New paper on stock collapse in fisheries
10 July 2024, by Cäcilie Melzer
Photo: Markus Lindner at pixabay
Globally, a considerable number of fisheries have experienced collapse. This has happened despite the fact that most of these fisheries had management plans with harvest control rules and were supported by scientific modelling that explicitly accounted for uncertainty.
This finding is presented in the article, entitled “Adding the risk of stock collapse over time to stock assessments and harvest allocation decisions” that was published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science on 10th of July. FNK members Dr. Benjamin Blanz and Prof. Dr. Hermann Held were part of the author team together with Roland Cormier and Douglas Swain. In the paper, the authors discuss insights from fisheries management and sustainability policy. They suggest that the cumulative probability of stock collapse over a range of harvest levels would provide a perspective on the future consequences of harvesting decisions. For their study, they use a time series from the Canadian cod fishery in the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, from which they construct and calibrate a simplified model as an emulator of more comprehensive models to demonstrate the approach.
Prof. Dr. Hermann Held is the chair of the Research Group Sustainability and Global Change. Dr. Benjamin Blanz is a PostDoc and researcher in the Research Group of Climate Extremes. Together they investigated tipping points in the socio-ecological system of the North Sea as part of the SeaUseTip project.