Operationalizing a dynamic ocean management tool for fisheries sustainability

Spatial management is widely applied to manage and conserve marine resources. Many applied spatial management schemes are static in space and time (e.g. marine protected areas) and are unable to accommodate the movements of... [ view full abstract ]

Spatial management is widely applied to manage and conserve marine resources. Many applied spatial management schemes are static in space and time (e.g. marine protected areas) and are unable to accommodate the movements of highly mobile species. Dynamic management schemes have boundaries that are flexible in space and time, allowing scales of management to align with scales of environmental variability, biological movement, and human uses. Here we present an operationalized dynamic ocean management tool – EcoCast – designed to maintain target catch and minimize bycatch in a U.S. swordfish fishery. EcoCast integrates species distribution models with near real-time outputs from a data assimilative configuration of the Regional Ocean Modeling System to produce a daily fishing suitability map. The map indicates areas that are good and poor to fish relative to the predicted distributions of target species (swordfish) and bycatch species (leatherback turtles, California Sea lions, blue sharks). Species risk weightings allow managers to weight the contributions of each species in reflection of changing management priorities or recent bycatch events. A hindcast analysis was run to test the ability of EcoCast to avoid historical bycatch events while maintaining historical catch under different scenarios of species weightings. Fisheries sustainability tools such as EcoCast allow for the protection of highly mobile species while still maintaining healthy target catch, serving as a win-win for conservation and fisheries economics. Dynamic ocean management schemes offer solutions that are flexible to anomalous environmental conditions, thereby increasing management capacity to respond effectively to climate variability and change.