Are nursery approaches maturing in their application to US fisheries management?

There have been significant conceptual advances for identifying nursery habitats within coastal systems used by juvenile fishes and crustaceans. The approaches for delineating nursery areas include measures of juvenile abundance, growth, or survival; habitat characteristics; seascape connectivity; population fitness; and contribution to adult biomass (per unit area or total). We used all US coastal states as replicate trials to evaluate the integration of nursery concepts into fisheries management and found an obvious disconnect between expanding academic interest in nursery roles and management application. Among the few states that afford a subset of coastal environments with nursery status, easily obtained metrics (e.g., juvenile density or presence/absence of biogenic structure) are used, and it remains unclear what role nursery designations have played in promoting sustainable fisheries. Gathering the data necessary to use higher-order nursery approaches and metrics (e.g., connectivity and biomass contribution) to designate nurseries will require significant research investment and greater collaboration between ecologists and fisheries scientists.