Overfishing and the destruction of small-scale fisheries in developing countries — particularly through the use of illegal fishing gear — is a pressing issue. Policymakers and local community leaders often suggest fines and enforcement mechanisms to reduce the use of illegal fishing; however, the response of fishery participants to “bans”...
Individual transferable quotas (ITQs) have been used in British Columbian fisheries management for more than 25 years. When they were implemented, few restrictions were placed on who could own or lease quota. As a result, many retiring fishermen retain quotas to lease or sell to processors and corporations rather than...
The Alaska recreational charter boat sector has undergone significant change in recent years due in part to several regulatory changes in the management of the Pacific halibut sport fishery, including a limited entry program, harvest controls specific to the charter sector, and a Catch Sharing Plan (CSP) implemented during 2014....
As fisheries management becomes more collaborative by seeking input and involvement from stakeholders, it is important to understand and address the diversity of those stakeholders. Gulf Coast fisheries communities include diverse racial and ethnic groups, particularly a large number of Vietnamese Americans involved in all aspects of the seafood industry....
Ecosystem services (ES) represent a way to represent and quantify multiple uses, values as well as connectivity between ecosystem processes and human well-being. Ecosystem-based fisheries management approaches may seek to quantify expected trade-offs in ecosystem services due to actions such as restoration and gear restrictions, or due to changes such...
Fishing years 2012 -2013 brought declines in socio-economic performance for the Northeast groundfish fishery. Severe reductions in catch limits for key species such as Atlantic cod have constrained fishing behavior and declining groundfish revenues cannot be offset by non-groundfish revenues earned by the fleet. Little is known about the way...
Over recent years, fisheries managers have been going through a paradigm shift to prioritize ecosystem-based management. With this comes an increasing need to better understand the impacts of fisheries management decisions on the social well-being and sustainability of fishing communities. This paper summarizes research aimed at using secondary data to...
The for-hire sector plays a significant role in providing recreational fishing opportunities for Atlantic highly migratory species (HMS) such as tuna, billfish, swordfish, and sharks. Because of the high cost of equipment needed to pursue HMS, many saltwater anglers find chartering a for-hire vessel to be the only affordable alternative....
Two species of the Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois miles and P. volitans) have rapidly expanded throughout the Gulf of Mexico, mid- and south Atlantic and the Caribbean following their introduction to Florida coastal waters during the mid-1980s through releases from marine aquaria. There is overwhelming scientific agreement on the threats that...
Several factors currently threaten blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) in the Chesapeake Bay. In addition to poor water quality, degraded habitat, and shifting environmental conditions, derelict gear has recently been recognized as a significant source of mortality for this economically and culturally significant species. From 2008 through 2014, commercial watermen in...
Fisheries management is increasingly being conducted at finer scales of spatial resolution. The spatial distribution of fish stocks is recognized as being an important aspect of stock abundance and spatial management tools, such as marine reserves, have become common. Information on the spatial distribution of fishing effort is critical to...
We empirically disentangle the efficiency mechanism of revenue sharing, in which a group of harvesters shares catch and/or revenue among members of a fishery cooperative, by incorporating the influence of social capital. In addition to each of revenue sharing and social capital influencing a fishery independently we hypothesize social capital...
The traceability practices of 48 seafood businesses were assessed as part of an evaluation of nine global seafood value chains (from harvest to retail). The research was conducted through direct interviews and written surveys in order to assess the reasons why traceability systems were used to strengthen business performance. The...
Climate change and continued fishing pressure threaten to increase recruitment variability for many stocks globally. Shifts in the inter-annual stability of an exploitable renewable resource may have dramatic consequences for the industries and communities which depend upon them. In this talk, the link between resource volatility and industry structure is...
Data scarcity and weak institutional governance make the implementation of top-down, quota-based fisheries management in much of the developing world’s fisheries difficult. An alternative to quota-based management is the use of space-based rights such as territorial use rights fisheries (TURFs). In spite of wide spread use of TURFs as a...
National Standard 1 states that a primary function of fisheries management in the single stock case is the determination of the annual allowable harvest, and it is based on the selection of a target stock size and a control rule that will specify a harvest path that that will cause...
Cooperatives in the Rights-based Fisheries Management have the potential to overcome some of the limitations of Individual Transferrable Quotas. The New England groundfish sector management, a new regime under which fishermen can voluntarily form sectors with each sector constrained by a total allowable catch or Annual Catch Entitlement (ACE), is...
The Pacific sardine fishery is shared but independently managed by three nations: Canada, USA and Mexico. As a result, potential conflict scenarios may arise. A stochastic optimal control methodology is presented to analyze potential conflict scenarios by first considering a deterministic logistic stock growth function and adding a stochastic term,...
As fisheries management becomes more collaborative by seeking input and involvement from stakeholders, it is important to understand and address the diversity of those stakeholders. Gulf Coast fisheries communities include diverse racial and ethnic groups, particularly a large number of Vietnamese Americans involved in all aspects of the seafood industry....
During the first three years (2007-2009) of the Gulf of Mexico red snapper IFQ program most quota lease trades were local, involving fishers that lived in the same communities. In 2010, the red snapper quota lease market changed as more IFQ participants began trading quota with fishers from different regions...
Ecosystem externalities arise when one use of an ecosystem affects its other uses through the production functions of the ecosystem. We use simulations from a size-spectrum ecosystem model to investigate the ecosystem externality created by fishing of multiple species. The model is based upon general ecological principles and is calibrated...
Almost one half of the EEZs of the world are subject to so-called foreign fishing arrangements (FFAs), in which foreign fishing states (distant water fishing states in particular) gain access to EEZs under access arrangements with the relevant coastal states. The FFAs may take the form of “fee fishing” arrangements,...
Recreational fishing for popular species like red snapper and grouper in the Gulf of Mexico has followed a familiar pattern to that observed in many commercial fisheries: fishing under regulated open access has promoted a “race to the fish” with cascades of shorter seasons, shrinking bag limits, and significant fishery...
In this paper we measure the value of sanitary restrictions in terms of forgone profits. For this we model the trade-off between biosecurity and profits in the salmon aquaculture industry. We introduce the concept of “sanitary desirable volume” of the salmon industry, as a goal in a bi-objective model. We...
Over the last decade direct exports to China and Hong Kong of Pacific Geoduck have grown to encompass more than 80 percent of U.S. geoduck production. In December 2013 China shut its doors to U.S. geoduck over possible arsenic contamination and imports from the U.S. fell from over 250 MT...
"Rationalization” or the change to catch share management in fisheries has been shown to lead to the slowing of fishing activity, input and effort consolidation, cost savings, as well as new market and product development. The effects of rationalization on fishermen’s behavior become more complex when one accounts for the...
Electronic monitoring (EM) systems hold promise for the future collection of fishery-dependent data, either to supplement human at-sea observers or replace them. Several pilot studies have been conducted on EM in the New England groundfish fleet, though there are still on the water operational and shore-side protocols to further test...
Fishing impacts biodiversity on multiple levels, potentially resulting in unintended feedbacks to economic performance of the fishery over time. For example, targeting observable traits within a population can impact genetic diversity, targeting populations within a species can impact population diversity, and targeting valuable species can impact biodiversity at the ecosystem...
Fisheries sustainability is a much sought-after goal. Yet, “sustainability” is often too ambiguously defined to be of much practical guidance to policymakers. Furthermore, fisheries managers are increasingly expected to assess and manage fisheries in an “ecosystem-based” manner – accounting for the ecological interdependencies of species and their coupling with the...
In 2011 an individual fishing quota (IFQ) system was implemented for the limited entry trawl component of the Pacific groundfish fishery in the US. The IFQ system allocates quota shares (QS) for 29 IFQ stocks and individual bycatch quota (IBQ) shares for Pacific halibut. Each year quota shareholders are issued...
In an environment of limited resources and expanded management expectations, fisheries regulators face hard decisions about how intensively to regulate different stocks. The Fishery Management Councils are required to regulate harvest of all stocks in a sustainable manner, but have discretion on how much regulatory effort to invest in individual...
A brief overview of changes in the distribution of permanent entry permits in Alaska’s limited fisheries is provided in this presentation. From 1975 to 2014, 79 permit types have been issued in 65 fisheries. This presentation provides an overview of Alaska’ limited entry program, gives statewide data and some fishery-specific...
The paper analyzes a situation in which the fishing fleet is subject to restrictive regulation regarding the harvest of its primal target species due to biological overfishing that in turn reveals a high level of overcapacity. The goal is to model fishermen’s expectations and likely responses to the government initiated...
Multispecies fisheries pose a considerable management difficulty with respect to quota allocation between species. Externalities of direct control over the harvest may include, among others, creation of unbalanced predator‐prey relationships in the environment. That, in turn, may affect the individual economic incentives of fishing vessels. Combining economic and ecological factors...
Many of the tangible benefits of catch share programs (e.g., reducing overcapacity) are dependent on the trading of shares. Additional trading-related questions (such as whether landings will change port or be concentrated geographically) are also important to the overall evaluation of a fishery, but are often asked only during post-implementation...
Purchases made by marine recreational anglers are an important source of economic activity in coastal areas around the United States. In recognition of the economic contributions anglers make to coastal state economies, NOAA Fisheries conducts surveys every three to five years in order to gather data on expenditures made by...
The Baltic fishery is managed under the European Union Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) which defines procedures for setting annual total allowable catches (TAC) for major commercially harvested species. TACs are given as fixed shares to each member state by applying the principal of relative stability. Poland uses non-tradable individual vessel...
New Bedford’s share of Atlantic sea scallops landings and revenues increased from 44% in 1996 to 67% in 2013. Explanations for industrial agglomerations often focus on the relative importance of natural advantage and economies of scale or scope. We use the absolute and relative Theil indices of disproportionality to examine...
From 2012 through 2013, NOAA Fisheries Service conducted a study to collect participation, effort, and expenditure information related to ocean recreation activities in the United States. This study collected information from all 50 states and the District of Columbia in six, two-month waves. There were eight ocean recreation categories of...
Sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) are distributed from Japan to Baja California. Alaska is the world’s principal supplier of sablefish with the majority of commercial landings occurring in the Gulf of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. This demersal, long-lived fish is in one of Alaska’s highest value commercial fisheries. In terms of...
This research analyzes the effects that a redistributive fishing quota policy, within a collective rights quota assignment system, might have on the profits and employment of artisanal fisher organizations. The Chilean authorities have been pursuing a deliberate quota redistributive policy between ship-owners of different vessel categories. This policy has affected...
Atlantic sea scallop fisheries in Iceland and the United States have been subject to outbreaks of ‘gray meat’, a disease caused by infestation by a new species of apicomplexan parasite that causes progressive myodegeneration of scallop meats that kills scallops and reduces recruitment. Due to reduced exvessel value, fishermen discard...
In this paper we study whether environmental bureaucrats share preferences for environmental policy with the general public. We use the choice experiment method to elicit preferences for improvements in coastal cod abundance along the Swedish West coast. This is done for the general public, Swedish EPA (SEPA) bureaucrats, and for...
The North Atlantic U.S. groundfish and scallop processing industries are a tale of two fisheries. The groundfish processing industry has suffered a steep, almost continual decline in landings starting in 1984 that resulted in 2014 landings that were only 16% of 1983 landings. US scallop landings increased from 5 million...
Alaska is the largest seafood producing state in the US. In 2013, Alaska landed 1.88 billion USD worth of seafood, with a volume of 2.63 million MT. This consists of 34% of the total value and 60% of the total volume landed in the US. Of the top 20 fishing...
The great earthquake that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, triggered a nuclear power plant accident. As a consequence, many marine product processing industries and fishery resources were damaged. This paper discusses the determinants of the rumors related to the radioactivity, which seem to affect the purchase decisions of processed...
Commercial fishing is generally hazardous, but some types of commercial fishing are more dangerous than other types. Since much of the fishing industry is composed of small family-owned businesses, commercial fishermen have to rely on the private health insurance markets, health insurance offered through a landside job, spouses’ plans, social...
The Agricultural Act of 2014 (Public Law 113-79) amended legislation regarding the U.S. catfish inspection program to include “all fish of the order Siluriformes,” encompassing imported species: basa, tra, and pangasius. Furthermore, the amendment finalized the transition of catfish and catfish-like product inspection responsibilities to the USDA Food Safety and...
The potential economic impact of a fully developed mariculture industry in Alaska is not well understood by industry or policy makers. It is also not entirely clear what is needed to move from Alaska’s current micro industry (approximately $500,000 in annual sales) to a fully developed industry. In general, the...
Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia have all developed nutrient trading programs to defray the cost of achieving mandated nitrogen load reductions in Chesapeake Bay, and there is increasing interest in the role oysters can play in generating credits. A number of bioeconomic models highlight the impact these credits have...