The productivity and resilience of fisheries are subject to a multitude of dynamic and interrelated influences that arise from complex coupling of fish populations with the natural and human systems of which they are a part. With few exceptions, fisheries are managed independently, ignoring important natural and human linkages among...
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...
Although widely accepted, management systems that directly restrict catch or effort are neither efficient nor desirable for many fisheries, and have failed to conserve fishery stocks in many cases. Fisheries scientists have suggested that closing part of the fishery with marine reserves may sustain or increase harvest. These marine reserves...
Individual transferable quotas (ITQs) in multispecies fisheries create incentives for fishermen to avoid bycatch of
species for which quota is scarce. However, when bycatch is highly uncertain, individual quota demand and prices
may be volatile creating substantial financial risk for fishermen. The US Pacific Groundfish fishery recently
introduced an ITQ...
Catches and prices from many fisheries exhibit high inter-annual variability leading to variability in the income derived by fishery participants and communities dependent on the fisheries. The economic risk posed by this variability might be mitigated in some cases if individuals and communities participate in several different fisheries, particularly if...
The US Pacific Whiting fishery is a large industrial fishery with landings over 260 thousand metric tons valued at $64 million in 2014. A catch share system was implemented in the fishery in 2011 with IFQs for shoreside vessels and allocations to a mothership and a catcher-processor cooperative. Bycatch is...
When several new species are introduced into the New Zealand Quota Management System in the near future, some of the quota, or single-year annual catch entitlement (ACE), will be tendered through competitive auctions rather than allocated based on historical catch. This study uses a laboratory experiment calibrated to a representative...
There is currently much national and international interest in measuring commercial fishing capacity. Two quantitative methods that will likely be used for this purpose are data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier (SF) production functions. Although both methods can be used to estimate a production frontier, their underlying assumptions and...
The West Coast salmon fishery presents several complexities that have received little attention in the fisheries economics literature. Two of those complexities are reviewed and analyzed in this dissertation. The first, salmon fishermen participate in alternative fisheries within a season demonstrating a complex switching behavior between different species. Second, the...
Increasingly fishery managers are expected to take an ecosystem approach to fisheries management that accounts for the interrelationships of target species as well as non-target species and habitat. Fishery managers would benefit from coupled ecological-economic models that includes both the human and ecological aspects of the fishery and incorporates them...