Sustainable Blue: A Participatory Spatial Decision Support System for Fishery Management

Improved decision-making capabilities are essential for sustaining fisheries, particularly as fisheries managers must consider the complex interdependencies among fishing efforts, changes in ocean physics and biogeochemistry, and decision-making processes. These considerations are critical for maximizing the long-term benefits of marine resources in a rapidly changing climate. Current decision-support tools for fisheries management often fail to accurately predict the impacts of climate variability on fishery production, however, due to significant errors in many physical and biological models. Furthermore, many of these tools lack participatory design, resulting in systems that fail to incorporate end-user feedback and their practical needs. This misalignment with workflows and operational habits reduces these tools’ usability and acceptance by stakeholders. To address these gaps, we developed a participatory spatial decision-support system called Sustainable Blue for Fishery Management (SBFM), which integrates a climate-biogeochemistry model and knowledge coproduction with stakeholders to predict fish production patterns under varying climate and ocean conditions. The SBFM platform aims to advance sustainable fishery management to understand how the coupled ocean–atmosphere system along the U.S. West Coast will evolve through 2100. We identified and developed effective and widely adopted decision-making tools that integrate stakeholder-driven knowledge to deliver actionable and climate-informed insights to fisheries managers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders to support long-term sustainability to enable intelligent and adaptive fisheries management. The development of SBFM involved a well-networked multidisciplinary team of modeling experts, social scientists, fisheries managers, economists, and industry and community stakeholders.