Steve Jacob, Priscilla Weeks, Benjamin G. Blount, Michael Jepson; Published in Marine Policy Volume 34, Issue 6, November 2010, Pages 1307-1314 - Regulations can have an array of social and economic impacts on fishers and the communities in which they live and work.  Accordingly, fishery the National Marine Fisheries Service is required to identify and consider the impacts of management on fishing communities. The purpose of the project on which this paper is based was to develop and evaluate social indicators based on secondary quantitative data to measure the concepts of dependence, gentrification, vulnerability, and resiliency of fishing communities in Texas. A mixed methods design was employed. Because an important goal of the project was to evaluate the external validity of the indicators constructed using secondary data, they were compared to independently conducted ethnographic assessments in the same communities. In this paper, the method is described by focusing on the indicators constructed for fishing dependence.

Rich Haut, Senior Research Scientist at HARC, has been asked to join a small, diverse working group of energy and environmental experts charged with providing timely input about what questions the federal government should ask in deciding whether individual drilling sites and rigs are sufficiently safe to allow lifting of the moritorium.