Index of Gadus Associates' Reports Available On-Line or for Download

Most of Gadus Associates' reports are the confidential property of the clients who commissioned them and will never be released by this company. Equally, the copyrights to published papers are usually held by the publishers and such material cannot be mounted here. However, we have produced a few reports which entered the public domain when they were submitted to government reviews. With the approval of the relevant clients, those can be made generally available. Other unpublished materials have been prepared in Gadus' own name, without any client being involved. This page provides links to a selection of such documents (those which have some interest beyond their original purposes) that are here made available to whoever can use them.

Some of these documents are provided here for download as PDF files. To read those, you will require Adobe Acrobat Reader® software, which is available, free, from the manufacturer's site:

1: Marine Protected Areas: A fisheries management perspective

This paper was prepared by Dr. Trevor Kenchington in 1995 at the request of Canada's Fisheries Resource Conservation Council for presention to the Council's Strategic Planning Workshop of that year. It is in not an "expert" discussion of Marine Protected Areas ("MPAs") by a specialist in that topic but rather a perspective on MPAs based on experience in marine fisheries management. It is readable on-line as an HTML file.

2: Marine Environmental Effects of the Sable Offshore Energy Project 

The Sable Offshore Energy Project, or SOEP (now called SOEI), is Nova Scotia's first large-scale offshore petroleum development. It was preceeded by a lengthy public review, held in 1997. For that review, Gadus Associates was retained as a consultant by the Ecology Action Centre, a local environmental organization and an intervenor in the review process. This document (120 pages in length) was Gadus' major contribution to the review. Besides its relevance to the one particular project, it may serve as a useful introduction to the available scientific information on the effects of the offshore petroleum industry on both fisheries and the marine environment.

The document is provided here as a PDF file, nearly 500K in size. If you would prefer, it is also available on-line in a somewhat modified format on the Ecology Action Centre's Web site.

3: Conservation Status of the Barndoor Skate (Raja laevis)

In 1999, a number of interest groups petitioned the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service to have the barndoor skate listed under the Endangered Species Act. The evidence advanced in support of such a listing was, primarily, a brief paper published by Casey & Myers in 1998. The Trawlers Survival Fund, a coalition of fishing-industry groups, contracted Gadus Associates to prepare a review of Casey & Myers' paper for submisson to NMFS's review of the pettion. The resulting review is now readable on-line, in a modified format, on the New Jersey Fishing site. (Please note that this report is not available on Gadus Associates' site, except through the external link to the New Jersey Fishing site.)

4: Canadian Fisheries Management in the Twenty-First Century

In the spring of 1997, three academics published a stinging attack on Canada's Department of Fisheries & Oceans. The news media kept the resulting controversy alive through that summer and called for an official inquiry into the Department's management of the fisheries -- a call that was rejected by the government. In the fall the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries & Oceans began its own investigation, under the leadership of its then-Chairman, Mr. George Baker M.P. As a contribution to the Committee's process, Dr. Trevor Kenchington prepared a lengthy submission, outlining one scientist's perspective on the defects in the Canadian fisheries management system and suggesting some remedies. As expected, nothing came of this submission but it is published here in the hope that it may provoke informed discussion, leading to improved fisheries management.

5: Bibliography of the Effects of Fishing Gear on the Seabed and Benthic Communities 

Gadus Associates' has been collecting information on the seabed impacts of fishing gear for several years. In 1997, that material was compiled in the form of an annotated bibliography, prepared for World Wildlife Fund Canada. With the permission of WWF, the listing was subsequently reworked and updated for clients in the Canadian fishing industry, since which time it has been maintained and expanded as an in-house project. For the November 2002 Symposium on Effects of Fishing Activities on Benthic Habitats, held in Tampa, Florida, a non-annotated version was prepared. Listing over 1,000 published items, this is the most complete bibliography on its topic yet prepared. That version is now available on this Web site as an aid for everyone engaged in research into or management of the seabed impacts of fishing.