Managing Nonrandomly Varying Fisheries

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Abstract
Theoretical studies indicate that constant effort or constant escapement harvest strategies are viable long-term management policies for fisheries influenced by random environmental variability. But the marine environment and fishery recruitment do not characteristically vary randomly: their time series tend to be autocorrelated. I examined the response of a model of an age-structured fish population to these harvest strategies, if recruitment is influenced by periodic variability. Variance in fish yield and the incidence of low stock size increased with both increasing amplitude and period length of environmental forcing. Sensitivity to environmental fluctuations increased sharply at periodicities between one and several times the generation length. Low-risk fisheries, which are subject to little nonrandom recruitment variability, may be satisfactorily managed by either management strategy, although constant effort harvesting provided greater stability to industry with little risk to the fish population. Neither strategy maintained stability in high-risk fisheries with high-amplitude, low-frequency recruitment variability, but a constant escapement policy minimized risk of stock collapse.