Waterways that are used for boating (both for recreation and commercial fishing) are increasingly being constrained out of concern for boater safety, the habitat and habitat-dependent stocks and wildlife. In Southwest Florida, a primary species of concern is the West Indian manatee, which is currently listed as an endangered species....
Environmental events such as tropical storms, hurricanes, and harmful algal blooms (HABs) have the potential to disrupt the commercial production and supply of certain marine species. In Florida, the red-pigmented dinoflagellate Karenia brevis (a particular type of naturally occurring HAB) has contaminated molluscan shellfish beds resulting in periodic fishery closures....
Using three years of weekly ACNielsen Scantrack data, this study aims to estimate the implicit prices of labeling retail finfish and shellfish in the U.S. with harvest-specific information, such as “wild” ‚“Atlantic”‚ “Pacific” or “imported”. Recent concerns for the availability of wild-caught supplies has led to increasing interest for labeling...
Ecological and economic tradeoffs of proposed management actions were assessed using the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) and Ecospace software. The model has 70 biomass pools (e.g., detritus, primary producers, invertebrates, fish, dolphins, sea birds), including multiple age-classes of key species. After mass-balancing, the model was driven using observed fishing mortality...
Red tides are algal blooms that have caused significant ecological and
economic damage in Florida. Different nations and regions have addressed
harmful algal blooms such as red tides a variety of ways including distinct
strategies designed to prevent, control and or mitigate the negative effects
of a bloom. While a...
Many of the coastal counties in Florida have active artificial reef
deployment and monitoring programs. These reef systems have been
shown to be an important destination for the marine recreational boating
industry, as well as for the for-hire commercial sector (i.e., six-pack charter
vessels, guide boats, party/head boats, and dive...
Stock assessment techniques currently used in the United States are extremely costly to implement, involve significant data requirements, and are inaccessible to all but a few stock assessment scientists. A systematic decrease in fishery yields and the designation of several species as overfished on the west coast of the United...
The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development saw governments
around the world undertake to maintain or restore stocks to levels that can
produce the maximum sustainable yield with the aim of achieving these
goals for depleted stocks on an urgent basis and where possible not later
than 2015. However, progress...
With a national policy on catch shares in progress in the United States and
increasing use of transferable fishing rights in fisheries worldwide, it is
important to understand how the markets created by these programs
function in the real world. This paper presents information collected from
interviews with Florida spiny...
Spiny lobster (Panulirus argus) and related species represent one of the most important commercial fisheries targeted within the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean regions. This important fishery extends from Florida (USA) to Brazil. The longlived, pelagic larval stage within the life cycle of spiny lobster reveal this species to be...