Empirical evaluation of regional scale marine reserves and the groundfish trawl fishery

This Sea Grant project responded to a call from the California Sea Grant Strategic Plan 2001- 2005, which stated a need to model the performance of area closures from a resource management standpoint (including assessment of reserve size and the response of commercial and recreational fisherman to creation of reserves and the economic and conservation implications of reserves). Analyzing responses to spatial management, for example marine reserves, has been a topic recently in the literature on marine resource economics. This project made an important contribution to that literature (Dalton and Ralston, 2004), which extended previous work on dynamic models of fishing effort. Previous work treated abundance, ex-vessel prices, and climate as uncertain factors with a testable hypothesis, known as rational expectations, of how fishermen forecast future values of these variables