Methods for Characterizing and Examining Marine Fishery Ecosystems

There are many variables associated with assessing marine fishery ecosystems. These include exploring facets of the living marine resources (LMRs), habitats, oceans, economics, and social considerations associated with marine social-ecological systems. Yet which ones can help track progress toward ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) and, by extension, the efficacy of LMR management? This chapter provides a list of over 90 indicators we will use throughout the regional chapters, with documentation of data sources, time periods, and geographies covered, and the typical caveats associated with these data. This chapter also notes the methodology of how we synthesized all this information across all the regional chapters, noting the appropriate statistical and ranking methods we employed and the benchmarking criteria we considered to ascertain progress toward EBFM.