Martin Pastoors’ Blog: CFRN’s Cliffhangers, Elephants & Science

Martin is working with the Canadian Fisheries Research Network to better understand what this successful, active collaboration between scientists and industry across Canada, driven by industry, can teach the GAP2 project. You can read all of his blog posts here.

The Canadian Fisheries Research Network presents impressive results from industry-science partnerships

The meat on the bone for the 3rd Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Fisheries Research Network (CFRN) was a broad suite of presentations on different research activities across the country. The research programme on lobster, for example, tries to assess all the aspects of the lobster life cycle so as to improve the local management. But there were also impressive results from research in the Great Lakes and on British Columbia fisheries.

The format for the presentations was excellent. First an introductionary presentation by the principle investigator for a specific theme. Then the research students (PostDoc, PhD, MSc) gave five minute talks summarising their research ambitions and preliminary results. Those presentations were really the advertisement for the poster session where students presented their results in more detail. Several students did this in a very clever way, incorporating cliff-hangers in their talk (“come to see me at the poster, if you want to know what is really surprising here”).


There were around 100 participants in the network meeting of which over a quarter were representatives from the fishing industry (28 fishing industry, 46 academics and students, 13 Government, 16 others). I think that is a sign of real commitment on the sides of industry and science. In one of the breaks I had a chat with one of the fishermen to try to get a feel on how he experienced the presentations. He was very positive about the collaboration. He said: “the problems are all the same with the government and so we are working with the science. They are sharing the information with us and that is pretty cool”.

During the panel discussion on Thursday morning, Maria Reccia, executive director of the Fundy North Fishermen’s Association, remarked that many good things are coming from the network, but she also noted to main challenges.

The first challenge is that the timelines of academic research are difficult to match up with the quick developments in management and fisheries. By the time the research is completed, many changes may have occurred. The fisheries experience “quickly moving ground under our feet”. The second challenge is to deal with the “elephant in the room”: linking the participatory projects to the actual management of fisheries. As one fishermen noted, “without real change at the policy level, the science won’t matter because the independent fleet will be gone.” These challenges are very similar to what we are facing in the GAP2 project. As leader of the GAP2 work package that deals with ‘making a difference’ and engagement of policy, stakeholder and science, I therefore see many areas of collaboration with the Canadian network. I presented my reflections on the possible interaction in a presentation during the panel discussion.

Just before I had to leave the CFRN meeting to catch my plane back home, there was a presentation by Michael Jones (Michigan State University) on participatory structured decision-making systems. He showed how they had used a Management Strategy Evaluation approach in an explicitly participatory setting for the management of Walleye in Lake Erie. Initial results were very positive and led to general commitment to follow this way of decision-making. This was confirmed by the fishermen that I talked to after the presentation. The ‘elephant in this room’ could be what happens when the system does not develop or does not respond as envisioned by the modelling approach. But that is for future consideration.

I would like to thank the organizers and participants in the CFRN network for their very warm welcome that they provided for me, as representative of the GAP2 project. I have come back filled with ideas for collaboration and implementation in GAP2. In my next blog post, I will write specifically about the exchange programme that we are planning between Canada and EU.

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