A summary is presented of the efforts by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to determine which fishery-management measures are effective in conserving marine fisheries and in producing significant economic and social benefits, based on analyses of more than 100 fisheries in 24 OECD member countries. The evidence on management experiences is organized to focus on o...

The U.S. Atlantic large coastal shark fishery grew rapidly during the 1980s when commercial landings increased from 135 metric tons (t) in 1979 to a high of 7122 t in 1989 (NMFS, 1993). In 1993, a quota of 2750 t was established; in 1997 this quota was halved to 1375 t in order to rebuild depleted shark stocks. This fishery targets several species of sharks that are valued for fins (exported to...

Fishery management complexity conspires to defeat seemingly obvious solutions to overfishing. Management may not adequately include decisions of fishers, management, and politicians. A new, simple, but acceptably complex fish population model is meshed with both fishery activities and management decision making. The population component is based on the common single stock biomass dynamic model....

As well as serving valuable biodiversity conservation roles, functioning no-take fishery reserves protect a portion of the fishery stock as insurance against future over-fishing. So long as there is adequate compliance by the fishing community, it is likely that they will also sustain and even enhance fishery yields in the surrounding area. However, there are significant gaps in scientific know...

The Pacific Coast groundfish fishery is conducted along the entire coastline of Washington, Oregon, and California, and includes a diverse range of habitats, species, and participants. The Pacific Fishery Management Council’s (PFMC) Groundfish Fishery Management Plan (FMP) contains more than 90 species organized into several sub-fisheries, including 1) the Dover sole, thornyheads, and sablefish...

An ecosystem approach is widely seen as a desirable goal for fisheries management but there is little consensus on what strategies or measures are needed to achieve it. Management strategy evaluation (MSE) is a tool that has been widely used to develop and test single species fisheries management strategies and is now being extended to support ecosystem based fisheries management (EBFM). We des...

Climate change is expected to influence spatial and temporal distributions of fish stocks. The aim of this paper is to compare climate change impact on a fishery with other factors impacting the performance of fishing fleets. The fishery in question is the Northeast Arctic cod fishery, a well-documented fishery where data on spatial and temporal distributions are available. A cellular automata ...

Fishery-management policies based on the allocation of exclusive fishing rights, territorial use rights, and sea zoning are recurrent tools for achieving sustainability. In Chile, the 1991 Fishery and Aquaculture Law reformed division of the right to fish between the artisan and industrial subsectors, introduced sea-zoning (spacebased) strategies, and established a differential individual trans...

The Fishery Research Program (FRP) of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission includes as a research theme area “The Human Dimensions of Great Lakes Fisheries Management.” The term human dimensions refers to how and why humans value natural resources, how humans want resources managed, and how humans affect or are affected by natural resources management decisions. Human dimensions inquiries strive ...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are becoming a favoured management strategy for the conservation of marine biodiversity. We present an analysis of how fishery data from a trawl fishery in northern Australia can contribute to the process of developing a system of candidate MPAs. We investigate ways of using fishing grounds, bioregion and depth information as a means of classifying ecosystems, and ...