Management strategy analysis for multispecies fisheries including technical interactions and human behavior in modeling management decisions and fishing

A multispecies fishery management strategy evaluation (MSE) framework based on the example of the groundfish fishery in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands region of Alaska was used to examine the interplay between a bycatch species and three groundfish species. The study introduces a framework for a realistic multispecies fishery MSE by accounting for fleet dynamics, multispecies fishery quota allocation, and the temporal dynamics of technical interactions. The quota allocation and the fleet dynamics models were implemented using linear programming, and regression approaches were used to realistically project future usersâ behavioral response to changes in the fishery. Models were calibrated and then validated using historical and out-of-sample data, respectively. The results highlight the importance of accounting for technical interactions and their inter-annual dynamics for both quota allocation and fleet dynamics to design a realistic multispecies fishery MSE (without them, the amount of lost yield increased). Particular attention should therefore be paid to understanding human behavior as well as its uncertainty and to refining approaches to incorporate this information into a multispecies fishery management strategy analysis.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author