Research interests 
 

My broad research interest lies primarily in understanding the criteria which determines people’s decisions on how to use environmental goods and services - a fundamental requirement for addressing sustainability concerns.  My focus is on marine capture fisheries, with a particular emphasis on understanding fishers’ spatial behaviour, using a methodology which integrates ecological, social and economic approaches.  
 

My Ph.D. research, in collaboration with the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas), focuses on fisheries in the southwest of England. Over-fishing of marine fish populations in UK waters threatens the ecosystem and associated livelihoods.  Traditional management efforts have failed and there is an urgent need for new management approaches, based on a knowledge of fishery systems, which includes knowledge of human behavioural responses.  It has been emphasised by both fisheries researchers and managers that understanding and predicting responses of fishers to proposed regulations, or future threats, requires knowledge of decision-making frameworks.  Despite this, interdisciplinary approaches for understanding fisher behaviour for fisheries management have been traditionally ignored. The European Community Satellite Vessel Monitoring System (VMS), introduced in 2001, allows simultaneous tracking of hundreds of fishing vessels, providing unprecedented detail on fishing activity and presenting a unique opportunity to elucidate fishers’ strategies and motivations and their impacts on fish stocks. Incorporating interview-based surveys with skippers, this study aims to explore the decision-making processes that explain spatial distribution of fishing activities in the south-west of England.    This research is funded by the Fisheries Society of the British Isles (FSBI). 

My previous work in this research area was conducted on the Caribbean island of Anguilla.  I used the theory of the ideal free distribution (IFD), which predicts the spatial distribution of consumers in relation to the distribution of resources, as a framework to understand the mechanisms underlying fishing site-selection and harvesting behaviour of artisanal fishers exploiting the shallow-water coral reefs.   
 

Research group: Natural Resources and Environment 
 

Publications 
 

Abernethy, K.E., Trebilcock, P., Kebede, B., Allison, E.H. & Dulvy, N.K. (2010) Fuelling the decline in UK fishing communities? ICES Journal of Marine Science, 67, [Advance access published January 8 2010].

Abernethy,K., Côté,I., Molloy P. & Allison E. (2007) Why do fishers fish where they fish?  Using the Ideal Free Distribution to understand the behaviour of artisanal reef fishers. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science. 64, 1595-1604.

Herberstein, M.E., Abernethy, K.E., Backhouse, K., Bradford, H., de Crespigny, F.E., Luckock, P.R. & Elgar, M.A. (1998) The effect of feeding history on prey capture behaviour in the orb-web spider Argiope keyserlingi Karsch (Areneae: Araneidae). Ethology 104, 565-571.  


Conference presentations:

‘Why do fishers fish where they fish?  Using the ideal free distribution to understand the behaviour of artisanal reef fishers’ (K. E. Abernethy, E. H. Allison, P. P. Molloy and I. M. Côté)
Presented at SCB conference, Port Elizabeth, 2007

‘Fuelling the decline of UK fishing communities’ (K.E. Abernethy, P. Trebilcock, B. Kebede, E. H. Allison and N. K. Dulvy)
Presented at MARE conference, Amsterdam, 2009


Contact: k.abernethy@uea.ac.uk

Download Kirsten's CV from here.