Empirical survey-based harvest control rules in a transboundary small pelagic fishery under recruitment regime shifts: The case of the northern Chilean-southern Peruvian anchovy

Abstract

The management of small pelagic fisheries is a complex task due to its large variability of both environmental and biological processes. This high variability can impact the reliability of stock assessment models and fishery management recommendations. When this occurs, management decisions should explore alternative control rules based on empirical abundance indices or pragmatic management procedures. In this paper, we examined the performance of a harvest control rule (HCR) for the Chilean fleet in the shared Chile-Peru anchovy (Engraulis ringens) fishery (16°S–24°S), which is one of the most important stocks in the Humboldt marine ecosystem in the Southeast Pacific. The HCR uses the annual changes in spawning biomass estimated by Daily Egg Production Method (DEPM) surveys in the waters off northern Chile. Analyzes are carried out through operating models simulating population regime shifts under different uncertainty sources. The results show that despite the latent risk of overfishing caused both by recruitment variability and the lack of fisheries management coordination between two jurisdictions, the control of one of the parties' fishing mortality can enable the sustainability of the entire stock, provided the fishing effort of the other jurisdiction be remained at similar levels as in the last decade. The use of an HCR would avoid increases in fishing mortality and would facilitate BMSY-based management goals. This research determined conditions under which the shared Chile-Peru anchovy fishery can be sustainable considering different sources of uncertainty of the biological-fishing system.