Variables Influencing the Efficacy of Estuarine and Marine Resource Management

This award permits the principal investigators to study how resources are managed, especially regarding marine and estuarine resources like fisheries and shellfisheries. Much of the contemporary work on issues of resource management has limited temporal scope. That is, most contemporary work does not consider the time depth and long-term implications of resource management strategies that archaeological studies can offer. Archaeological cases provide long-term perspectives on the mechanisms by which management is successfully or unsuccessfully implemented. Archaeology provides a retrospective view on what “does and does not work” regarding how societies mediate potential overharvesting of key resources under such pressures like population growth and/or shifting ecological conditions. Overharvesting, resource availability, and environmental changes are key challenges in the face of rapidly expanding populations. While this certainly includes productive agricultural land, forest resources, and pasturelands, such challenges may be most rapidly facing societies living along our coasts, where over 40% of the world’s population lives. The interdisciplinary approach, methodologies, and analyses employed create unique opportunities to train students in tackling modern-day societal challenges across disciplinary boundaries to develop real-world solutions. This study advances NSF investments in understanding human adoption of biotechnology innovations through its implementation of biotechnology methods of isotope analysis. The research goal is to understand the specific ways the management of estuarine and marine resources may have changed over time as large towns grew and conditions fluctuated in the past. The research is designed to investigate the specific decisions, rules, and institutions of governance leveraged by rapidly growing communities that promoted long-term large-scale resource base (fisheries) that are highly sensitive and prone to overharvesting. Combining archaeological, ecological, and geochemical approaches, the researchers reconstruct fisheries and shellfisheries management practices by communities who resided along the southeastern Atlantic coast for thousands of years. In examining a case of known success in achieving a sustainably extractive system, this interdisciplinary work examines the variability in (1) how communities implement differential strategies in determining access or use-rights to resources and (2) how they adaptively deploy strategic practices that ensure resource extraction under critical internal and external pressures. The research team generates new insight from historical/archaeological datasets that can be translated for analysts. These are valuable and informative datasets that are rarely leveraged to their full potential to contribute to solving contemporary challenges facing societies today. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.