PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 27: Marine Populations Under Harvest
Monday, August 8, 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM, Meeting Room 519 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Modeling the spatial patterns of harvesting effort and fish in response to marine protected area establishment.
Kellner, Julie*,1, Nisbet, Roger2, Gaines, Steve2, 1 University of California, Davis, Davis, CA2 University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA
ABSTRACT- The interplay between fish movement and harvesting effort is a key mechanism driving the effectiveness of marine reserves to maintain fish stocks and supplement fishery yield. Using spatially-explicit models, we predict the optimal distribution of fishing effort near marine reserves for competitive and cooperative fisheries and compare how these harvesting strategies shape the distribution of fish within marine protected areas and across their boundaries. We show that (1) the optimal harvesting strategy for both competitive and cooperative fisheries includes a "fishing-the-line" component (i.e. fishing effort concentrated at the reserve boundary); (2) cooperative fisheries should allocate a large proportion of their fishing effort at the reserve boundary to maximize the spillover rate of fish from the protected area to the surrounding exploited area; and (3) competitive fisheries should also allocate a substantial proportion of the total fishing effort to harvesting at the reserve boundary, but this allocation of effort is lower than that of the cooperative fisheries. Additionally, these results of differing intensity in allocation of fishing effort can lead to strikingly disparate patterns of fish density and yield away from the marine reserve boundary for competitive versus cooperative fisheries. These findings are compared to empirical patterns of fish density near marine reserves, and highlight the need for both theoretical and empirical studies to more accurately portray the spatial distribution of harvesting effort.
Key words: marine protected areas, fishing-the-line, competitive fishery