Responsive harvest control rules provide inherent resilience to adverse effects of climate change and scientific uncertainty

Abstract

Climate change is altering marine ecosystem and fish stock dynamics worldwide. These effects add to scientific uncertainties that compromise fisheries management. Among the strategies that can respond to climate change and scientific uncertainty, modifications to harvest control rules (HCRs) might be among the most direct and impactful. We used a bioeconomic model to compare alternative HCRs in terms of biomass, yield, and profits in response to potential effects of climate change and scientific uncertainty, specifically simulated retrospective patterns, for 14 stocks on the Northeast Shelf of the United States. Our results suggest that a responsive HCR in which fishing mortality changes with measured changes in biomass builds inherent resilience to adverse effects of both climate change and scientific uncertainty relative to an HCR in which fishing mortality is precautionary but fixed. This was despite that fact that the HCR algorithm did not account for the climate effects modelled. A fixed fishing mortality HCR was effective when climate effects were negligible or beneficial. Scientific uncertainty further reduced biomass, yield, and profits by about the same magnitude as climate change. Our results suggest that simple changes to HCRs can be a readily implementable strategy for responding to climate change and scientific uncertainty.

Heuristics for the sustainable harvest of wildlife in stochastic social-ecological systems

“…Our results suggest that management of slower life-history species should be particularly concerned about low population sizes: recovery from these could be lengthy (Kritzer, Costello, Mangin, & Smith, 2019). In 'faster' species recovering from extreme low populations, harvest strategy trades off speed, magnitude, and likelihood of recovery with harvest early in the time period, a trade-off likely to depend on the productivity of the population (Babcock, McAllister, & Pikitch, 2007).…”

A real‐time PCR assay to detect predation by spiny dogfish on Atlantic cod in the western North Atlantic Ocean

“…However, regulations designed to control fishing have not led to rebuilding cod populations (Kritzer, Costello, Mangin, & Smith, 2019). Other factors that may be holding back population rebounds of cod include disruption of spawning aggregations (Armstrong et al, 2013;Dean, Hoffman, & Armstrong, 2012;Dean, Hoffman, Zemeckis, & Armstrong, 2014), warming trends that reduce habitat suitability (Adams et al, 2018;Kritzer et al, 2019), predation by planktivores such as Atlantic herring, Clupea harengus, or Atlantic mackerel (Bakun, 2006) ing fishing boats or a fishery-independent platform. The existing NEFSC bottom trawl survey has specific advantages because it is already operational, it covers nearly the entire geographic range of dogfish, and it is the source that generated the existing reference consumption rates (Link et al, 2002;Smith & Link, 2010).…”

Ecosystem-Based Harvest Control Rules for Norwegian and US Ecosystems

“…We adopt lessons learned from other (mostly single-species) MSE efforts in terms of how to score, plot, and summarize model performance. Overall, there is recognition that harvest control rules are key tools for achieving ecosystem-based fisheries management goals such as coping with climate change (Kritzer et al, 2019), and for implementing the precautionary approach (Punt, 2006). Below we demonstrate that applying end-to-end "operating models" allows simulation testing of novel harvest control rules that include ecosystem considerations, and allows us to screen the implications of those rules on the ecosystem level.…”

“…In the context of harvest control rules for single species, other authors have pointed out the dangers of mis-identifying shifts in recruitment and their underlying mechanisms (Haltuch and Punt, 2011;Szuwalski and Punt, 2012), and the importance of timely action in relation to climate and productivity shifts (Brown et al, 2012). However, Kritzer et al (2019) showed that a simple threshold control rule outperformed fixed fishing mortality for a range of species in the face of directional climate-induced changes in stock productivity. This suggests that simple threshold control rules may be sufficient in many cases.…”