Harvesting an age structured population as biomassdoes it work英文文献.pdfVIP

N AT U R A L R E SO U RC E M O D E L IN G Volum e 21, N um b er 4, W inter 2008 HARVESTING AN AGE-STRUCTURED POPULATION AS BIOMASS: DOES IT WORK? OLLI TAHVONEN∗ Fishery and Environmental Management Group, FEM University of Helsinki Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences Helsinki, Finland Finnish Forest Research Institute, Unioninkatu 40A, 00170 Helsinki, Finland E-mail: olli.tahvonen@metla.fi Abstract. The economics of fisheries is based heav- ily on describing fish populations by the surplus production model. Both economists and ecologists have different opinions on whether this approach provides an adequate biological ba- sis for economic analysis. This study takes an age-structured population model and shows how, under equilibrium condi- tions, it determines the surplus production model. The surplus production model is then used to solve an optimal feedback policy for a generic optimal harvesting problem. Next, it is assumed that the fishery manager applies this feedback policy even though the fish population actually evolves according to the age-structured model. This framework is applied to the widow rockfish, Atlantic menhaden, and Pacific halibut fish- eries. Population age-structure contains information on future harvest possibilities. The surplus production model neglects this information and may lead to major deviations between the expected and actual outcomes especially under multiple steady states and nonlinearitie