| Summary: | The roots of fisheries science on the Atlantic coast of Canada go back to 1898. The primary research agencies were the Fisheries Research Board of Canada and predecessors until the early 1970s and subsequently the federal department responsible for fisheries. Canadian research on Atlantic fisheries expanded substantially after the Second World War, at about the time the International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries was formed, and increased again after the 1977 extension of fisheries jurisdiction, but gradually declined from the 1980s. Initially research was directed at improving and expanding the fisheries through exploring for new resources and by introducing and testing new fishing methods and new processing technologies, but increasingly was directed towards rational exploitation of the fisheries as international fishing effort greatly expanded in the 1960s. By the 1980s, the provision of short-term advice on catch limits occupied a large proportion of science resources. This paper describes these changes with primary reference to groundfish fisheries, which were the most important for much of the period.
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