Humans look to nature for sustenance and nourishment — food, water, energy, transportation, culture, tradition, adventure and so on. With the population of the United States now exceeding 340 million, humans are demanding more of the natural world than ever before. To understand the consequences, researchers set an ambitious goal: a wellness check on nature.

Nature is a sweeping category that includes everything from massive mountains to tiny urban gardens. Its health can’t be summarized in just a few words. In fact, it took researchers 868 pages, split into 13 chapters, to report the condition of lands, waters, wildlife, and biodiversity and describe links to human health and safety, culture, economy, and national security.

The new report, , is available for public comment and scientific review until May 30.

“The Nature Record tells an honest story,”  said , director of The Nature Record and interim executive director of the UW’s EarthLab. “It does not shy away from the scale of change we are seeing in nature — but it also shows that our choices matter, and that there are real, tangible ways to restore and sustain the systems we depend on.”

The preliminary findings are a mixed bag. On one hand, the report details a long history of resource extraction and habitat loss that will be difficult to reverse. At the same time, it shows how restoration and Indigenous stewardship approaches can help turn things around.

For example, the report states that approximately 50% of U.S. land is used for agriculture. This means farmers and ranchers must be involved in efforts to protect ecosystems and preserve biodiversity, Levin said.

The U.S. has millions of miles of rivers, which are fragmented by tens of thousands of large dams and as many as 2 million small dams and culverts.

Damming rivers disrupts fish migration and degrades ecosystem health. Ecological concerns have spurred hundreds of dam removals in the past decade, after which rivers quickly rebounded. In some places, fish have returned to spawning grounds that were inaccessible for generations.

“The assessment documents many examples where ecosystems and communities are recovering together,” Levin said. “These success stories show that change is possible when science, policy and communities align.”

The project began in 2022 following an executive order calling for an assessment of nature. Levin, selected to lead the effort, assembled a national team of experts to work on what was then called the National Nature Assessment.

Then, in January 2025, just weeks before the team was due to deliver a first draft, the effort came to a screeching halt when the federal government canceled the effort.

Undeterred, the team, including more than 170 scientists and experts, decided to continue working independently. They published a draft of The Nature Record in March.

“We built this to be useful,” Levin said. “And the only way it becomes truly useful is if people engage with it — question it, add to it, and help shape what comes next.”

He encourages people of all backgrounds to engage with the report and share feedback on the clarity, relevance and thoroughness, including representation of diverse perspectives.

In addition to documenting how humans are changing nature, the record provides important insights into how nature influences quality of life. Access to nature varies widely across the U.S. — the benefits of nature are not equally shared, nor is the burden of going without. Social and historical factors often determine whether communities enjoy greenspaces and clean drinking water, among other essentials.

“This assessment reflects not just the state of nature, but the relationships people have with it,” said deputy director , principal research scientist at the UW’s EarthLab. “We want people to see themselves in this work — whether through their communities, their values, or the places they care about — and to help shape how it evolves.”

For more information, contact Levin at pslevin@uw.edu.

To understand how Puget Sound has changed, we first must understand how it used to be. Unlike most major estuaries in the U.S. — and despite the abundance of world-class oceanographic institutions in the area — long-term monitoring of Puget Sound fish populations did not exist until 1990. Filling in this missing information is essential to establishing a baseline that would provide context for the current status of the marine ecosystem, and could guide policymakers in setting more realistic ecosystem-based management recovery targets.

Researchers from the 91̽�� School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, 91̽��Puget Sound Institute, NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife have discovered an unconventional way to help fill in these gaps in data: using old vessel logbooks.

The crews of the 91̽��’s then School of Fisheries’ research vessels R/V Oncorhynchus (1947 to 1955) and R/V Commando (1955 to 1980), both of which were skippered by , took notes on all of the fish tows conducted under their watch. With funding from Washington Sea Grant, the researchers combed through more than 1,000 of these logbook entries to analyze the information regarding the groundfish species caught in each tow, including when and where the fish were caught. Then, the researchers analyzed historical logbook data from 1948 to 1977 and contemporary monitoring data to reveal longer-term trends in the local groundfish populations. The research was published in last month.

Although there were changes throughout the periods analyzed, the researchers did not find that groundfish populations today in Puget Sound look fundamentally different from the historical populations.

“We see the same types of fluctuations in the historical data as in the contemporary data,” said , professor at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and the study’s lead author. “This suggests that boom and bust populations are natural, and speaks to the importance of having a long time view to establishing a baseline.”

However, some trends did stand out, Essington explained. For example, Pacific cod used to be very common but is rare today, and the abundance of Pacific spiny dogfish has decreased.

The fact that the researchers were able to fill in any of the historical gaps was really a matter of luck: the right people had maintained the research vessels at the right time.

“They were remarkable, the records,” Essington said. “They not only noted the species and size, but also detailed descriptions of the locations. It was amazing what we could reconstruct.”

was a graduate student at the School of Fisheries from 1957 to 1960, during which he ventured out on the Commando along with Oswold and his advisor, Allan DeLacy, to collect data for his research on Puget Sound rockfish. He remembers once being chastised for filling out the logbook incorrectly.

“I had misspelled one of the scientific names — that was the only time I remember that DeLacy got mad at me,” Hitz said. “He said that the logbooks had to be correct.”

This level of precision made Essington’s work possible decades later. For Hitz, the logbooks also became a rich repository of memories.

“When I was going through the logs of the Commando, I found an entry that I had written on May 3, 1960,” he wrote in a 2015 . “It was for trip #6017 and it brought back a wave of memories, since that was my first encounter with the open waters of the Pacific Ocean. At the time I was being considered for a job with the Exploratory group which worked the outside waters from Mexico to the Bering Sea. The first thing that came to my mind was, would I become seasick once I was outside? If so, would three years of graduate school be wasted? There was no class about seasickness given at the [School of Fisheries], but there was talk.”

Although the researchers analyzed logbooks up until 1977, Essington explained that they became considerably less useful after 1973. As Hitz recalls, this was around the time the school began to place more emphasis on chartering the Commando for outside research, rather than using it for students’ education and research.

“I assume the logbooks became less important when the boat was being chartered,” Hitz said.

Essington described the project methods as “half detective work and half computer work.” The detective work involved the researchers carefully perusing the old logbooks while wearing N-95 masks to protect themselves from the mildew and dust (prior to COVID-19). The computer work involved analyzing how the catch rates of 15 groundfish species differed between the historical and contemporary datasets, to understand how the general groundfish populations differed between the two periods.

Given that the details within the logbooks petered out, and then stopped altogether once the Commando was retired, the researchers were forced to leave out an important period in their analysis.

“There was a 17-year gap between the captain’s books and current monitoring, and no amount of scrappiness could fill this in,” Essington said.

The years between the two datasets — the bulk of the 1970s and 80s — also happened to coincide with extensive environmental change in Puget Sound, including the implementation of regulations to address pollution and protect endangered species. A few changes particularly impacted groundfish: For example, the 1974 Boldt decision resulted in increased non-tribal recreational groundfish fishing. Subsequently, the introduction of bag limits, marine protected areas and species-take prohibitions in the late 1980s and early 1990s reduced the intensity of recreational groundfish fishing.

in June 2020, groundfish were added as a food web indicator species for the Puget Sound Partnership’s , which has guided policy since 2010. This research could help shed light on what to look for as healthy for this vital sign, the authors said.

“It might be better to think about baselines in the dynamic sense,” Essington said. “To focus on acceptable ranges of fluctuation, rather than a precise number.”

Other co-authors are and of the Northwest Fisheries Sciences Center; of Puget Sound Institute at 91̽��Tacoma; , an independent consultant who previously worked at the 91̽��School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences; and of Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

This study was funded by Washington Sea Grant, The Seadoc Society and the Lowell Wakefield Endowment.

For more information, contact Essington at essing@uw.edu.

Fisheries managers typically strive to strike a delicate balance between two, often competing, types of needs: the needs for fishermen’s profits and the needs for the planet. But in 1994, entrepreneur John Elkington posited that true sustainability requires consideration of a third “P” — the needs of the people. In making this argument, he coined the term “.”

In a , an interdisciplinary group of researchers used Pacific herring in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, as a case study for modeling the implicit tradeoffs within the triple bottom line that result from various fisheries management decisions. They found that considering spatial dynamics is a key component of this modeling process — for example, considering the geographic areas of the fish populations, the areas that are important to the various communities of people, and the areas that are impacted by management decisions.

Published Sept. 30 in the journal Fish and Fisheries, the study is one of the outcomes of the , a collaboration between the 91̽�� and The Nature Conservancy that aims to use models to provide insights on how to best address complex ocean issues.

Pacific herring provided a relevant and timely prototype for modeling the economic, ecological and socio-cultural tradeoffs within a fishery. Herring is in high commercial demand, is a vital part of the food web, and has been central to the social, cultural and economic life of Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest for millennia. Herring fisheries have also borne out steep management consequences: the collective North American herring fishery collapsed in 1993, and has required careful management to recover.

“There are so many people who rely on fishing as part of their way of life,” said , assistant professor of biological science at Florida State University who led the modeling component of the study. “Everyone wants their piece of the pie. But we need a better way of making decisions regarding fisheries.”

While most herring fisheries remain closed or severely limited, some British Columbia stocks have rebuilt to a level at which managers are considering reopening the fishery. However, several critical factors that would determine the success of reopening these fisheries are still missing, the researchers said, including a social-ecological framework to address issues of equity in decision making by integrating traditional knowledge and ecosystem services into management. This study demonstrates a new and concrete way to fill this void.

These social and cultural considerations are notoriously difficult to quantify in such a way that they can be measured against the economic and ecological ones.

“We started from qualitative ethnographic information, including local and traditional knowledge, to identify indicators linked to various benefits and values of herring,” explained co-author , a social scientist at Washington Sea Grant based at the 91̽��. “We then surveyed different user groups to generate quantitative scores for select indicators to determine outcomes for various fishing sectors, abundances of herring and places of harvest.”

The social benefits of the herring fishery included in the study were the ability for the commercial fishing fleet to practice harvest, the ability for Indigenous Haida to practice harvest, and community and social relationships within the Indigenous Haida community.

The researchers incorporated these social-ecological indicators along with economic and ecological metrics into a model to analyze their relative tradeoffs under different management scenarios. These management scenarios included four target harvest rates of the total herring population, ranging from 10% to 37.5%; three upper-limit harvest thresholds, ranging from 25% to 70%; and two spatial closures, in which a traditional roe, or egg, harvest area is closed to commercial fishing.

“As expected, many management options result in sharp tradeoffs in the triple bottom line,” said co-author , managing director of the Ocean Modeling Forum and lead ecosystem ecologist with the Puget Sound Institute at 91̽��Tacoma. “For example, higher commercial catches reduce ecological and social benefits — this could have been predicted. What’s interesting is where we found more balance among the multiple benefits.”

Spatial closures often resulted in win-win-wins: they allow for commercial harvest at open locations while also protecting cultural benefits and reducing the risk of collapse in protected areas. That said, the location of these closures must be carefully considered, accounting for both ecological productivity and the implications to different user groups. For example, while commercial fishermen are relatively mobile, Indigenous harvesters are often constrained to fishing in traditional areas. This shows the need for fishery management models that allow for evaluation at a spatial scale that is culturally relevant.

No one management strategy within the study’s model optimized the benefits to all of the people, planet and profit factors. However, having a framework to understand the relative tradeoffs to each of these factors is the first step toward responsibly balancing them, the researchers said. The model developed in this case study could be used not only to evaluate management strategies for Pacific herring fisheries as managers consider reopening them, but also for other fisheries that face similar dilemmas across the globe.

“This work has the potential to be game changing,” said co-author , 91̽��professor of practice and lead scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “For years researchers have talked about the triple bottom line but lacked the ability to really assess it. By directly linking quantitative fisheries models for social and cultural outcomes, we now have the ability to truly evaluate the full impacts of alternative management strategies.”

Similar to how children learn, often unconsciously, to mimic the adults around them, a small, silvery ocean fish employs this tactic when teaching the next generation to find a suitable place to reproduce.

Scientists have named the strategy “go with the older fish,” and it describes a key part of the Pacific herring lifecycle that has been recognized for years by indigenous peoples, but hasn’t factored into management of the species.

As juveniles, herring join large schools offshore to mingle, eat and grow until it’s time to reproduce. Then, younger, smaller herring follow the older, more experienced fish back to specific beaches to spawn. It appears none of the fish are aware of this learning process; rather, the memory of where to go is imprinted unconsciously into their brains.

Herring migration isn’t random, and this could also explain why herring have been missing for years from some beaches, even in the few cases where the overall population numbers are adequate. If older fish that spawned at a specific beach are wiped out, there are no fish to lead the next generation to use that particular site.

This realization could entirely change how these fish are managed, and aid in restoring some of the spawning populations now absent from many of the beaches along the west coast of British Columbia and Alaska.

“The herring are very important to our people,” said Harvey Kitka, an elder and former tribal council member with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska. “Spawning was a huge event each spring, and probably for thousands of years herring spawned in the same area in Sitka Sound.”

This shift in thinking happened because a diverse group of people, including tribal leaders such as Kitka, ecologists, biologists, anthropologists, fishery managers and commercial fishers, met to talk about how to save Pacific herring, a fishery that is vital to native communities and the commercial fishing industry. Facilitated by the — a collaborative group led by the 91̽�� — they tackled difficult management questions, and ultimately produced a number of released this winter that will help guide the recovery and management of herring going forward.

“During our conversations, it became very clear that herring and humans are really tightly coupled, and that’s true whether you’re a commercial fisherman, a vessel owner or a traditional harvester,” said Tessa Francis, managing director of the Ocean Modeling Forum and lead ecosystem ecologist with the at 91̽��Tacoma. “This was an opportunity for us to think about different forms of knowledge and alternative models in a situation related to fishery management.”

The Ocean Modeling Forum in June 2015 with a summit in British Columbia, with the goal of hearing from a number of stakeholders, tribes and First Nations about the role herring plays socially and ecologically, and to begin to develop a for how different approaches and knowledge — including traditional ecological knowledge — can be used in fisheries management practices.

The meeting came at a time when the Pacific herring fishery was fraught with disagreements about fishing practices, including along the archipelago of Haida Gwaii off British Columbia’s west coast. There, First Nations leaders have argued that the herring population, which holds deep cultural significance, hasn’t yet recovered to a healthy level capable of sustaining a fishery. This is true particularly at individual spawning beaches that are significant for First Nations communities, where some fish have never returned to their previous numbers.

Meanwhile, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has considered opening the fishery to commercial fishing in recent years. They find the overall population in some areas to be strong, but managers aren’t considering the finer-scale patterns of sub-populations that spawn at individual beaches.

Tribes and First Nations people harvest herring eggs on kelp or tree branches, traditionally at specific beaches using small boats, and make considerable efforts not to disturb the spawning fish. This approach is in stark contrast to commercial fishing vessels that target schools of fish and can move around to where they are any given year. As a result, the current management approaches are tailored to commercial fishing, as long as there are fish to catch.

Against this backdrop, the Ocean Modeling Forum wanted to offer a different approach: One that put local beaches back at the center of the conversation, and joins traditional knowledge with science.

“Our working group was born on the idea that where the fish are is just as important as how many fish there are. Herring used to be the life force of the indigenous villages in the spring,” said , co-director of the initiative who also holds a joint role as a 91̽��professor of practice and lead scientist with the Nature Conservancy of Washington. “For herring management to be successful, it must address problems at the scale that impacts the well-being of the people who depend on the fish.”

After the initial herring summit drew 150 people, a smaller group of about two dozen set to work on addressing the main priorities raised in the summit. The outcome of this working group is a set of released this winter that agencies can use to incorporate local-scale dynamics, traditional knowledge and human dimensions, such as the cultural significance of fishing, into Pacific herring management.

Notably, one of the main results was the “go with the older fish” interpretation of herring biology, explained in a recent , which will likely impact how these fish are managed. This idea has been used in European herring fisheries, but this is the first time it’s been applied in ways that could recover and sustainably manage herring in North America.

“I hope we can get managers to look at this and at least give it a try,” Kitka said. “It’s so important to us. From the time they’re an egg to when they disintegrate, herring are food for something.”

The origins of this paper are representative of the overall goal of the Ocean Modeling Forum: By bringing together experts from many backgrounds, the idea was hatched while Kitka, a long-time fisherman and tribal elder, traded stories one morning with Alec MacCall, a long-time scientist and fisheries researcher. They realized that patterns they had both seen over the years overlapped to illuminate key aspects of herring biology.

“Progress in science can be much less certain than is the popular understanding of how it works. When a new approach or theory seems to answer questions beyond those that were initially posed, it feels like we may be on the right track,” said MacCall of the Farallon Institute for Advanced Ecosystem Research in California. “The path to healthy herring stocks is neither easy nor clear, but we may be getting a better sense of its direction.”

The Ocean Modeling Forum has been asked to participate in a new herring rebuilding strategy process for Haida Gwaii, which just launched among Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the Haida Nation and Parks Canada. At the group’s first meeting this winter, accounting for the differences between where traditional and commercial harvest practices occur and the “go with the older fish” idea were central to their conversation, which is a positive sign that the thinking around herring management already is changing, Francis said.

“It’s hard to underestimate the value of showing respect for traditional knowledge and incorporating it into management practices,” Francis said. “One major impact the Ocean Modeling Forum has is to influence the decision-making process by changing people’s minds and developing tools that can be directly used.”

The Ocean Modeling Forum’s is looking at ways to use scientific tools and modeling approaches to reduce the number of marine mammals accidentally caught during commercial fishing.

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For more information, contact Francis at tessa@uw.edu or 206-427-7124 and Levin at pslevin@uw.edu or 425-777-6656.

That finding is surprising to scientists who study eelgrass, which sprouts in the brackish waters close to shore and provides shelter and breeding habitat for fish and invertebrates. Along many beaches in Puget Sound, eelgrass has disappeared or drastically declined due to factors such as warmer, cloudy water, shoreline armoring and structures like piers and docks that block sunlight.

The , published online in November in the Journal of Ecology, draw on a unique 41-year dataset to show that across the Puget Sound basin, the eelgrass population is doing well. That means eelgrass die-offs at individual beaches are not pervasive enough to affect the overall population across the region.

“Our human population has exploded, we have all kinds of increasing impacts on Puget Sound, and yet eelgrass is resilient,” said co-author , a 91̽�� professor of practice and lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy. “It gives us hope about the ability to restore eelgrass. It tells us that what we do at the neighborhood scale matters, and we can have a positive impact.”

The study’s authors were able to analyze trends in eelgrass population over 41 years — the longest period ever recorded for this species in Puget Sound — by making use of shelved data that recorded more than 160,000 eelgrass observations dating back to the early 1970s.

The data were collected for another purpose altogether: monitoring herring populations in Puget Sound. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has surveyed Pacific herring spawning sites across the Sound since the 1970s, returning each year to rake the seafloor, then record all of the plant and animal species present. Since herring lay their eggs on eelgrass, these plants were also recorded in surveys along with the number of eggs and other species present.

“One of the interesting things with this study is we have this dataset collected for something totally different being used in a new way,” said lead author , a research scientist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center. “The value of the data is not in the most recent five or 10 years — it’s being able to go back to 1975 and make a comment about eelgrass status at that time.”

Student interns with the at 91̽��Tacoma manually digitized notebooks full of data, which then made the information accessible for complex modeling. The end result was a 41-year dataset of eelgrass observations covering more than 300 miles (500 km) of Puget Sound coastline. That’s about 15 percent of the region’s total shoreline.

The analysis also confirmed what researchers, local residents and fishermen have observed for years — eelgrass declines happen in localized areas, and one beach might be depleted while another shoreline close by is teeming with healthy eelgrass. Herring populations also show localized trends.

“I think this study is one more piece of evidence that when we are looking at Puget Sound recovery, we have to use multiple lenses,” said co-author , a 91̽��ecologist at the Puget Sound Institute. “We have to look at what’s happening broadly, and we also have to look at what is happening on individual pieces of the shoreline. What an individual person or jurisdiction does really matters for what is living near that shoreline.”

The most obvious impacts on eelgrass are human disturbances such as placing moorings in the water, running a motorboat in shallow water or pulling up eelgrass. But other causes of eelgrass decline in Puget Sound are unknown. Scientists suspect many factors are at play, and those mechanisms are further complicated as the climate and ocean continue to warm.

“We are facing changing conditions, and eelgrass is found in a very sensitive fringe of Puget Sound that is going to change dramatically,” Francis said.

This analysis could be useful to pair with local knowledge about what may have caused eelgrass to decline at a particular beach, the researchers said.

Other co-authors are Blake Feist of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center; Gregory Williams of Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission; and Adam Lindquist of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

This research was funded by the Puget Sound Institute and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

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For more information, contact Shelton at ole.shelton@noaa.gov or 206-860-3209; Francis at tessa@uw.edu or 253-254-7030 ext. 8013; and Levin at pslevin@uw.edu.

A wise investor plays the financial market by maintaining a variety of stocks. In the long run, the whole portfolio will be more stable because of the diversity of the investments it contains.

It’s this mindset that resource managers should adopt when considering Pacific herring, one of the most ecologically significant fish in Puget Sound and along the entire West Coast, argue the authors of a appearing in the January 2016 print edition of the journal .

Just like a financial portfolio contains shares from different companies, the diverse subpopulations of herring from different bays and beaches around Puget Sound collectively keep the total population more stable, the study’s authors found.

“This paper shows that all of these little subpopulations are important to the stability of Puget Sound herring as a whole,” said lead author , a 91̽�� doctoral student in aquatic and fishery sciences.

“If you’re a manager and you need to invest in multiple pieces of a natural resource, it’s helpful to know what the impact will be of diversifying your efforts instead of just focusing on a few spots.”

Pacific herring swim close to shore to spawn in eelgrass or seaweed, and each subpopulation usually returns to the same area year after year. This life pattern has traditionally created a close relationship between the herring and First Nations peoples and tribes who harvest herring and their eggs on Pacific Northwest beaches, as well as the marine mammals and larger fish that feed on these small, silvery fish.

Siple and senior author , lead ecosystem ecologist with the Puget Sound Institute at 91̽��Tacoma, analyzed 40 years of herring biomass data in Puget Sound to try to understand how the nearly 21 distinct subpopulations behave and relate to each other.

They found that each smaller group varied out of synch with the others — despite sometimes spawning near each other. They also found that high year-to-year variability, which is common in forage fish such as herring, was dampened by the existence of many distinct subpopulations, buffering the wellbeing of the entire Puget Sound herring population from the failures of any single group.

“This paper shows that the local variability of herring helps ensure stability of the population,” Francis said. “While biologists have recognized local variation in herring anecdotally, not all management has adapted to the ‘local matters’ perspective yet. This work shows that if you’re interested in overall sustainability of the resource, protecting that local diversity is a good strategy.”

In Puget Sound, the commercial herring fishery is limited and targets juvenile fish in South and Central Puget Sound, mainly caught to be used as bait in sport fisheries, primarily salmon. Concern about overfishing has resulted in relatively light fishing for herring since around the late 1980s, compared with other regions.

The Puget Sound herring stock is managed at a relatively fine scale, meaning all of the distinct subpopulations that spawn at various beaches in Puget Sound are known and counted by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

In Alaska and British Columbia, where the commercial herring fisheries are much larger, management doesn’t yet account for what happens among smaller groups at individual beaches. But that local, beach-to-beach level is really how people and other animals most readily interact with herring, the researchers said, so it’s important information to consider.

“Salmon rely heavily on herring as a prey source. We also know that indigenous people connect to herring locally and are using the resource at a very local scale. Herring beaches are in their villages, they’re walking distance from their homes,” Francis said.

This Puget Sound-focused study comes on the heels of a West Coast-wide effort last summer to bring together everyone who has a stake in Pacific herring — from tribes, First Nations peoples and commercial fishers to fishery managers, nonprofits and scientists. The goal of the in British Columbia was to capture the various roles herring plays in the ecosystem and understand how the species fits into the social, economic and ecological landscape.

Now, a smaller working group is tasked with creating a way to bring social and cultural knowledge of herring into actual management of the fishery. As a starting point, the first day of the June summit was dedicated to hearing stories of how tribes and First Nations peoples interact closely with the fish. That intimate knowledge is lost to the existing herring management process, Francis said.

“These social metrics are currently not used in fisheries management for herring, and yet herring is the forage fish of the people — they come to shore to spawn and are tightly connected to people,” she said.

The working group’s first paper that discusses the June meeting and initial findings was accepted in the journal this month. The team of about 20 people, the second working group of the of which Francis is the managing director, will meet three more times, drawing inspiration from communities in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, and Sitka, Alaska.

Ultimately, the group plans to construct a framework that agencies can adopt when they are ready to incorporate human dimensions, such as the cultural significance of fishing, into fisheries management.

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For more information, contact Siple at siplem@uw.edu and Francis at tessa@uw.edu.

The , a collaboration between the at 91̽�� and , is trying something very rare — bringing together multiple science models and people who care about a particular ocean resource or fishery to decide what’s most important for its vitality and the communities it serves.

“We’ve gotten to this point now where there’s an amazing amount of science, but it’s fragmented,” said , the Ocean Modeling Forum’s co-director and senior scientist with NOAA Fisheries. “We want to bring it together and exploit the strengths of all these different models and data streams and try to overcome the weaknesses.”

The Ocean Modeling Forum will address all ocean management issues, facilitating conversations among as many stakeholders as possible. Its first project, focused on the recently closed , will have its fourth and final meeting later this month in Seattle. The group will kick off its second project June 8-10 in Richmond, British Columbia, with a summit focusing on the .

The goals of the herring summit are to hear from tribes and First Nations peoples, social and natural scientists, the fishing industry, nonprofits, and federal and state wildlife managers about the role herring plays socially and ecologically, and to begin to develop a framework for how traditional ecological knowledge — in addition to scientific data — can be used in fisheries management practices.

“I think there is a lot to be gained in bringing together people who are working on common problems so we can use models in new ways,” said , director of the UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and co-director of the Ocean Modeling Forum.

The three-day summit in British Columbia comes at a time when many are questioning plans for the Pacific herring fishery. Some First Nations peoples protested and prevented commercial fishing by taking to the water last year and this spring, though Fisheries and Oceans Canada opened a commercial fishery. The First Nations have argued that the herring population, which holds deep cultural significance, hasn’t yet recovered to a sustainable level, and some scientists evaluating the fishery agree.

The first day of the summit is devoted to hearing stories about the significance of herring, and many tribes and First Nations peoples are expected to share. An artist will serve as a pictorial recorder, overlaying words, ideas and pictures from the stories into works of art that will remind participants of the discussions and themes throughout the conference.

The Ocean Modeling Forum’s approach for the summit – where the people who set fishing quotas, conduct the science, catch the fish and plan for the future are all brought to the discussion table – is the first of its kind worldwide for fisheries. The goal is to come up with a plan to sustainably manage a fishery in a way that’s more nimble to change, and sensitive to both ecological and social factors.

“The idea is to increase the breadth of the approach to address the complex questions that we’re facing right now,” said , managing director of the Ocean Modeling Forum and lead ecosystem ecologist with the at 91̽��Tacoma. “Given the particularly knotty ocean management issues faced worldwide, our hope is to bring together all the existing models, with their modeling teams, to provide more reliable and clear advice.”

Some models combine a hypothesis and data to try to predict how healthy a fishery is ecologically, while others look at how well it’s performing from an economic standpoint. Nearly all involve complicated math, and scientists agree that all models are flawed in some way. So, by looking at every option on the table, organizers hope the best parts of each will rise to the surface.

The result is a way for managing a fishery that offers more than any single model could on its own.

Over the next year and a half, a smaller working group will take information from the herring summit and construct a framework that agencies can adopt when they are ready to incorporate human dimensions, such as the cultural significance of fishing, into fisheries management.

The sardine project launched with a similar meeting in March 2014, and its working group will wrap up this summer with a paper summarizing its findings and recommendations.

In the future, organizers say, the Ocean Modeling Forum could be used to address other fish and animal species, or issues such as how to manage resources affected by ocean acidification.

“I think the sky is the limit in terms of the sorts of issues we can address and the scope with which we can address them,” Levin said.

The Ocean Modeling Forum is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The Pew Charitable Trusts is funding the summit in British Columbia, which brings together experts from the entire West Coast.

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For more information, contact Francis at tessa@uw.edu, Levin at phil.levin@noaa.gov and Punt at aepunt@uw.edu.