Socio-Ecological Outcomes of Single-Species Fisheries Management: The Case of Yellow Perch in Lake Erie

Katherine Lee,Hongyan Zhang,Jenny Apriesnig

doi:10.3389/fevo.2021.703813

Abstract

This manuscript uses seminal models in fisheries economics to assess the ecosystem effects of policy focused on sustainable management of a single fish stock. Economic models representing fishing decisions under open access and two fisheries management schemes are parameterized using data from the four management units in the Lake Erie Yellow Perch (Persus flavenscens) fishery and linked with an end-to-end ecosystem model representative of the lake food web and spatial species interactions. We find that the sustainable harvest rules from single species economic models result in significant changes to biomass of species in planktivorous, omnivorous, and piscivorous groups in the ecosystem model. These impacts can be traced through the food web back to harvest rules implemented in the management units. Most notably, the biomass of several non-target but also commercially harvested fish species are reduced through Yellow Perch fishing. In some cases, the economic losses to coexisting fisheries exceeds benefits gained from implementing the Yellow Perch management scheme. Our results imply that while an ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management requires weighing trade-offs between multiple fisheries, an ex ante understanding of the whole-system consequences of harvest rules can be critical for developing policy that overall enhances ecological and social wellbeing.

Highlights

There is increasing awareness that a single-species focus of fisheries management can lead to undesired impacts on food webs including habitat and overfishing of non-target species (Jennings and Kaiser, 1998; Murawski, 2000; Lotze, 2004; Pikitch et al, 2004)
Effort expended in the open access model exceeds both the individual vessel quotas (IVQs) and individual transferrable quotas (ITQs) levels of effort for each management unit and decision period (Figure 2, Panel A) which aligns with the existing literature
Following the fisheries bioeconomics literature to understand incentives faced by fishing vessels and general framework for management for many fisheries, we assessed the value of singlespecies management in the Lake Erie Yellow Perch fishery and find that both the IVQ and ITQ systems create positive and significant but heterogeneous changes to profit across the four management units

Summary

Introduction

There is increasing awareness that a single-species focus of fisheries management can lead to undesired impacts on food webs including habitat and overfishing of non-target species (Jennings and Kaiser, 1998; Murawski, 2000; Lotze, 2004; Pikitch et al, 2004). The ability to understand the food web effects of regulatory decisions before implementing a policy eliminates some of the need for trial-and-error adjustments based on ecological or economic pressures (Latour et al, 2003). End-to-end ecosystem models such as Ecopath with Ecosim (Christensen and Walters, 2004) and Atlantis (Fulton et al, 2004) can be used to predict ecological responses to policy by coupling environmental processes and energy flows within the natural system with fishery models. Published work using end-to-end models has shown that is there “no one size fits all” management strategy for fisheries but that modeling target species with ecosystems models leads to different policy recommendations (Fulton et al, 2014, 2019; Smith et al, 2015; Howell et al, 2021). End-to-end models have the capability of providing insight into the whole-system ecological consequences in designing EBFM (Dichmont et al, 2010; Punt et al, 2010)

Methods

Results

Conclusion