Postdoc Emily Klein Authors Paper on Human Dimensions of Fisheries

Emily Klein, a senior post-doctoral associate at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, recently co-authored a paper on the human dimensions of fisheries in the journal Fish and Fisheries.

In the paper, titled “Opportunities for agent‐based modelling in human dimensions of fisheries,” the authors explore the importance of agent-based models (ABMs) as tools for understanding and predicting changes to marine coupled human-natural systems. ABMs are capable of describing the behavior of individual people, firms, and vessels in order to predict their aggregate behaviors, but while these models are widely used in other settings like finance and the military, they are not yet common in fisheries science and management. The authors argue that ABMs of human behavior can make significant contributions to understanding how fisheries respond to changes in ecological, social, and institutional contexts.

At the Pardee Center, Klein leads the Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS) project with Prof. Les Kaufman. The CHANS project investigates how governance, social, and economic systems are intricately connected to natural systems, how we can better explore those connections, and how to better understand the trade-offs that confront those making resource management decisions.