Of Fish and Fishermen: Using Human Behavior to Improve Marine Resource Management

People around the world depend on the ocean for their livelihoods and cultural identity. Properly done, marine resource management can help communities balance their extractive needs with the importance of maintaining healthy ecosystems. But, limited data and understanding often inhibits our ability to effectively manage our interactions with the sea, threatening both food security and ecological integrity. My research uses simulation modeling and quantitative methods to demonstrate how integrating data and theories of human behavior with ecological information can improve our understanding and management of marine ecosystems. For my first project, I ask whether we can use satellite data on the behavior of fishermen provided by Global Fishing Watch to predict the abundance of fish. We show that while a reasonably strong predictive model can be made from the effort data, environmental data is a better predictor, and neither is reliable in new times or locations. My next line of research shows that the region-wide conservation and fishery effects of Marine Protected Areas may be smaller, more variable, and harder to detect than we thought, and demonstrate an empirical approach for estimating these regional MPA effects in the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. Lastly, I present a novel approach for using local historic economic information, together with biological data, to improve the ability of communities to estimate the health of their fishery. We show that integration of bio-economic theory, along with data on costs, prices, and profitability, can in many cases improve the ability of our model to provide accurate estimates of fishing mortality rate