Seabank is a program of the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust that strengthens fishing communities and marine resources through research, education, and economic opportunity.
SeaBank is a multi-disciplinary approach to identify, assess, and communicate the value of the Southeast Alaska ecosystem, and to empower residents, visitors, and policymakers to make sound long-term decisions that promote stewardship and sustainable economics.
SeaBank is a diverse nexus of individuals, scientists, organizations, and businesses that wish to share the untold story of Southeast Alaska’s ecological wealth and promote the region’s natural products that support the livelihoods of our communities. We are a growing hub of scientific and economic information that pertains to the marine environment of Southeast Alaska, and a marketplace for the region's sustainable products.
Community, Commerce, and Conservation in Southeast Alaska
We can look at Southeast Alaska—from the mountaintops to the open ocean—as a single, vast, highly productive watershed. Everything is tightly interconnected: the land and waters, vegetation and wildlife, resources and economies, cultures and ways of life.
For the communities of Alaska’s Panhandle, this great natural ecosystem functions as a richly endowed bank, providing natural capital that is essential to the regional economy.
Unlike ordinary business enterprises, this ecosystem bank requires no human input, no equipment, and no built infrastructure of any kind, yet it produces over a billion dollars worth of fish and other sea foods every year, harvested from Southeast Alaska’s waters.
The ecosystem bank is also infinitely sustainable, as long as its resources are harvested responsibly and we ensure that the environment remains healthy and productive.
The goal of SEABANK is to make people aware of Southeast Alaska’s natural bank, to measure the huge annual capital that it provides, to highlight its value to the shareholders, and to help safeguard its future.
Ecology
Southeast Alaska encompasses the 17-million-acre Tongass National Forest. Together with the coastal old-growth forests of British Columbia, this is the largest temperate rainforest ecosystem in the world.
The Panhandle is a complex mosaic of mountains, valleys, bays and inlets, and about 5,000 islands called the Alexander Archipelago. When the entire convoluted coast is measured, Southeast Alaska has more than 18,000 miles of shoreline.
Cool, saturated air from the North Pacific creates a moderate maritime climate with abundant rainfall, averaging more than 100 inches per year. Remarkably, the Panhandle has over 350,000 acres of tidal estuaries, where voluminous runoff carrying nutrients from the land mixes with powerful oceanic tides that are rich in marine nutrients. Estuaries are also the ecological link for species that move between rivers and the sea. All of this adds up to an extraordinarily productive ecosystem.
Semi-enclosed by land, the whole Panhandle archipelago represents a single estuarine system that ranks among the largest and most complex in the world. This nutrient-rich environment is the preeminent feature of the region, supporting an abundance of animal and plant life, including one of the planet’s most prolific wild salmon ecosystems.
The waters close to shore are also essential for commercially valuable shellfish. And few people realize that fish caught far out at sea—such as rockfish and black cod—spend their early lives growing in the nearshore waters and bays of Southeast Alaska. Eelgrass beds are an especially important part of this nursery habitat, and remarkably, the Panhandle has more eelgrass beds than Washington, Oregon, and California combined.
Economy
“Southeast Alaska has more than 10,000 estuaries that flow into the bays, fjords, and channels, then coalesce to form a single overarching estuary system. For communities in the Panhandle, this literally amounts to a fish factory—one of the greatest on earth—producing over a billion dollars worth of commercial fish alone for world consumption every year. ”
We can look at the wealth derived from Southeast Alaska’s environment as nature’s dividend. Unlike other industries that must purchase raw materials, the cost of goods for this extraordinary enterprise is virtually zero. No amount of human ingenuity can improve on the Panhandle’s rich and reliable ecological system, nor could we design a more perfect business model.
The economic health of Southeast Alaska is directly tied to the stability and health of our environment. To understand the economic side of this equation, SeaBank draws from research on the dollar value of marine resources harvested in the region—most importantly salmon, halibut, shellfish, and black cod. We further include the value of tourism and ecosystem services which also depend on the natural environment.
Community
FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, TLINGIT AND HAIDA COMMUNITIES HAVE THRIVED IN SOUTHEAST ALASKA BY HARVESTING SALMON, HALIBUT, SHELLFISH, HERRING, GROUNDFISH, AND OTHER RESOURCES FROM THE SEA. TRADITIONAL NATIVE KNOWLEDGE, SOCIAL CUSTOMS, AND ARTS ALL REFLECT AN ANCIENT, INTIMATE CONNECTION TO THE MARINE ENVIRONMENT.
When people of European and other origins came to the Panhandle, fishing again was at the core of community life. Today every town has one or more harbors—veritable forests of trolling poles, docks where seine fishermen and gillnetters mend their nets, where longliners tie up after delivering their catch, and where charter boat fishermen come to chase their dreams.
If commercial fishing is the heart of life in most Southeast Alaska towns, then subsistence fishing is the soul. Kids with spinning rods crowd along the riverbanks in summer. People with skiffs of every size and description head out after salmon, halibut, rockfish, crab, and shrimp. Subsistence fishing is much more than recreation, it’s about staple foods with serious cash-equivalent value for local families.
The 55,000 residents of Southeast Alaska live in a unique congeries of villages, towns, and cities. Hugging the coastline, backed by sheer mountains, and often isolated on islands, most of these communities are accessible only by plane or ferry. The names of these fishing communities embody the diversity and character of its people: Hoonah, Angoon, Sitka, Kake, Port Alexander, Juneau, Haines, Port Protection, Petersburg, Ketchikan, Tenakee Springs, Klawock, and Wrangell.
Every Panhandle community is linked to the others by the tides that flow between them, by the fish that pass their shores, and by their shared harvesting of the sea. This is the “blue economy”—the SEABANK—that underwrites and sustains Southeast Alaska’s communities and ways of life.
