Pathways to Resilience

Sustaining Pacific Salmon in a Changing World

April 3-5, 2007
Portland, OR

Oregon Sea Grant hosted an interdisciplinary conference - "Pathways to Resilience: Sustaining Pacific Salmon in a Changing World" - in Portland, Oregon, held April 3-5, 2007. The meeting was a forum for exploring the concept of resilience and its application to ecosystem management and salmon recovery.

The conference organizers saw the need for new strategies to improve long-term resilience of salmon populations and ecosystems. Resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to accommodate change without losing its characteristic structure and functions, as valued by society. The decline of salmon across much of the Pacific Northwest has been attributed to many factors, often linked to human activities, that collectively have left watersheds, salmon populations, and human communities less resilient to future disturbance.

The Oregon Sea Grant conference explored both the attributes of resilient ecosystems in which salmon populations thrive and the implications for developing alternative approaches to conservation. The conference was intended to bridge traditional disciplinary boundaries between the natural and social sciences and to broaden the discussion amoung scientists, resource managers, practitioners, and policy makers. Technical presentations, "town hall" style conversations and panel discussions examined the ecological, social, economic and institutional factors that influence adaptation to change.

From the conference presentations and discussion, organizers drafted a series of management recommendations for improving resilience of the salmon ecosystem. These were presented for discussion the final day of the conference. Selected papers from the conference and the final recommendations will be published in a peer-reviewed journal volume dedicated to the resilience theme.