Targeting Abundant Fish Stocks while Avoiding Overfished Species: Video and Fishing Surveys to Inform Management after Long-Term Fishery Closures.

ABSTRACT: Historically, it has been difficult to balance conservation goals and yield objectives when managing multispecies fisheries that include stocks with various vulnerabilities to fishing. As managers try to maximize yield in mixed-stock fisheries, exploitation rates can lead to less productive stocks becoming overfished. In the late 1990s, population declines of several U.S. West Coast groundfish species caused the U.S. Pacific Fishery Management Council to create coast-wide fishery closures, known as Rockfish Conservation Areas, to rebuild overfished species. The fishery closures and other management measures successfully reduced fishing mortality of these species, but constrained fishing opportunities on abundant stocks. Restrictive regulations also caused the unintended consequence of redu

SUBMITTER: Starr RM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5176310 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature