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State-of-the-art science is helping to improve operational forecasting of floods, drought conditions, and water resources, delivering more precise and accessible information to customers.

Resource managers and policy makers have long recognized the importance of considering fisheries in the context of ecosystems; yet, movement towards widespread Ecosystem-based Fisheries Management (EBFM) has been slow. A conceptual reframing of fisheries management is occurring globally, which envisions fisheries as systems with interacting biophysical and human subsystems. This broader view, along with a process for decision making, can facilitate implementation of EBFM. A pathway to achieve these broadened objectives of EBFM in the United States is a Fishery Ecosystem Plan (FEP). The first generation of FEPs was conceived in the late 1990s as voluntary guidance documents that Regional Fishery Management Councils could adopt to develop and guide their ecosystem-based fisheries management decisions, but few of these FEPs took concrete steps to implement EBFM. Here, we emphasize the need for a new generation of FEPs that provide practical mechanisms for putting EBFM into practice in the United States. We argue that next-generation FEPs can balance environmental, economic, and social objectives-the triple bottom line-to improve long-term planning for fishery systems.

Most regulation studies have used industry output or inputs as the control variable(s), but these are only indirectly controlled by government action through its choice of governing instrument, enforcement procedure, and penalty structure and the operational level of each. A model is developed which demonstrates how profit-maximizing firms will react to these control variables taking into account the benefits (extra production) and costs (possible penalties) of noncompliance and the ability to avoid detection of noncompliance. The optimal operation level for two sets of control variables is derived and discussed.