Biomass management targets and the conservation and economic benefits of marine reserves

The establishment of no-take marine reserves has been increasingly promoted as a key measure to achieve conservation and sustainability goals in fisheries. Regardless of the wide range of benefits cited, the effectiveness of reserve establishment depends critically on fisheries management outside the reserves. We construct a bioeconomic model of a fishery that allows for the establishment of a no-take marine reserve and evaluate how the choice of the off-reserve management target influences the effectiveness of reserve establishment. We evaluate two biomass targets: (i) BMSY or the biomass that produces the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) and (ii) BMEY or the biomass that maximizes the net present value of the returns to fishing. The parameterized model shows that, for a wide range of scenarios, the fishery will be better off in terms of both conservation and economic objectives when the no-take reserve is established in conjunction with the BMEY target rather than with the BMSY target. Model results further show that the opportunity cost of securing additional fish biomass, in both deterministic and stochastic environments, is lower when the reserve size is increased under the BMEY target. This finding is important because marine reserves have been established as a key measure to restore depleted fish stocks, and the results suggest that this objective can be achieved with lower economic costs in a BMEY managed fishery

Building blocks of economic resilience to climate change: a south east Australian fisheries example

Climate change will impact on ecological, social, and economic elements of fisheries; however, the three are seldom considered in an integrated fashion. We develop a fishery-level assessment of economic resilience to climate change for the Tasmanian rock lobster fishery, a linked social-ecological system. We outline the main climate change forcing influences that link climate change to the fishery via changes in lobster abundance, distribution, and phenology. Using a bottom-up approach, we identify twelve economic attributes strongly related to the fisheries' economic resilience to climate change. Resilience attributes are grouped according to the level of the economic domain (business, sectoral, and governance). Attributes are then evaluated to determine the overall economic resilience of the rock lobster fishery in the context of the specific nature of predicted climate change effects. We identify areas of low resilience in the economic sub-system for this fishery. Evaluating the economic resilience of regional fisheries using this integrated, interdisciplinary framework provides a practical, parsimonious, and conceptually sound basis for undertaking comprehensive and contextually tailored assessments of climate change impacts and economic vulnerability. The framework can be extended to include a broader range of climate change impacts and the social domain of the human sub-system. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Ingrid E. van Putten, Sarah Jennings, Stewart Frusher, Caleb Gardner, Marcus Haward, Alistair J. Hobday, Melissa Nursey-Bray, Gretta Pecl, André Punt, Hilary Revil

Nature Reserves as a Bioeconomic Management Tool: A Simplified Modelling Approach

Extinction, Marine reserve, Maximum sustainable yield, Nature reserve, Resource management, Wildlife reserve, Q20,