Value of Short-Term Forecasts of Recruitment Variation for Harvest Management

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Abstract
The expected improvement in management performance due to using short-term forecasts can be assessed with stochastic dynamic programming. Numerical studies on test cases indicate that this improvement depends strongly on average productivity and on the flexibility of the inseason regulatory system that is used to adjust stock size estimates and target harvests within each year. For productive stocks that are managed with flexible inseason systems, such as larger Pacific salmon stocks, only modest improvements in average yield (5–10%) can be expected from improved forecasting. Very large (30–50%) improvements would be possible in principle for such stocks if they were managed with inflexible annual quotas set before each fishing season (as would happen for example under some proposals for improving economic performance through vessel quotas), but only if perfect preseason forecasting were practical. For unproductive stocks (where harvest rates are always low), only modest improvements (5–15%) can be expected from short-term forecasting, no matter what inseason regulatory system is used.

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