Conflicts between fisheries and seabirds—Management options using decision analysis

Fisheries management issues are no longer exclusively limited to fisheries sustainability. General environmental concerns have become criteria in assessing the success of fisheries management and have opened up possibilities for new kinds of conflict between interest groups. As an example the disagreement between bird conservation and fisheries at the Shetland Islands shows how the introduction of new world views make management more complex. Quantitative tools of fisheries assessment can be used to identify scientific uncertainties but the resolution of conflicts demands new approaches to the whole management structure, which must facilitate a systematic treatment of different values and the trade-offs these imply. This paper discusses the application of decision-analytic methods for this purpose.