Reconciling fisheries with conservation: match and mismatch between management goals, operational guidelines and data requirements

A.M. PARMA; J.M. ORENSANZ

Vancouver, Canada

Congreso; Fourth World Fisheries Congress; 2004

American Fisheries Society

The demand for reliable data to support fisheries management decisions is pressing and growing, as we become ever more aware of stock assessment weaknesses and as concerns about fishing impacts extend beyond the target species to include broader ecosystem issues. Even for conventional single-species assessments, the data available generally do not meet the standards required to deliver reliable assessments. A welcome response has been an increasing use of empirical knowledge and novel collaborative data-gathering schemes to supplement scientifically-collected data. In terms of harvesting strategies, however, there is a need to develop and implement management schemes that match the data that can realistically be obtained and that are robust to existing uncertainties. Prevailing management approaches involve the determination of allowable annual catches by applying a fishing mortality target to an analytical estimate of stock size each year. These best-assessment approaches are extremely data hungry and their performance deteriorate fast with the standard type of errors that affect fishery statistics. In some cases, rather rigid operational guidelines have been put in place to prevent overfishing, with the downside of generating new demands for parameter estimation often not guaranteed by the data or by the stock characteristics. We argue that more flexible approaches are needed, where management procedures are designed to meet management goals by evaluating candidate harvesting strategies simultaneously with the monitoring schemes needed to implement them. In this way, due emphasis is placed in the collection of adequate data for achieving management goals.