Changes in the management of the fin fish fishery of the Great Barrier Reef motivated us to investigate the combined effects on economic returns and fish biomass of no-take areas and regulated total allowable catch allocated in the form of individual transferable quotas (such quotas apportion the total allowable catch as fishing rights and permits the buying and selling of these rights among fishers). We built a spatially explicit biological and economic model of the fishery to analyze the trade-offs between maintaining given levels of fish biomass and the net financial returns from fishing under different management regimes. Results of the scenarios we modeled suggested that a decrease in total allowable catch at high levels of harvest either increased net returns or lowered them only slightly, but increased biomass by up to 10% for a wide range of reserve sizes and an increase in the reserve area from none to 16% did not greatly change net returns at any catch level. Thus, catch shares and no-take reserves can be complementary and when these methods are used jointly they promote lower total allowable catches when harvest is relatively high and encourage larger no-take areas when they are small.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	computer-simulation modeling, fisheries management, ITQ, management strategy evaluation, marine protected areas
Research Division:	Agricultural, Veterinary and Food Sciences
Research Group:	Fisheries sciences
Research Field:	Aquaculture and fisheries stock assessment
Objective Division:	Animal Production and Animal Primary Products
Objective Group:	Fisheries - wild caught
Objective Field:	Fisheries - wild caught not elsewhere classified
UTAS Author:	Little, LR (Dr Richard Little)
UTAS Author:	Smith, ADM (Dr Tony Smith)
UTAS Author:	Mapstone, BD (Professor Bruce Mapstone)
ID Code:	119893
Year Published:	2011
Web of Science® Times Cited:	24
Deposited By:	Ecology and Biodiversity
Deposited On:	2017-08-07
Last Modified:	2017-10-16
Downloads:	0