Advice on West Coast Rockfish Harvest Rates from Bayesian Meta-Analysis of Stock−Recruit Relationships

Abstract Over the past two decades, populations of rockfish Sebastes spp. off the U.S. West Coast have declined sharply, leading to heightened concern about the sustainability of current harvest policies for these populations. In this paper, I develop a hierarchical Bayesian model to jointly estimate the stock−recruit relationships of rockfish stocks in the northeastern Pacific Ocean. Stock−recruit curves for individual stocks are linked using a prior distribution for the “steepness” parameter of the Beverton–Holt stock−recruit curve, defined as the expected recruitment at 20% of unfished biomass relative to unfished recruitment. The choice of a spawning biomass per recruit (SPR) harvest rate is considered a problem in decision theory, in which different options are evaluated in the presence of uncertainty in the stock−recruit relationship. Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling is used to obtain the marginal distributions of variables of interest to management, such as the yield at a given SPR rate. A wide ra...

[1]  Terrance J. Quinn,et al.  Quantitative Fish Dynamics , 1999 .

[2]  Walter R. Gilks,et al.  Hypothesis testing and model selection , 1995 .

[3]  Dean Roemmich,et al.  Climatic Warming and the Decline of Zooplankton in the California Current , 1995, Science.

[4]  Milton S. Love,et al.  Management of Pacific Rockfish , 2000 .

[5]  L. Wasserman,et al.  Computing Bayes Factors by Combining Simulation and Asymptotic Approximations , 1997 .

[6]  Ray Hilborn,et al.  Inferring Bayesian Priors with Limited Direct Data: Applications to Risk Analysis , 2002 .

[7]  William G. Clark,et al.  Groundfish Exploitation Rates Based on Life History Parameters , 1991 .

[8]  C. Walters,et al.  Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment , 1992, Springer US.

[9]  Ransom A. Myers,et al.  Maximum reproductive rate of fish at low population sizes , 1999 .

[10]  D. Cayan,et al.  Climate-Ocean Variability and Ecosystem Response in the Northeast Pacific , 1998, Science.

[11]  C. Walters,et al.  Fixed exploitation rate strategies for coping with effects of climate change , 1996 .

[12]  Randall M. Peterman,et al.  Form of Random Variation in Salmon Smolt-to-Adult Relations and Its Influence on Production Estimates , 1981 .

[13]  James N. Ianelli,et al.  Simulation Analyses Testing the Robustness of Productivity Determinations from West Coast Pacific Ocean Perch Stock Assessment Data , 2002 .

[14]  C. Walters,et al.  Linking recruitment to trophic factors: revisiting the Beverton--Holt recruitment model from a life history and multispecies perspective , 1999, Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries.

[15]  Jie Zheng,et al.  Threshold Management Policies for Exploited Populations , 1990 .

[16]  Steven R. Hare,et al.  Effects of interdecadal climate variability on the oceanic ecosystems of the NE Pacific , 1998 .

[17]  Ray Hilborn,et al.  Depensation in fish stocks : a hierarchic Bayesian meta-analysis , 1997 .

[18]  Charles F. Cole,et al.  Sustaining Marine Fisheries , 2000 .

[19]  David Draper,et al.  Assessment and Propagation of Model Uncertainty , 2011 .

[20]  S. D. Cooper,et al.  The importance of data-selection criteria: meta-analyses of stream predation experiments , 1999 .

[21]  Richard D. Methot,et al.  Synthetic Estimates of Historical Abundance and Mortality for Northern Anchovy , 1989 .

[22]  Stock-recruitment curves as used in the stock-reduction analysis model , 1988 .

[23]  David B. Dunson,et al.  Bayesian Data Analysis , 2010 .

[24]  W. Overholtz,et al.  Analysis of Spawning Stock Biomass per Recruit: An Example for Georges Bank Haddock , 1989 .

[25]  Colin W. Clark,et al.  Bioeconomic Modelling and Fisheries Management. , 1985 .