Estimating surplus production and maximum sustainable yield from biomass data when catch and effort time series are not available

Garcia, S., Sparre, P. and Csirke, J., 1989. Estimating surplus production and maximum sustain-able yield from biomass data when catch and effort time series are not available. Fish. Res., 8 13-23. L In order to describe a simple method of estimating maximum sustainable yield (MSY) , we first demonstrate that the parameters of the two well-known surplus production models of Schaefer and Fox can be expressed in terms of fishing mortality that yields maximum sustainable yield ( FMsy) , annual yield and mean biomass. If FMsy is known, or, alternatively, is assumed to be some specified function of a known natural mortality rate, it thereby becomes possible to estimate MSY and describe the surplus production function even when the data are limited to one year of esti-mates for catch and mean biomass. The method is compared to other simple methods for esti-mating MSY and its potential application is discussed