Multispecies Management and Assessment in the US West Coast Groundfish Fishery

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2017Multispecies fisheries are complex and present tradeoffs between ecological, economic, and social goals. Multispecies trawl fisheries, in which trawl gear is not easily able to select one species while avoiding others, pose additional management challenges. For example, managers might reduce catch limits to rebuild overfished populations, but this reduction might then limit catches of valuable species. Catch shares are a management strategy that may allow fishers flexibility to better catch target species while avoiding overfished species. Under catch shares, individual entities are allocated transferable shares of quota for managed species. Some portion of the fleet might decide they are better off leasing or selling the quota resulting in a smaller, more efficient fleet. The US West Coast Groundfish fishery shifted to catch shares in 2011 in order to improve fleetwide economic efficiency and accounting of managed species. In this dissertation, I evaluate the implications and effects of catch shares in the US West Coast Groundfish fishery. Many of the West Coast species live in rocky reef habitats that can be difficult to monitor, resulting in inaccurately informed catch limits that can constrain economic outcomes without ecological benefit. In Chapter 1, I conducted a simulation study evaluating the ability of hook-and-line surveys to detect changes in population size. All simulations displayed hyperstability, in which catch-per-unit-effort declines more slowly than population size, although preferentially sampling in sites with higher fish densities were better able to detect changes in population size. In Chapter 2, I focused on the ability of catch shares to improve catch-quota balancing (the ratio of catch to total allowable catch) in the West Coast Groundfish fishery. Catch-quota balancing declined in the West Coast from 0.41 to 0.29 in the four years before and four years after catch shares. The similar BC fishery had a decrease from 0.70 to 0.62 in the four years before and after catch share implementation. Chapter 3 focuses on the fleet dynamics of the West Coast Groundfish fishery in response to catch shares. The numbers of vessels and tows both declined about 40% after catch shares. Additionally, results from a random utility model of tow-level data show that distance, expected revenue, and individual vessel habits are important factors in fishing behavior before and after catch shares. Catch shares have not been a panacea in the West Coast Groundfish fishery, perhaps due to the need to rebuild many overfished populations. This work highlights the consequences of particular design aspects of catch shares to inform future catch share programs in multispecies trawl fisheries