Spatial bioeconomics under uncertainty

The combination of a randomly fluctuating environment and dispersal of biological organisms calls into question the adequacy of traditional bioeconomic models, the vast majority of which are both deterministic and aspatial. Perhaps for this reason, economists have been largely silent on recent policy debates surrounding fisheries management in a complex environment. In particular, much of the scientific community recommends marine protected areas spatial harvest closures to mitigate the problems associated with institutional failure in such stochastic spatial systems. Yet this recommendation does not immediately accord with economic intuition. We analyze the economic problem of optimal spatial harvest in a dynamic stochastic environment and derive an analytical solution. The theory has direct implications for spatial resource management, including informing under what biological and economic circumstances, harvest closures are optimal.