stocks
varied, ranging from colder water temperatures to
overfishing. There was also an issue of stock size and
stability, the results of which varied depending on the

length of time over which data were analysed
(Hutchings and Myers, 1995). Human communities
survived economically by shifting commercial fishing
effort to other species, which then also came under
serious pressure. The large fishing firms, by contrast,
not only survived but did well, moving their effort
into other international waters and returning large
profits.
Whatever the truth of the reasons for the stock
collapse – and it is probably a combination of over-
fishing and stocks made vulnerable as a result of
environmental factors (Rose et al., 2000) – the fallout
for local human communities and the small boat
fishery was serious economic, social and cultural dis-
tress with which the province is still wrestling. For
fisheries, the impact was also serious, as local fishers
Table 1. Comparison of time, space and organizational scales in the natural and social sciences in relation to the Northern cod
(Gadus morhua) off Newfoundland, Canada.
Scale dimension Natural sciences
Time Life span 20–26 years
Age at maturity 5–6 years
Population doubling time 5–10 years
Seasonal inshore–offshore migrations
for some stocks
Stock collapse in 1992 (10 years)
Decadal-scale variability of the
North Atlantic Oscillation
(positive NAO results in cold conditions
off Newfoundland, as in the 1990s)
Space Max length of fish 200 cm
School size, hundreds of metres
Inshore cod stocks (few tens of kilometres)
Offshore cod stocks migrate from banks
to bays (a few hundreds of kilometres)
Several cod stocks exist within the trip range of
industrial trawlers (hundreds of kilometres)
Organizational Cod stock collapse in 1992 (10 years) and resulting
ecosystem changes to favour lower trophic level
species (e.g. crabs, shrimp)
Increased fishing pressure on distant stocks and
previously lightly fished species
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Scale issues in ecosystems and human interactions 519
shifted their commercial effort to other stocks, and
extended the distance over which they fished (i.e.
extended their commercial species and geographical
scale of operations). The impact of this collapse to the
marine ecosystem has also been large, with a signifi-
cant reorganization to favour the production of
invertebrates such as shrimp and crab instead of
groundfish (Bundy, 2001). These species are, at the
time of writing, the mainstay of the Newfoundland
commercial fishery. The principle features of New-
foundland cod in relation to the three scale dimen-
sions are shown in Table 1. They illustrate the
mismatch in the scales of the cod stocks compared
with the fishery system exploiting these stocks.
A similar example with respect to scale issues, but
somewhat different in regards to the driving factors, is
Social sciences
Long fishing experience (a few hundred years)
Modernization of commercial fishing
since 1949 (50 years)
Typical duration of fishing trips (inshore fishery,
days; freezer trawlers, weeks–months)
Inshore fishing at scales of bays (one to tens
of kilometres)
Offshore fishing at scales of banks (hundreds
of kilometres)
Large firms move vessels and effort
internationally (>1000 km)
Inshore fisheries: crews of family and household
members; ‘subsistence’ fishing
Offshore fisheries: crews from local communities
plus international
Increase in dragger fleet size and capacity drove
development of coastal processing plants
Factory freezer-trawlers owned by large
international firms, no shore-based processing
facilities needed
Community collapse and social disruption
since 1992 but enhancement of large firms
520 R.I. Perry and R.E. Ommer

provided by Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax) off the
west coast of Canada. This species comprised the lar-
gest fishery in British Columbia from the mid-1920s to
the 1940s, but then collapsed in 1947 (McFarlane and
Beamish, 2001). It was accepted as a classic case of
overfishing. This collapse extended to California,
where it drove the collapse of ‘Cannery Row’. Those
employed in the fishery and its processing sectors were
forced to find employment elsewhere (some of which
was re-directed to a developing anchovy industry, a
species which was then increasing), and some of the
capital equipment went to fuel the newly developing
anchovy fishery off Peru (Radovich, 1981).
In the 1990s, however, Pacific sardines returned to
Canadian waters to such an extent that spawning
occurred in 1997 and 1998 (McFarlane et al., 2002).
McFarlane and Beamish (2001) suggest that the return
of sardines to northeast Pacific coastal waters was
driven by environmental and ecosystem changes; such
changes have been observed for several northeast
Pacific marine systems (Francis and Hare, 1994). The
centre of the sardine distribution is in California, and
under ‘normal’ conditions about 10% of the population
is estimated to migrate into Canadian waters during the
summer to feed. The availability of this species to local
Canadian fishers therefore depends on the extent of the
summer northward migration (which appears to be
under environmental, possibly temperature, control)
and the longer term and larger spatial scale processes
relating to climate forcing of ecosystems. The assess-
ment of both the ability of this ecosystem to produce
sardines, and of the importance of sardines to the local
fisheries and processing sectors, depends on when one
starts the analyses – a shifting temporal baseline
problem (Table 2). Such changes may also have global
consequences (e.g. the impact of the shift of effort and

Table 2. Comparison of time, space and organizational scales in the natural and social sciences in relation to the Pacific sardine
(Sardinops sagax) off the Pacific coast of North America.

Scale dimension Natural sciences Social sciences

Time Life span 13–25 years Largest fishery in British Columbia

from 1920s to 1940s
Age at maturity 2 years Population collapsed 1947 (50 years)
Population doubling time <5 years Sardines began recovery in California
in early 1990s; returned to British
Columbia in late 1990s
Seasonal north–south migrations
Long-time population variability with periods
!60 years
ENSO (5–7 years) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation
(decades) influences on environmental conditions
Space Maximum length 40 cm Collapse of North America fishery drove
a migration of capital to South America
School sizes, hundreds of metres Development of both shore-based and ship-based
processing facilities in California during 1920s
Migrations of hundreds of kilometres Three international jurisdictions involved in
alongshore; tens of kilometres cross-shelf management: Mexico, United States, Canada
Three to four stocks (Gulf of California, Baja
California, southern California, northern
California to British Columbia); smaller
sub-populations can occur at scales of coastal
inlets (tens of kilometres)
Collapse of population in late 1940s was
coastwide; only productive stocks remaining
were off Baja California and in Gulf of California
Organizational Production is related to cycles of warm and cold Product initially sold both for fish meal and
environmental conditions (ecosystem changes) human consumption
Anchovy replaced sardine as the dominant small Growth of fishery paralleled the growth of
pelagic finfish in southern waters during agriculture in California
sardine collapse
Industry shifted effort to anchovy as Pacific
sardine declined

! 2003 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Fish. Oceanogr., 12:4/5, 513–522.


capital to Peru and the consequences for that nation’s
fisheries) – nothing is ever straightforward or self-
contained in fisheries management!
CONCLUSIONS
The lessons to be learned are that the role of scale is
absolutely crucial: spatial and temporal scales, eco-
system (organizational) scale, management scale,
technological scale, the size of fish, the length of time
over which patterns of biomass shift are measured, or
over which management policies are applied, and the
poorly understood nature of the scale of impacts in one
ecosystem on another given human capacity to inter-
fere in natural systems through technological and
economic means. There are four specific scale lessons
to be drawn from these examples, which all have wider
implications:
1. We need to find a way to manage fisheries that
reaches from the global to the local. This is a social
science problem.
2. We need to make sure that we use the appropriate
scale of natural science analysis when we are building
it into management policy. We can solve this jointly
with social science by considering the complementary
nature of the organizational dimension (e.g. individual
fish to seascapes; individual people to supra-national
organizations) and focussing analyses more on the
organizational scales of communities of fish and fishers.
This is a joint solution to a long-standing natural
science – social science problem.
3. We need to be aware of shifting temporal baselines
in both social and natural science analysis. This means
thinking about appropriate temporal cut-offs when
using natural and/or social science data in policy built
on such analyses.
4. We need to be very cautious about predictive
models when dealing with their application to human
societies, because there are usually more variables
involved than can be included in the models. This
is the principal problem with most bio-economic
modelling.
In terms of methodologies, we can say the
following:
1. We can probably find good scale matches across
large-scale social and natural science models and sur-
veys. These tell about pattern. But they usually do not
tell (or do not tell enough) about underlying human
motivation, and thus do not tell us what is likely to
happen if human conditions alter or become stressful.
2. The main difficulties for matching social with nat-
ural science models lie in (i) cross-scale social science
studies, which tell about pathways; and (ii) small-scale
! 2003 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Fish. Oceanogr., 12:4/5, 513–522.
Scale issues in ecosystems and human interactions 521
qualitative social science studies, which help us to
understand those crucial human motivations without
which we have little chance of making reliable pre-
dictions about human responses. So far, specific case
studies are proving the most successful ways of begin-
ning to resolve this issue, in particular with problems
that appear to originate with variability at intermediate
temporal scales. The hope is that, as these accumulate,
we will be able to identify processes from the bottom up
rather than attempting to impose them from the top
down. However, many methodological issues remain
unresolved in integrating studies conducted at local
scales to larger scales (Wilbanks and Kates, 1999).
These scale and methodology issues are crucial
because, as Lee (1993) suggests, when human
responsibility does not match the spatial and temporal
scales of the natural processes involved, then unsus-
tainable use of resources is likely. We need effective
stewardship of our oceans at the local, as well as the
institutional, scale because that is where it is a matter
of survival for both natural and human communities.
We also need to institute management policies that
are sensitive to local needs if we are to achieve the
‘buy-in’ that is a feature of all successful management
strategies. This is likely to resolve itself if the focus is
more on ecosystem and community forms of analysis,
which are intrinsically bottom-up in approach. This
will also have the great strength of bringing natural
and social scientists comfortably together to identify
ecosystem processes and human interactions, and their
appropriate scales.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank Nigel Haggan and two anonymous review-
ers for their comments and suggestions regarding this
paper. This is a contribution of the IGBP/SCOR/IOC
GLOBEC Program Focus 4 on the social impacts from
changes in marine ecosystems.
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