Project Description

One of the objectives for fisheries management world-wide (including those of the National Marine Fisheries Service) is to manage fisheries using what are called global control rules to achieve sustainable harvests. Establishing harvest rates and preventing excessive population reduction are parts of this process. Work in the Systemic Management Studies Program includes defining sustainable harvest rates combined with defining what should sustainably be left for the rest of the ecosystem. Other work focuses on sustainable population reduction that is reductions with effects that can be sustainable endured by ecosystems. The combination of such elements of sustainability make up the global control rules used in fishery management. Using established principles of management, a project is under way to define changes needed in existing global control rules.

Issues & Justification

Sustainable fishing practices are central to the objectives of fisheries management world-wide, and particularly within NOAA. Ecosystem-based management is one of the approaches espoused by NOAA and other agencies to account for the complexity of natural systems. Global control rules are part of the basis for fisheries management. This project is aimed at developing global control rules that embody not only ecosystem-based management, but also biosphere-based management, so as to adhere to the principles of management developed over the past three decades.

Goals

• To use naturally observed integrative patterns in predation to develop systemic global control rules so as to provide advice for fisheries management that adheres to the general principles of management.
• Publish the results in the peer-reviewed literature.

Methods

Integrative patterns in functional response curves (consumption rates by predators as a function of prey density), and predatory effects on prey populations (degree to which prey populations increase or decrease in reaction to the effects of predators) will be extracted from the ecological literature. The resulting information will be used to contrast global control rules defined on the basis of natural empirical patterns with what is currently used in fisheries management. Advice based on the natural patterns will be developed as a replacement for conventional rules so as to adhere to the principles of management developed in the last several decades.