Lake Pend Oreille and the Clark Fork River provide essential ecosystem services, including fisheries and hydroelectric power, to residents of Montana, Idaho, and Washington. Although conflicts exist, these services are maintained in concert by emergent sociocultural services created by a multi-institutional, transboundary collaboration. This has been enabled by an innovative Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license settlement agreement among a multitude of stakeholders. The consensus-based agreement promotes connections among people, projects, waterways, and fish populations. Collaborative management efforts allow stakeholders to address controversial issues, such as invasive fish suppression. We demonstrate how reciprocal cultural ecosystem services and services to ecosystems can enable ecosystem-scale restoration that addresses invasive species, habitat protection, and water quality management. Continued ecosystem management success relies on sustaining the relationship-building and shared knowledge services that have emerged over the past 25 years.

Salmon are revered by Pacific Northwest Tribes as a central figure in their cultural and spiritual identity and have been a critical food resource for millennia. Historic commercial overfishing and hydropower development on the Columbia River have devastated salmon runs and altered tribal communities. Before European settlement of North America, most Pacific Northwest Tribal economies were based on obtaining salmon for food and bartering for other commodities. Despite extensive efforts to promote salmon recovery in downstream areas, most salmon populations continue to struggle throughout the Columbia River Basin. Over 1,800 km of historical salmon habitat remain inaccessible upstream of Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee dams due to lack of fish passage at these facilities. The Indian Tribes of the upper Columbia Basin are working collectively on salmon reintroduction efforts through both a long-term scientific phased approach and near-term cultural and educational releases. This paper will briefly outline the Phased approach and provide detail on the initial results of some recent cultural and educational releases of salmon in the blocked area. The cultural and educational releases had a goal of reconnecting the people with the salmon and the salmon with historic habitats. These salmon release events were diverse and included school children releasing juvenile fish they raised in the classroom, releasing adult salmon to swim free and reproduce, and tribal members harvesting salmon from their ancestral waters. Ceremonies were held to celebrate the significance of salmon to the tribal cultures and the salmon's return home. In addition to the ceremonies, some fish were tagged to evaluate survival and behavior and to begin to document the effectiveness of trap and haul efforts. The effort resulted in anadromous salmon reintroduction to their traditional waters for the first time in 60 to 110 years. These efforts have generated tremendous interest from the press and given the people of the region a glimpse at what is possible, building momentum for the larger Phased reintroduction effort.

Windsor in Ontario, Canada and Detroit in Michigan, USA are Great Lakes border cities on the Detroit River that have a long history of water pollution. Public outcry over water pollution in the 1960s led to the enactment of environmental laws starting in the early 1970s. As these laws were implemented and water quality improved, citizens started calling for improved public access to the river, including establishing linked riverfront greenways. This paper presents a case study of greenway development in these border cities based on indicator reporting to comprehensively assess ecosystem health. Findings show that waterfront greenways were catalyzed by cleanup of the Detroit River. As greenway systems expanded on both sides of the border, greenway stakeholders began to envision cross-border greenway connections that would stimulate ecotourism, help encourage healthy lifestyles, and enhance quality of life in southwest Ontario and southeast Michigan. Recommended next steps include investing in greenway capacity building, identifying and testing creative financing options for greenways, formalizing institutional arrangements between Canada and the United States for a binational greenway network, and strengthening cross-border greenway connections by reestablishing a cross-border ferry, offering free access to the tunnel bus on weekends for cyclists, and hosting Windsor-Detroit open streets' events. Robust transboundary greenway partnerships are critical to realizing the full potential of cross border greenway systems, including expanding outdoor recreation and ecotourism, conserving natural resources, and inspiring a stewardship ethic for shared ecosystems.

Aquatic ecosystems and specifically the freshwater therein, provide several ecosystem benefits including provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural services. These benefits are substantial but are not partitioned equally or equitably among the various stakeholders. Demand for freshwater is expected to double by 2050; the inland fisheries sector is in competition with other users of freshwater and will need to demonstrate the value of freshwater and its fisheries to ensure appropriate policies to manage inland aquatic ecosystems.

I have examined published material to estimate the value of water to industry, domestic, agriculture, and fisheries users. Although the estimates are extremely rough, there are differences of many orders of magnitude in the value of freshwater depending on what it is used for. For example:

The large values associated with water use by non-fisheries sectors are often not realized by the fisheries, sector, but need to be in policy negotiations. The large differences in dollar value between inland fisheries'products and the other users of freshwater do not reflect the true value of inland fisheries in terms of nutrition, food security, and cultural values for many stakeholders. Those values are difficult to determine, and the stakeholders are often rural communities in developing countries whose needs are not often addressed. As reflected in the Rome Declaration: Ten steps to responsible inland fisheries, efforts must be made to engage other users of freshwater and accurately value the services provided by freshwater ecosystems. Examples of specific benefits derived from freshwater fish are provided to help develop a robust valuation system for these ecosystem services. Inland fisheries will never produce the number of pounds of product produced from irrigated farmland, or surpass the value of electricity from hydropower, but crops and electricity do not have the nutritional value of fish. Therefore, elements of a more robust value system and framework are proposed that acknowledges the other uses of freshwater and addresses the social and cultural needs of communities that depend on inland fisheries for their livelihood.

Although social-ecological fisheries research is growing, comparatively little attention is paid to fisheries in urban environments. We aim to address this imbalance, because as cities expand worldwide, we expect urban fisheries to become more widespread and important in providing food/nutrition security, recreation, community well-being, and other benefits to fisheries stakeholders and urban dwellers across spatiotemporal scales. This paper contains a first analysis of the economic and sociocultural provisions, trade-offs, and dilemmas associated with urban fisheries to yield insights for sustainable management and planning of urban blue space. To address these objectives, we use the metacoupling framework, a method for assessing human–nature interactions within and across adjacent and distant fisheries systems. We use examples from multiple countries and data from the United States to illustrate how urban fisheries encompass flows of people, money, and information across multiple spatiotemporal scales and provide nutritional, recreational, social, and cultural benefits to fisheries stakeholders. Throughout the world, urban fisheries are influenced by wide-ranging human needs (e.g. food provisioning, recreation, aquatic resource education) that generate social-ecological effects within and beyond cities. Our analysis yields insights for developing holistic, metacoupling-informed management approaches that address the diverse social-ecological objectives and trade-offs involved in sustainable development of urban fisheries.

The Amazon Basin is the largest in the world and for many of its inhabitants fishing is a crucially important source of food and income. However, the benefits derived from mostly informal, part time, seasonal, and subsistence-based activities such as fishing are largely invisible to policy-makers, and addressing the threats to aquatic habitats, ecosystem functioning, and fisheries is frequently given low priority in national development agendas.

To estimate the total extraction of fish in the Amazon Basin, we reviewed various publications and databases with quantitative data related to the landings, trade, and consumption of fish. We estimated the total landings to be between 422,000 and 473,000 t yr-1 in live weight, near to previous estimates. Almost 75%, however, represented landings in the Brazilian part of the basin, and there is a very large margin of uncertainty given that, among other issues, there are no recent official statistics on commercial landings. Conversely, landings in Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador seem to be considerably higher than previously thought. In all Amazonian countries, from 50% up to almost 100% of the fishing takes place for personal consumption, implying that it is not recorded in official landing statistics. Available time series data indicate that fish consumption in Brazil, as well as commercial fish landings in Peru and Colombia, have declined in recent years. Local case studies, national household consumption and expenditure surveys (HCES), and market surveys, all have their benefits and drawbacks. Some minor modifications of HCES procedures could considerably improve their usefulness for estimating fish landings in the Amazon Basin. To improve such estimates, we propose that local case studies be used to calibrate HCES data, thus combining the high precision of local case studies with the wide coverage and representativity of HCES data

Ecosystem services do not exist independently from human perceptions and recognition. They are socially, culturally, economically, and environmentally scale- and context-dependent. Socio-cultural services tend to be difficult to evaluate and invisible to policymakers and conservation practitioners. Based on six years'qualitative analysis of a floodplain fishery in the Pantanal wetland, Brazil, we bring an in-depth understanding of the socio-cultural ecosystem services in the region. We show that the inter- and intra-annual ecosystem dynamics variations in the flood pulse are closely associated with local people's governance structure, identity, and cosmological histories. All of them, to some extent, capture some of the unpredictable changes in the Pantanal. Our study uncovers part of the complex and rich social-cultural ecosystem service created from the interaction between local people and the ecosystem in which they are embedded. We also present the threats faced by these services in the face of current development projects in the Pantanal, such as the Waterway and Hydrometric Dams. We argue that the predicted outcome may jeopardize not only the social-cultural services in the Pantanal, but also the local people themselves and the environment that they are currently protecting.

Coastal areas have been intensively urbanized in Asia, causing changes to the structure and function of intertidal macrobenthic communities. In this study, the intertidal assemblages on two natural rocky shores, two rocky shores disturbed by construction works, and two shores with mixed artificial seawalls and mudflats in the Dongtou Islands were studied. We examined the influence of coastal engineering by comparing macrobenthic community structures in different transects. The statistical results revealed significant differences between macrobenthic community structures in natural and influenced transects, although all the high tidal zones shared common species. The most common species on mudflats were opportunistic polychaetes; however, historical evidence suggests that the mudflats in Dongtou used to be dominated by Mollusca. We inferred that this change in community structure occurred when the seawalls were constructed five5 years previously. The macrobenthic community does not appear to have subsequently recovered. We also observed an absence of habitat-forming macroalgae in our study area, although similar investigation results revealed that they still prevail on an uninhabited island in Dongtou. The increasing disturbance caused by construction work may explain the decline in brown algae, which are mainly distributed in the low tidal zone.

The nearshore areas of the Laurentian Great Lakes provide valuable ecosystem services including habitat for a variety of species and water for surrounding communities. Recent declines in nearshore water quality have increased the need for understanding the connectivity between nearshore and offshore areas; however observing water quality variability across the dynamic nearshore to offshore transition zone poses logistical challenges for traditional observing systems. Here we evaluate cross-shore and along-shore water quality gradients using observations from two three-week deployments of a Slocum autonomous glider in southern Lake Ontario. The glider was deployed between the Niagara River mouth and Rochester, NY during early and late summer 2018, and each deployment resulted in over 3000 vertical profiles of the water column and several transects between 2 km and 20 km from shore. In early summer, the cross-shore chlorophyll gradient was characterized by highest values just below the surface, at the frontal zone between weakly stratified conditions closer to shore and unstratified conditions offshore. In late summer, stratified conditions extended across the entire survey area. The depth of the thermocline was deeper and chlorophyll values were lower within 10 km of shore than offshore, where the highest chlorophyll values were observed in a distinct layer below the thermocline. In both early and late summer, the frontal boundary indicated by the cross-shore chlorophyll gradient was located below the surface and well offshore of what is typically considered the nearshore zone but was within the width of the coastal boundary layer. The high-resolution glider observations provide a detailed view of patterns of variability across a dynamic coastal zone and pinpoint the cross-shore frontal boundary that may be important for biologists to differentiate biological communities.