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...
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...
It is rarely possible or desirable to maintain a constant target fishing mortality rate for each individual stock in a multispecies fishery. Preventing overfishing of all stocks at all times will often be in conflict with attainment of optimal yield for the fishery. This paper presents a retrospective analysis and...
Fishery managers in the United States are required to identify and limit adverse consequences of fishing on essential fish habitat. We propose a cap-and-trade system for habitat conservation that would utilize economic incentives to achieve habitat conservation goals cost effectively. Individual quotas of habitat impact units (HIU) would be distributed...
Fisheries management is complicated in nearly all fisheries by various types of uncertainty. Numerous economics and fisheries science publications prescribe adjustments to harvest strategies in the face of uncertainty. The conclusions and recommendations from this body of work are conflicting in many cases, are often dependent on critical but unrealistic...
In the absence of formal insurance, fishers often ”self-insure” against financial risk due to environmental and economic factors by adjusting fishing activities over species, space, and time. This diversification can be effective (e.g., Kasperski and Holland, 2013; Cline, Schindler, and Hilborn, 2017; Sethi, Dalton, and Hilborn, 2012; Fuller et al.,...
Pursuit of the triple bottom line of economic, community and ecological sustainability has increased the complexity of fishery management; fisheries assessments require new types of data and analysis to guide science-based policy in addition to traditional biological information and modeling. We introduce the Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs), a broadly applicable...
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 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...