SCORE Rationale

Our Mission was developed in response to lagging dissatisfaction among fishery scientists over the effectiveness of marine stock enhancement programs developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many of the early ideas about stocking remain, even today, and have been impediments to progress in this branch of fisheries science. The impediments are a result of the failure by the 1950's of early marine stocking programs in the US, after 60+ years of stocking large numbers of eggs and newly hatched larvae. These impediments are refelected in a general lack of funding for scientific research, as well as a reluctance among fisheries scientists even to engage in research, on marine stock enhancement. The early stocking programs did little or no investigation of their effectiveness, but proliferated for decades. Scientific findings about the effects and effectiveness of marine stocking programs did not begin to emerge until the 1990s. Finally, scientific inquiry in this field has begun to accelerate. SCORE aims to contribute to the emerging knowledge about the potential impact of marine stock enhancement and couple that knowledge with adaptive managment in agency programs, which operate at scales large enough to make substantial advances in this field if they use an adaptive strategy.

Our Rationale for placing increased emphasis on marine stock enhancement research is related to the history of marine fisheries enhancement  >>here.