Community profiles have been produced for fishing communities throughout the State of Alaska in order to meet the requirements of National Standard 8 of the Magnuson-Stevens Act and provide a necessary component of the social impact assessment process for fisheries management actions. These profiles provide detailed information on elements of each fishing community, including location, demographics, history, infrastructure, governance, facilities, and involvement in state and federal fisheries targeting commercial, recreational, and subsistence resources. A total of 196 communities from around Alaska were profiled as part of this effort.
However, these profiles are static and require manual updates as more recent data become available. In order to address this in a more effective way, social scientists in the Economic and Social Sciences Research (ESSR) program have developed web-based community snapshots, which provide updated time series information on communities involved in fishing in the North Pacific. These snapshots take the pulse of Alaskan fishing communities using information about their fishing involvement and demographic characteristics. Each snapshot provides information on:
What commercial species are landed and processed in the community
The number of crew licenses held by residents
The characteristics of fishing vessels based in the community
Processing capacity
Participation in recreational fishing (including both charter businesses and individual anglers)
Subsistence harvesting dependence
Demographic attributes of the community (including educational attainment, occupations by industry, unemployment, median household income, poverty, median age, sex by age, ethnicity and race, and language and marginalization).
Social vulnerability indices -- these indices represent social factors that can shape either an individual or community’s ability to adapt to change. These factors exist within all communities regardless of the importance of fishing. The indices include: poverty, population composition, personal disruption, and housing disruption.
Fishing engagement and reliance indices -- these indices portray the importance or level of dependence of commercial or recreational fishing to coastal communities. The indices include: commercial engagement, commercial reliance, recreational engagement, and recreational reliance.
This web-based snapshot tool will be updated annually as new data become available.
To access the *NEW* community snapshots click here.
