Performance review of simple management procedures

Carruthers, Thomas R; Kell, Laurence T; Butterworth, Doug S; Maunder, Mark N; Geromont, Helena F; Walters, Carl; McAllister, Murdoch K; Hillary, Richard; Levontin, Polina; Kitakado, Toshihide; Davies, Campbell R

Performance review of simple management procedures

Journal Article

2015

Journal Title

ICES Journal of Marine Science

Link to Journal

http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/

Publisher

International Council for the Exploration of the Sea

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Marine Resource Assessment and Management Group

Faculty

Faculty of Science

Abstract

Using a management strategy evaluation approach, we compare a range of new and established management procedures (MPs) for setting catch-limits in fisheries. Performance is evaluated with respect to fish life history type, level of stock depletion, data quality, and autocorrelation in recruitment strength. We quantify the robustness of each MP with respect to the various observation processes. Methods using observations of absolute biomass or stock depletion offer the best overall performance and this is consistent across life history types, data qualities, and stock depletion levels. Simple MPs can outperform conventional data-limited methods and data-rich assessments that use time-series of catch and effort data. MP performance is most sensitive to biases in catch data. Our results indicate that often tuning MPs for specific stocks is important, though this may not be viable in data-poor assessment scenarios because of insufficient data and analysis resources.

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