Evaluating methods for setting catch limits in data-limited fisheries

By Tom R. Carruthers, André E. Punt, Carl J Walters, A. MacCall, M. Mcallister, E. Dick, J. Cope. 2014

263 citations recorded by the source corpus.

a b s t r a c t The majority of global fish stocks lack adequate data to evaluate stock status using conventional stock assessment methods. This poses a challenge for the sustainable management of these stocks. Recent requirements to set scientifically based catch limits in several countries, and growing consumer demand for sustainably managed fish have spurred an emerging field of methods for estimating overfishing thresholds and setting catch limits for stocks with limited data. Using a management strategy evaluation framework we quantified the performance of a number of data-limited methods. For most life-histories, we found that methods that made use of only historical catches often performed worse than maintaining current fishing levels. Only those methods that dynamically accounted for changes in abundance and/or depletion performed well at low stock sizes. Stock assessments that make use of historical catch and effort data did not necessarily out-perform simpler data-limited methods that made use of fewer data. There is a high value of additional information regarding stock depletion, historical fishing effort and current abundance when only catch data are available. We discuss the implications of our results for other data-limited methods and identify future research priorities.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e232fbf17444e44459508ff9d2129163b8baec7

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In Ecology

In Global and Planetary Change

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Management strategy evaluation: best practices (2016, methodology): “2010), this is often computationally impossible except when the management strategies being evaluated are fairly simple (Carruthers et al. 2014), and even then, conducting a MSE could be very computer-intensive depending on how many trials are run.”
Stock assessment in inland fisheries: a foundation for sustainable use and conservation (2016, background): “However, inland fisheries are not simply equivalent to data- and capacity-poor marine fisheries, the assessment of which is a very active research area (Carruthers et al. 2014; Chrysafi and Kuparinen 2016).”
Estimating Fisheries Reference Points from Catch and Resilience (2017, methodology): “…model of recruitment has been proposed by Barrowman and Myers (2000), and a threshold around half of Bmsy has been widely adopted as a limit reference point for recruitment overfishing (Beddington and Cooke 1983; Myers et al. 1994; Punt et al. 2013; Carruthers et al. 2014; Froese et al. 2016a,b).”