Importance of Stability Analysis for Sustainable Fisheries in the Absence of Important Data

Abstract

Assessment of fish stocks is especially important to avoid overfishing and obtain sustainable fishing policies, and there are many stock assessment methods such as XSA, VPA, BMS, CMSY, and MSVPA to analyze fish stocks. However, these assessment methods require an important amount of data for fish stocks such as diet data, natural mortality, fishing mortality, abundance index of species, predator ratio estimates, and so on. Unfortunately, we do not have such data for most of the fish stocks, and obtaining such data requires an important amount of money and time, but we still can predict important information about fish stocks such as biomass of fish stocks, the maximum sustainable yield, the biomass of fish lost or gained due to predator-prey relations, and even can track the effect of harvesting on predator-prey relations by building a mathematical model for fish populations and implementing a stability analysis. To obtain these outputs, we only need landing data and implement a parameter estimation constrained on stability conditions derived from the stability analysis of the mathematical model. Shortly, this study shows us how important stability analysis is to obtain important information about fish populations in the absence of important data.