Biological interactions and cooperative management of multiple species

Abstract

Coordinated decision making and actions have become the primary solution for the overexploitation of interacting resources within ecosystems. However, the success of coordinated management is highly sensitive to biological, economic, and social conditions. Here, using a game theoretic framework and a 2-species model that considers various biological relationships (competition, predation, and mutualism), we compute cooperative (or joint) and non-cooperative (or separate) management equilibrium outcomes of the model and investigate the effects of the type and strength of the relationships. We find that cooperation does not always show superiority to non-cooperation in all biological interactions: (1) if and only if resources are involved in high-intensity predation relationships, cooperation can achieve a win-win scenario for ecosystem services and resource diversity; (2) for competitive resources, cooperation realizes higher ecosystem services by sacrificing resource diversity; and (3) for mutual resources, cooperation has no obvious advantage for either ecosystem services or resource evenness but can slightly improve resource abundance. Furthermore, by using a fishery model of the North California Current Marine Ecosystem with 63 species and seven fleets, we demonstrate that the theoretical results can be reproduced in real ecosystems. Therefore, effective ecosystem management should consider the interconnection between stakeholders’ social relationship and resources’ biological relationships.

Designing of Closed-Loop Supply Chain on Dry Land-Based Catfish Aquabusiness in Gunungkidul: A System Dynamics Approach

“…The closed-loop supply chain on dry land-based catfish aquabusiness investigated in this present research was a series of rural fishery enterprises from upstream to downstream, including fish juvenile stock production, routine aquaculture practices, local catfish feedstock manufactured by farmers, and fish-by products distributed by small-enterprises in Gunungkidul Minapolitan. Rural fishery management involves complex interactions among biological processes (Holland, 2010), varied social environments of users groups, conflicting management interest (Jiang, Min, Chang, & Ge, 2017), uncertainty of stock status (Bradley et al, 2019), and anthropogenic disturbance (Ward et al, 2016).…”