Successful management of lake ecosystems and the ecosystem services they provide necessitates ecosystem‐based management. The application of ecosystem‐based management can assist in achieving sustainable management of the ecosystem to ensure continued and sustainable supply of ecosystem services such as fisheries. One concept for defining sustainable fishing is the Safe Operating Space (SOS). In our study, we apply the Ecopath with Ecosim suite of models to predict the SOS required for the management of a commercial fishery. We use the Lake Kinneret (Israel) ecosystem as a case study to illustrate the approach by developing an Ecospace model of the lake and incorporating the spatio‐temporal framework and varying environmental conditions. We test, and demonstrate, the methodology for developing a SOS for a commercial fish population that can be implemented by lake managers elsewhere and illustrate it's use by defining example target values of biomass (e.g., 200 and 250 tons) and catch (e.g., 125 tons/year). Our results show that the SOS for a given target can be defined by a range of fishing efforts and vegetation cover in the lake as a function of lake level. The complexity in defining the actual values highlight the benefit of the approach we present here.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.