Optimized fishing through periodically harvested closures

Catch Rates, Composition and Fish Size from Reefs Managed with Periodically-Harvested Closures

Periodically-harvested closures are commonly employed within co-management frameworks to help manage small-scale, multi-species fisheries in the Indo-Pacific. Despite their widespread use, the benefits of periodic harvesting strategies for multi-species fisheries have, to date, been largely untested. We examine catch and effort data from four periodically-harvested reef areas and 55 continuousl...

Fishing-induced life-history changes degrade and destabilize harvested ecosystems

Fishing through marine food webs.

A recurring pattern of declining mean trophic level of fisheries landings, termed "fishing down the food web," is thought to be indicative of the serial replacement of high-trophic-level fisheries with less valuable, low-trophic-level fisheries as the former become depleted to economic extinction. An alternative to this view, that declining mean trophic levels indicate the serial addition of lo...

Corrigendum: Fishing-induced life-history changes degrade and destabilize harvested ecosystems

Fishing is widely known to magnify fluctuations in targeted populations. These fluctuations are correlated with population shifts towards young, small, and more quickly maturing individuals. However, the existence and nature of the mechanistic basis for these correlations and their potential ecosystem impacts remain highly uncertain. Here, we elucidate this basis and associated impacts by showi...

Qualitative Tools for Studying Periodic Solutions and Bifurcations as Applied to the Periodically Harvested Logistic Equation

One-dimensional differential equations dy/dt = f (t, y) that are periodic in t arise in many areas of applied mathematics. The attracting and repelling periodic solutions and their bifurcations are the key qualitative features that determine the observed behavior of the system being modeled. One quickly finds that the low dimensional character of the problem conceals difficulties that in practi...