California Sea Grant College Program

This profile of the Santa Cruz Harbor commercial fishing community provides information to address National Standard 8 and complements work being conducted by social scientists at NOAA’s Northwest and Alaska Fisheries Science Centers (and others) by updating fisheries data and bringing fine-scale detail to individual harbor profiles.1 It is part of a larger California Fishing Communities Project (FCP [conducted in collaboration with NOAA Fisheries economist Cindy Thomson]), the goal of which is to characterize individual ports and describe how regulatory, economic and environmental changes influence the commercial fishing communities of each singly, by region and for the state.