Assessment of Alternative Harvest Regulations for Sustaining Recreational Fisheries: Model Development and Application to Bull Trout

Abstract
Regulations designed to protect recreational fisheries from overexploitation can fail. Regulations such as size and bag limits restrict harvest by individual anglers but not angler effort and therefore not total harvest. Even when individual harvest limits are set to zero (i.e., catch and release), a combination of hooking mortality and noncompliance may lead to fishing mortality rates that are not sustainable if angling effort is sufficiently high. These assertions were tested and quantified by using simulation experiments on a size- and age-structured model developed for a fishery on an adfluvial bull trout population. The functions and rates describing the biology and fishery were derived from a variety of sources, including published and unpublished information on bull trout and, where such sources were unavailable, from other salmonid species. The model predicts that a 40-cm minimum size limit for harvest would maintain viable populations at an annual effort up to 4 angler-hours · ha−1 · yea...