ABSTRACT
Mathematical and statistical models underlie many of the world's most important fisheries management decisions. Since the 19th century, difficulty calibrating and fitting such models has been used to justify the selection of simple, stationary, single-species models to aid tactical fisheries management decisions. Whereas these justifications are reasonable, it is imperative that we quantify the value of different levels of model complexity for supporting fisheries management, especially given a changing climate, where old methodologies may no longer perform as well as in the past. Here we argue that cost-benefit analysis is an ideal lens to assess the value of model complexity in fisheries management. While some studies have reported the benefits of model complexity in fisheries, modeling costs are rarely considered. In the absence of cost data in the literature, we report, as a starting point, relative costs of single-species stock assessment and marine ecosystem models from two Australian organizations. We found that costs varied by two orders of magnitude, and that ecosystem model costs increased with model complexity. Using these costs, we walk through a hypothetical example of cost-benefit analysis. The demonstration is intended to catalyze the reporting of modeling costs and benefits.
ABSTRACT
In many countries, sustainability targets for managed fisheries are often expressed in terms of a fixed percentage of the carrying capacity. Despite the appeal of such a simple quantitative target, an unintended consequence may be a significant tilting of the proportions of biomass across different ages, from what they would have been under harvest-free conditions. Within the framework of a widely used age-structured model, we propose a novel quantitative definition of "age-balanced harvest" that considers the age-class composition relative to that of the unfished population. We show that achieving a perfectly age-balanced policy is impossible if we harvest any fish whatsoever. However, every non-trivial harvest policy has a special structure that favours the young. To quantify the degree of age-imbalance, we propose a cross-entropy function. We formulate an optimisation problem that aims to attain an "age-balanced steady state", subject to adequate yield. We demonstrate that near balanced harvest policies are achievable by sacrificing a small amount of yield. These findings have important implications for sustainable fisheries management by providing insights into trade-offs and harvest policy recommendations.
