Introduction

As fishery management organizations make progress in incorporating ecosystem-oriented thinking into management, there is a need to more clearly define the ecosystem-oriented management goals of the organization and the tools available to managers to attain those goals. Parallel to this must be an expansion of the scientific advice provided to management beyond traditional single-species stock assessment advice. There is a broad spectrum of ecosystem research currently being conducted that can provide useful advice to managers in this regard including GLOBEC and GLOBEC-like research efforts, habitat research, ongoing trophic interactions work, and long-term monitoring of non-commercial species. Although the ultimate goal is to have quantitative predictions from this research to guide management, these efforts already serve as indicators of ecosystem status and trends. These indicators can provide an early warning system for managers, signalling human or climate-induced changes that may warrant management action. They can also serve to track the success of previous ecosystem-oriented management efforts. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) has started to include some of this ecosystem research information in an ecosystem considerations document that accompanies the traditional stock assessment reports. I outline here a proposed revision of this document that will include ecosystem status and trend information and link management actions with ecosystem observations.