Marine reserves are areas of the sea where fishing is not allowed. They provide refuges where populations of exploited species can recover and habitats modified by fishing can regenerate. In some places, closed areas have been used for fisheries management for centuries [1] and, until recently, natural refugia also existed, inaccessible through depth, distance or adverse conditions. Development...

Although a consensus in marine science is developing on the need to adopt ecosystem-based fishery management, few studies try to quantify the contextspecific gains from implementing it. Using a multi-species bioeconomic model for a Caribbean reef community, we determine the optimal harvesting rates for predator and prey species and ask how this more comprehensive optimization differs from tradi...

Ecosystem-based fishery management (EBFM) requires taking account of indirect effects (such as habitat destruction, incidental mortality, and competition between the fishery and marine mammals or birds) and dealing with non-commensurate values (such as yield from the fishery and production of offspring by the birds or mammals competing for the same resource). The perspective of EBFM requires th...

The brown sea cucumber fishery is active in the Galapagos Islands since the year 1991 after its collapse in mainland Ecuador. This paper analyzes the Galapagos Sea cucumber fishery over the past decade and the reasons for its management pitfalls and chronic over fishing, and proposes an improved strategy for estimating stock size and harvest potential. Based on the historical distribution of th...

The Spencer Gulf penaeid prawn fishery in South Australia has undergone a substantial increase in fishing efficiency (and profitability) mainly due to the implementation of adaptive harvest strategies requiring rapid response for change to harvesting plans. This paper describes the management background and the decision-making process leading to the development of a basic Decision Support Syste...

Fishery Management in Data-Limited Situations: Applications to Stock Assessment, Marine Reserve Design, and Fish Bycatch Policy by Kate I. Siegfried In 1996, the United States Congress updated the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act with the Sustainable Fisheries Act (SFA), which calls for the minimization of bycatch, an attention to efficiency, and the use of the best avai...

In the process of implementing marine reserves, policy makers typically are occupied with (1) choosing the spatial configuration of areas to protect and (2) addressing the concerns of fishermen regarding the effects of proposed reserves on fishery yield. The spatial configuration is typically set by choosing the habitat, species, and ecosystems to protect, assuming that the associated species w...