Bycatch is repeatedly noted as a primary problem of fisheries management
and as the foremost negative impact of commercial fishing. In the Bering
Sea pollock fishery, salmon bycatch reduction measures have included gear
modifications but have principally consisted of area closures. Bycatch
levels of chum and Chinook salmon have risen...
With the creation of multi-species catch share programs, halibut bycatch reduction efforts, and through actions to reduce Chinook and chum salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska pollock fisheries, we have seen a variety of new bycatch management programs implemented over the last decade in Alaska. The...
In the 1990s the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council and the National Marine Fisheries Service established regulations to limit the amount of Chinook and chum salmon taken as bycatch in Bering Sea trawl fisheries. The Bering Sea pollock fishery has in recent years (2002-2005) caught a significant number of sockeye...
For every fish species, future potential harvests are impacted by current
catch levels and patterns. Traditionally, managers use regulations on gear
(e.g., mesh size) to control so-called growth overfishing. Such regulations
are likely economically inefficient due to increased search costs and lower
catch rates. Bioeconomic models typically evaluate efficiency for...
Fisheries managers around the world have identified bycatch as a key management challenge in fisheries today. However, like the classic common property open-access problem in fisheries, a limit on fleet-wide bycatch may have similar consequences for fishing practices since bycatch is a common property open-access resource. If avoiding bycatch is...
One component of the Bering Sea Integrated Ecosystem Research Project
(BSIERP) is a spatial economic model that predicts changes in fishing
activity in the Bering Sea pollock fishery that may result from climate
change. Models such as the one employed here have been used in the
Bering Sea and elsewhere...
In the quest to limit the bycatch of non-target species, marine protected
areas (MPAs) have been frequently utilized. MPAs are popular with
ecologists and fishery managers because of their relative ease of
administration, habitat protection benefits, and the widespread acceptance
of MPAs as an instrument of choice for the ecosystem...
After salmon bycatch levels reached record levels in 2006 and 2007 in the
Bering Sea pollock fishery, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council
(NPFMC) began consideration of a hard cap that would close the fishery if
it were reached. The NPFMC asked for input from economists at the
National Marine...
Pollock recruitment and biomass in the Bering Sea has fluctuated in concert with environmental changes since the early 2000s. As pollock spatial distributions, densities, and abundances varied, fishers have adjusted their fishing behavior. Utilizing ~30,000 trips made by Bering Sea pollock catcher vessels from 2003 – 2014, we found strong...
Spatial closures are a prominent tool for ecosystem-based management in commercial fisheries. The potential benefits of spatial closures in commercial fisheries have been discussed thoroughly in the literature; however, empirical estimates of the potential short-run costs incurred by the commercial fishing industry are relatively scarce. Spatial closures constrain the ability...
Bioeconomic modeling of an age-structured population typically assumes the value of a fish increases with size; the fish increase in weight as they age, and harvesters may receive an increase in the price per weight. When size selectivity is possible, traditional policy such as individual quotas may still result in...
Economists and biologists have recognized that spatial and temporal area-closures may provide an effective means of managing the impact that fisheries have on one another and upon threatened species. To date, however, little work has been done to estimate the economic impact of protected areas on commercial fishing. One significant...
The Alaska non-pollock multi-species catcher processor trawl fishery, referred to as the Amendment 80 fishery since 2008, is an endlessly fascinating subject from the perspective of an economist. A diverse group of companies and vessels, emphasizing different species mixes from a multi-species ecosystem, targets fish across the Eastern Bering Sea,...
In the European Union (EU), marine resource management policies and legislation include not only environmental objectives but also a broad range of explicitly stated economic, social and institutional (ESI) goals, objectives and priorities. Although the environmental objectives often guide scientific assessments, the ESI objectives are often the primary drivers of...
We describe the dynamics by which competing harvesters selectively target prime market-sized fish, without internalizing the externality of increasing targeting costs, as the abundance of prime fish decreases. Due to the increasing targeting costs for prime size, harvesters continually target the next-most-desirable size fish, gradually fishing down the size structure...
Multispecies fisheries add additional complexity for rights-based management implementation. Imperfectly selective fishing gear may make it difficult for fishermen to match their catch composition with the portfolio of total allowable catches chosen by management. If fishermen can perfectly target their catch, the problem of matching catches with quota allocations declines...
This talk will introduce the special session on the Economics of Bycatch. It will provide an overview of the session. It will then discuss in general terms a variety of incentive-based approaches to managing bycatch that give vessels greater flexibility to devise cost-effective solutions of their own making. These include...
Metabolomics is a comprehensive analysis of small molecules, or metabolites, in a system. Metabolomics is a hypothesis-generating experiment and offers an unbiased analysis of cell metabolism that can aid in the understanding of fundamental biological processes. Metabolomics is widely and broadly applicable in the biological sciences and has been used...
This document provides a summary of a Special Session held at the IIFET 2016 Scotland conference in July 2016. The registration number and title of the special session were 5313: Analyzing behavioral responses to regulation – what can be learned for management? The session was organized by Florian K. Diekert,...