What's the story? Using news articles to examine resilience pathways and domains in the southern New England American lobster ( Homarus americanus ) fishery

Understanding the resilience of fisheries systems is integral to enabling them to adjust to current and future environmental change. The American lobster ( Homarus americanus ) fishery in southern New England has experienced widespread declines in abundance since the late 1990s, with significant impacts on the people and communities reliant on this resource. Through an analysis of news articles from 1999 to 2021, we examined 76 lobstermen’s responses to these lobster population declines using a cope, adapt, transform typology and identified factors that affected their ability to respond and their broader resilience. Results from across southern New England show that lobstermen responded in a diversity of ways. These included staying in lobstering full time, diversifying fishing portfolios, diversifying income by taking on part-time non-fishing roles, and in many cases, exiting the lobster fishery completely to pursue other fisheries or alternative jobs. A range of factors were revealed to influence responses, including financial pressures, access to assets such as savings or community infrastructure, occupational attachment, emotional deliberations, regulatory restrictions, and individual or collective actions. Our results reveal the heterogeneous ways in which individual resilience is exhibited, which requires resilience planning to account for people’s diversity of behavior and actions in response to environmental change. The range of influential factors at multiple scales highlights the need for measures that act at different levels of the fishery system to support resilience. Together, these results encourage the need for more integrated, multi-scale approaches to understanding and managing resilience in fisheries systems facing uncertainty and environmental change

American lobster · Biology · Crustacean · Fishery · Geography · Homarus · New england · Political science · Politics · Coral and Marine Ecosystems Studies