The Future of Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management: A Conversation with Senior Scientist Dr. Jason Link

Jason Link has been a scientist with NOAA Fisheries for more than 25 years. In 2025, he was honored with the American Fisheries Society's Award of Excellence, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the aquatic sciences. You can read the first installment here .

In your own words, what is ecosystem-based fisheries management? How does it differ from more traditional single species management?

Ecosystem-based fisheries management , in one word, is about trade-offs. When folks I encounter in my everyday life ask me what I do, I tell them I'm a scientist who studies fish. They say "What do you do with that?" And I tell them about ecosystem-based fisheries management, and how it's sort of like managing the restaurant supply chain. We model all the people that eat at Burger King, and that has impacts on what people that eat at McDonald's do, and it has impacts on what people that eat at Taco Bell do. It has impacts all throughout the restaurant chain.

It's the same in natural resource management: The trade-offs of any one choice we make have trickle-through effects on everything else. And we've always kind of known that and had a sense of that, but we've never really formally evaluated what those trade-offs would be. And that's a lot of what I've been trying to do.

Why should people-especially those who aren't fisheries scientists-care about ecosystem-based fisheries management?

I have a lot of family in the Midwest, and they're familiar with what I do. I'll say to them, "Hey, you guys are impacting us. Did you know that?" And they don't know. But the Mississippi River drains into the Gulf. That hypoxic zone in the Gulf comes from farmland. The Midwest is influencing what we're able to catch. And what we're able to catch has huge ramifications on regional and local economies.

It also has huge ramifications on what the national seafood market is-what you're able to get at a supermarket in Iowa or Illinois or Indiana is impacted. And the challenges that you have in the Midwest or the Great Plains, for example, can influence even the Mountain West and Pacific Northwest and some of the salmon there. There's probably fewer direct impacts, but it's all still interconnected. The other thing I emphasize is the market economy and how connected fisheries commodities are with the commodities of other foodstuffs we eat. I don't think people realize that. I didn't realize it before I started looking into it.

When you're working with folks on the coast, it's easier to make that connection, but we need to take a much more holistic approach to building resiliency in these places. We need to employ not just EBFM, but ecosystem-based management, because all ocean use sectors are dealing with sea level rise. They're trying to mitigate those impacts and plan the appropriate infrastructure to protect from storm surges and other threats. The fisheries are a part of that. They're impacted by those factors, and they also influence them in turn, like dock space.

We need to make sure that we're managing everything at a sustainable level. There's one extreme where you go out and you grab everything. There's another extreme where you don't touch anything and you preserve it forever. We're aiming for that sweet spot in the middle. How do we sustainably utilize these resources so that they maintain vigorous and robust local and regional economies? That's probably an easier connection to make with coastal communities, but showing how one thing might influence another can be challenging, especially for inland communities. That's why we do simulations, modeling, and data analysis.

The last thing that I would say is that the markets are so globally connected. There are some national security considerations we have to think about because of how critical fish are as a food source in certain regions. There are places where the competition to get out and catch food is so severe that it leads to armed conflict, famine, etc. So we have to pay attention to that, and what we're able to produce in other parts of the world has some bearing on that.

It's not only regional economies and it's not only coastal communities. There's geopolitical considerations in the Arctic, the Antarctic, the tropics, the subtropics. At that level of interconnectedness, if you overfish the equivalent of a Burger King Whopper and that goes away, is there an equivalent of a McDonald's Big Mac to take its place? If you're not thinking about this as an entire picture, you could run into trouble fast.

What do you see as the primary obstacles to implementing ecosystem-based fisheries management and how do you think those challenges can be overcome?

I can easily point to the main obstacle: change dynamics or change management. I can't tell you how many books I've read on it. In fact, I was just reading something this morning on change management, not only for my personal life, but also for our organization and to determine how we can best serve our mission and our people.

There are a lot of steps you have to think through. One thing that I always hear is that we just don't have enough data, and we've kind of debunked that myth. There's not enough analytical capacity, but I think we can still do a lot of this.

We do have to pay attention to the technical objections, and they're there, but I think we have the data to do this. I think the biggest challenge is in the way we do business. It's cultural; it's about comfort. Sometimes we would rather do business as usual because even though there are obstacles, we know what the obstacles are. Trying something new where we don't know what the outcomes might look like is more difficult.

But we've done studies and business cases and value propositions. Every time we do, we see that these more systematic, coordinated, trade-off focused ecosystem-based fisheries management approaches come out ahead of what we're currently doing. But there's a sense of, "This is how we've always done it, and at least this gets us an answer." Some of those answers are eroding now, though, and we're missing key things.

For example, if a stock keeps moving farther and farther out of an area that we survey or into another region, how do we continue doing assessments on that stock? That's part of what we're trying to look at: total biomass, total production in an area, movement of different critters, and then replacements of species via the market or or even permitting flexibility. How do you handle that? Those managerial challenges are real and we're having a lot of internal discussions on them.

I think another obstacle that we have is that there's a sense of "Well, we just don't know how to do this." But when I look around the world, and I look at places like Australia and Malaysia and Indonesia, they're surpassing us in some regards because they haven't been using the European-North American fisheries single-species management model. They've had to get innovative and try new approaches. And they're making a lot of progress on managing their fisheries as an entire system, which is fascinating to watch. I think there's a lot of lessons that can be learned both ways.

The other implication embedded in this question is that it's one or the other. You have to do ecosystem-based fisheries management or single species. You can't do both. And I think that's a false dichotomy. I think you're always going to need both, but we have to ask: What are we going to try to do in the Pacific islands versus the Gulf versus the Caribbean? Do we try to do 500 stock assessments, or do we assess the whole system and prioritize the top 10 or 20 species that we really need to pay attention to and do assessments for those?

And I think you need to do both, but we need to do a better job of prioritizing and assessing the entire system. In fact, maybe the full ecosystem is okay, and maybe we can then focus on a couple things instead of trying to do everything all at once in a constrained period of time. I want people to realize there's value in the single-species approach, and we're going to need it. We just might not need it at the resolution or extent that people often think we do, which can shut us down or overwhelm us because it's almost too big of a lift. And I think ecosystem-based fisheries management allows us to tackle some of that in a different way and flip the script, if you will.