Economic Impacts of Marine Reserves: The Importance of Spatial Behavior

Marine biologists have shown virtually unqualified support for managing fisheries with marine reserves, signifying a new resource management paradigm that recognizes the importance of spatial processes in exploited systems. Most modeling of reserves employs simplifying assumptions about the behavior of fishermen in response to spatial closures. We show that realistic depiction of the behavior of fishermen matters dramatically to the conclusions about reserves. We develop, estimate, and calibrate an integrated bioeconomic model of the sea urchin fishery in northern California and use it to simulate reserve policies, but with behavioral response via reallocation of effort over space. Our behavioral models show how economic incentives determine both participation and location choices of fishermen. We compare our results with biological modeling that presumes effort is uniformly distributed and unresponsive to economic incentives. The modeling shows that the optimistic conclusions about reserves may be an artifact of simplifying assumptions that ignore economic behavior.