A practical guide to economic frontiers for evaluating benefits of multispecies fisheries management

Brewster, Lauran R.; Townsend, Howard; Link, Jason S.; Edwards, Fiona; DePiper, Geret; Hansell, Alexander C.; Cadrin, Steven X.

doi:10.1093/najfmt/vqae012

i

A practical guide to economic frontiers for evaluating benefits of multispecies fisheries management

2025
By Brewster, Lauran R. ; Townsend, Howard ; Link, Jason S. ; ...

Details

Journal Title:

North American Journal of Fisheries Management
Personal Author:

Brewster, Lauran R. ; Townsend, Howard ; Link, Jason S. ; Edwards, Fiona ; DePiper, Geret ; Hansell, Alexander C. ; Cadrin, Steven X.
NOAA Program & Office:

NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) ; NEFSC (Northeast Fisheries Science Center) ; OST (Office of Science and Technology) ; OAA (Office of Assistant Administrator) ; CINAR (Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region)
Description:

Management of most fisheries is currently based on single species, so multispecies interactions often constrain fishing, leading to suboptimal yields or overfishing. Ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) uses a more holistic approach to resource access or allocation and takes advantage of multispecies interactions to spread risk and achieve target yields. Portfolio theory is a commonly applied financial tool that considers covariance between assets in an investment portfolio to reduce the risk of achieving economic return targets. This method can be adapted to EBFM for balancing risk with expected benefits for a portfolio of species’ revenue. Portfolio management considers species interdependencies (covariance in revenue time series), uncertainty, and sustainability constraints. We demonstrate how to apply economic frontier analysis using publicly available landings and revenue data from commercial fisheries and calculate the risk gap between historic portfolios and the EBFM frontier to assess past fishery performance. We identify data challenges and offer guidance on practical decisions for applying portfolio analysis to derive annual efficient frontiers (trade-offs between revenue risk and return) and demonstrate the sensitivity of frontiers to these data decisions and model parameters. In accordance with previous portfolio analyses, results show that the multispecies portfolio approach outperformed single-species management and there was forgone revenue for the associated risk taken in the single-species approach. These demonstrations as well as guidance on data and analysis are intended to facilitate broader evaluation and application of multispecies fishery management and portfolio theory to fisheries.
Keywords:

Fishery Management Risk Management Fishery Management Risk Management Ecosystem-based Fishery Management Efficient Frontier Portfolio Theory
Source:

North American Journal of Fisheries Management, 2025, 45, 369–385
DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1093/najfmt/vqae012
Format:

PDF
Document Type:

Journal Article
Funding:

Grant no. NA19OAR4320074
License:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Rights Information:

CC0 Public Domain
Compliance:

Submitted
Main Document Checksum:

urn:sha-512:15b5c5dc05d414f167c1e217d02de8e2d8c1b720d2c491176dafffbd93229124554d560720fe46eb1a6deb23581d60591f0bb77a2ad1c7cb9131ed74bae54ef3
Download URL:

https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/72308/noaa_72308_DS1.pdf
File Type:

[PDF - 6.91 MB ]

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