Optimal placement of Marine Protected Areas

Overfishing can lead to the reduction or elimination of fish populations and the degradation or even destruction of their habitats. This can be prevented by introducing Marine Protected Areas (MPA’s), regions in the ocean or along coastlines where fishing is controlled. MPA’s can also lead to larger fish densities outside the protected area through spill-over, which in turn may increase the fishing yield. A natural question in this context, is where exactly to establish an MPA, in order to maximize these benefits. This problem is addressed along a one-dimensional stretch of coast-line, by first proposing a model for the fish dynamics. Fish are assumed to move diffusively, and are subject to recruitment, natural death and harvesting through fishing. The problem is then cast as an optimal control problem for the steady state equation corresponding to the PDE which models the fish dynamics. The functional being maximized is a weighted sum of the average fish density and the average fishing yield. It is shown that optimal controls exist, and that the form of an optimal control-and hence the location of the MPA-is determined by two key model parameters, namely the size of the coast, and the weight of the average fish density appearing in the functional. If these parameters are large enough-and precisely how large, can be calculated exactly- the results indicate when and where an MPA should be established. The results indicate that an MPA always takes the form of a Marine Reserve, where fishing is prohibited. The main mathematical tool used to prove the results is Pontryagin’s maximum principle.