Research Document - 2013/081
Current approaches for the Provision of Scientific Advice on the Precautionary Approach for Canadian Fish Stocks: Section 8 – Management Strategy Evaluation
By A.R Kronlund, K.R. Holt, J.S. Cleary, and P.A. Shelton
Abstract
Fisheries management strategies require deliberate design to increase the likelihood that long-term sustainability objectives can be met. Compliance of management strategies with the Precautionary Approach and the DFO PA Framework means that a pre-specified plan should be developed with clear criteria for decision-making. Furthermore, the adopted plan should be evaluated to determine whether it can effectively avoid undesirable outcomes regardless of whether the outcomes relate to conservation or yield objectives. Management strategy evaluation is a simulation-based approach to assessing the relative performance of candidate management procedures under conditions that mimic plausible, though uncertain, stock and fishery dynamics.
The DFO faces increasing pressures to implement the Sustainable Fisheries Framework policy broadly across fisheries in Canada. This policy includes a suite of goals that relate to sustainable resource management, including the development of fishery reference points and harvest decision rules, the incorporation of habitat and eco-system considerations, development of formal measures for rebuilding depleted stocks, and the collaborative development of management procedures with resource users. Furthermore, the development of long-term management strategies, where formal stock assessment advice is updated periodically, has recently been promoted to increase the availability of government Science resources to support comprehensive policy implementation.
Management strategy evaluation is one means of examining the effects of such changes by considering the design of the management procedure used to integrate stock and fishery monitoring data, stock assessment methods, and harvest decision rules. For example, the consequences of adopting multi-year assessment schedules, or revising fishery-independent surveys, can be quantified using simulation outputs. The outputs allow the candidate management procedures to be ranked by how well each performs in relation to satisfying conservation and yield objectives. The approach is not without limitations; management strategy evaluation has been slow to become widely adopted due to lengthy development times and scarce technical resources to support implementation. However, management strategy evaluation is one of the few available methods that provide a consistent approach to informing resource use decisions and by design, demonstrates compliance with the requirements of precautionary fisheries management.
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