Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution June 2010
Description:
In this thesis, I expand a spatially-explicit bioeconomic fishery model to include the
negative effects of fishing effort on habitat quality. I consider two forms of effort driven
habitat damage: First, fishing effort may directly increase individual mortality
rates. Second, fishing effort may increase competition between individuals, thereby
increasing density-dependent mortality rates. I then optimize effort distribution and
fish stock density according to three management cases:
(1) a sole owner, with jurisdiction over the entire fishery, who seeks to maximize
profit by optimizing effort distribution;
(2) a manager with limited control of effort and stock distributions, who seeks to
maximize tax revenue by setting the length of a single, central reserve and a uniform
tax per unit effort outside it; and
(3) a manager with even more limited enforcement power, who can only set a tax
per unit effort everywhere in the habitat space.
I demonstrate that the economic efficiency of reserves depends upon model parameterization.
In particular, reserves are most likely to increase profit (or tax revenue)
when density-dependent fish mortality rates are affected. Interestingly, for large habitats
that are sufficiently sensitive to density-dependent fish mortality effects, reserve
networks (alternating fished and unfished areas of fixed periodicity) emerge. These
results suggest that spatial forms of management which include marine reserves may
enable significant economic gains over nonspatial management strategies, in addition
to the well-established conservation benefits provided by closed areas.
Description:
MIT Linden Fellowship, funding from the WHOI
Academic Programs Office, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Keywords:
Environmental economics
;
Marine parks and reserves
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Thesis
Format:
application/pdf
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