Chris Free
cfree14.bsky.social
Chris Free
@cfree14.bsky.social
Fisheries scientist interested in climate change and ecosystem-based management who runs too much and plays trombone too little | he/him
The California Dungeness crab season is delayed yet again due to elevated levels of the domoic acid neurotoxin. The fishery has been heavily squeezed by climate change since 2015. wildlife.ca.gov/News/Archive...
October 24, 2025 at 8:58 PM
I should have put this above but the estimated bycatch is 1-4% of the potential biological removal and marine mammal populations are recovering.
October 17, 2025 at 4:22 PM
As a result, she mapped bycatch risk to identify areas of high risk that disproportionately contribute to bycatch. These were areas of relatively low fishery importance, suggesting that temporary closures could curb bycatch risk with small fishery impacts, should managing bycatch become necessary
October 17, 2025 at 4:20 PM
Are there other management levers we can pull to find more efficient solutions? Yutian used random forest models to explore the drivers of bycatch risk and found that regulating spatial-temporal dynamics of the fishery could have more impact than regulating things like mesh size and soak time (4/X).
October 17, 2025 at 4:18 PM
However, this progress has been made through management-induced reductions in fishing effort, which have had huge impacts on particaption and revenues. See below (3/X).
October 17, 2025 at 4:16 PM
First, she combined observer and logbook data to estimate bycatch of six species over time. Bycatch, high and unsustainable in the 1980s and 1990s, has fallen precipitously.
October 17, 2025 at 4:14 PM
Our new paper examines impact of historical warming on 521 freshwater fish populations. Warm water species benefitted while cool water species suffered. However, overfishing has a larger impact, indicating that fisheries mgmt can offset many negative climate impacts: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
October 6, 2025 at 2:52 PM
I'm thrilled to share our new Fish & Fisheries paper synthesizing U.S. fisheries quota allocation policies and best practices for advancing their equity and fairness goals under climate change: t.co/JqjYR32qHc
June 30, 2025 at 6:11 PM