How Should Scarce Resources for Environmental Monitoring Be Prioritized for Sustainable Fisheries?

Abstract

Natural resource management often requires investments in monitoring programs to allow management actions to respond to changes in the ecosystem. However, financial resources for monitoring are often limited and must be allocated between competing priorities. This problem is acute for fisheries management, where harvest limits are ideally updated to track changes in population abundance, but the number of populations in need of monitoring often exceeds the available capacity. Here, a bioeconomic model was used to identify the optimal strategy for investing in fisheries monitoring programs, such as surveys and stock assessments. A sensitivity analysis identified factors to prioritize scarce fisheries monitoring resources. Monitoring contributed up to 20% of the total net present value of the fishery. Value largely flowed from increasing fisheries profits, rather than non-consumptive values, and was larger for populations with fast growth rates and large relative abundance. The model predicted large economic values for fisheries monitoring programs because they created stabilizing feedback to maintain the population in a productive, economically valuable state. The optimal policy tuned this feedback mechanism to match stock dynamics and economic potential of the fishery.