Effectiveness of marine reserves for large-scale fisheries management

Abstract

As more no-take marine reserves are established, the importance of evaluating effectiveness retrospectively is growing. This paper adapts methods from program evaluation to quantify the effects of establishing a marine reserve on fisheries using fishery-dependent data. The approach analyzes the effects of a policy at the individual vessel level and accommodates the coarse spatial resolution of fishing logbooks. It illuminates implicit assumptions in previous retrospective analyses of marine reserves that are unlikely to hold for large-scale fisheries. We illustrate the empirical model with an application to the Gulf of Mexico reef-fish fishery. Isolating the effects of reserves requires a full accounting of multiple gear production technologies, heterogeneity in vessel captain skill, spatial heterogeneity of fish stocks, seasonal patterns in abundance, the effects of coexisting management policies, and the possibility that the harvest sector anticipates reserve establishment. We find that the effect of two recently established marine reserves on catch is negative and trending downward, though the reserves have only been in place for 4.5 years.

Spatial-dynamics of Hypoxia and Fisheries: The Case of Gulf of Mexico Brown Shrimp

“…Examples include effects of regulation on air quality (Auffhammer, Bento, and Lowe 2009), roads on deforestation (Deng et al 2011), terrestrial protected areas on deforestation (Andam et al 2008), and marine reserve on fisheries catches (Smith, Zhang, and Coleman 2006). There may be similar opportunities to study the impacts of Gulf hypoxia using its spatial and temporal variation.…”

Measuring Welfare Losses from Hypoxia: The Case of North Carolina Brown Shrimp

“…The approach is similar to that used in Smith, Zhang, and Coleman (2006) to quantify the impacts of marine reserves on catches in the Gulf of Mexico's reef-fish fisheries and in Zhang and Smith (2011) to estimate reef-fish stock dynamics from fishery-dependent data. Let y denote year, t denote day, g is a gear index, m is a month index, and i is a daily time index for accumulating past effects.…”

Sea change: Exploring the international effort to promote marine protected areas

“…While there is scientific consensus regarding the ecological benefits of 'no-take' MPAs, particularly within reserve boundaries (Lubchenco et al 2003;Lester et al 2009), evidence of their value as fisheries management tools is less conclusive (Sale et al 2005;Smith et al 2006). During the discussion, one NGO participant argued that the motion should recognise that "fisheries are the main threat to marine biodiversity", while a representative from Norway demanded that the contact group "take out the reference to fisheries; we're talking about MPAs not fisheries".…”