This course will not be offered Fall 2013.

More sustainable seafood production focuses on the current ecological systems used to produce seafood and methods to evaluate, analyze, and make changes to these systems to enhance sustainability.   In the course we will analyze fisheries and aquaculture, our current means of producing seafood for human consumption, from the perspectives of history, sustainability, future supplies and demands, management, and their contribution to human welfare. Sustainable seafood is a hot topic currently, with interests ranging from groups like Monterey Bay Aquarium ranking which products are safe to eat from a sustainability perspective, to analyses in Science and Nature indicating the demise coming for wild fish stocks and the oceans as we know them. We will focus on particularly on the role of aquaculture in seafood production, and ways to evaluate different systems in terms of sustainability.  This focus is due to the high likelihood that aquaculture can expand to help fulfill future seafood demand, while fisheries are believed to be at or even above a sustainable level of production.