SOFish ver. 1.2 - A Decision Support System for Fishery Managers in Managing Complex Fish Stocks

Sustainability is an important issue in a fishery industry. A manager of the fishery industry is responsible in deciding the best harvest that is able to sustain the industry while it should also guarantee the profitability of the industry. The most used concept in determining the best harvest in many fisheries industries is the Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY). It represents the maximum amount of biomass that can be taken out from the fish population without harming the sustainability of the fishery. In other words, it is used to keep the population size stay over a threshold value of population level whenever harvesting activities is going on until indefinite time. In this paper we discuss a Decision Support System (DSS) for fishery managers in estimating the best harvest in a fishery industry. The best harvest is known as the Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) of the fishery. The DSS produces the MSY based on the discretization of some mathematical models of population growth, including the most popular models, such as Verhulst, Gompertz and Richards models. We also adding a biological complexity into the models, i.e. the presence of various degree of intra-specific competition of the population, which enhances the realism of the model and the DSS..