RCA Case Study Summary

How successful are the Rockfish Conservation Areas? To being with by looking at how well the RCA’s fulfilled the objectives that DFO set out when they were set up. Their primary objective to prevent the decline of the rockfish, has clearly been successful. Looking at the data they have been collecting shows a clear arrest to the decline of the rockfish populations. Their second objective to enhance the production of larvae, is much more ambiguous to measure the success of, in part due to a lack of data. As such we find that this objective was not completed. Their third objective to see spillover effects from the RCA’s for larvae is also considered incomplete by us due to a lack of larveal data. Their fourth objective to establish controls …show more content…
We consider this to be a limited success, where we would have hoped to see CPUE decrease, indicating that there are more fish and less effort being put into getting them. We looked at how the RCA’s affected the different shareholders and how different holders were affected and found that the First Nations people while happy with the measures did not feel that their were clear effects and would liked to have been a larger part of monitoring. Government workers feel that DFO has fallen behind in monitoring the rockfish specifically after the government change. Where the new emphasis of 10% of the waters being MPA’s has left projects like this struggling. The recreational fishing sector has issues with compliance, particularly with excessive bycatch when fishing for salmon. This showed that not all of the shareholders are particularly happy with the effect of the RCA’s. Comparing the use of RCA’s in BC to those in California we found that the ones in California showed higher levels of population returns. We suggest that this is due to the lack of compliance in BC from recreational