The views and opinions expressed or implied in this article are those of the author (or authors) and do not necessarily reflect the position of the National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA. Abstract—Improved methods for estimating saltwater recreational fishing catch and effort have been developed by the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service. Sampling weights that account for a complex sample d...

Sustainable fisheries management is key to restoring and maintaining ecological function and benefits to people, but it requires accurate information about patterns of resource use, particularly fishing pressure. In most coral reef fisheries and other data-poor contexts, obtaining such information is challenging and remains an impediment to effective management. We developed the most comprehens...

In the midst of several management failures, marine reserves are seen as a potential management tool to control overexploitation. In the literature, both modelling and empirical work have demonstrated that closing an area to fishing would lead to an increase in biomass and mean body size within the reserve. Benefits, in the form of increased catch, outside the reserves are sometimes shown using...

One common method for estimating total catch is to multiply an estimate for CPUE, the catch per unit effort, by an estimate of total effort obtained from an independent second survey. In general, estimating total effort requires that sample times are chosen at random over the full fishing period; however, in practice, this may not always be possible and the usual estimator may be severely biase...

Fisheries models are generally built to assess the dynamics of a resource with a given fishing mortality which level can be decided by some “decision maker” and/or which can be an observed process, e.g. times series proportional to some observed values of fishing effort. In these cases, the resource dynamics is represented “conditionally to” fishing mortality. This mortality must be therefore p...

The public perception of fisheries is that they are in crisis and have been for some time. Numerous scientific and popular articles have pointed to the failures of fisheries management that have caused this crisis. These are widely accepted to be overcapacity in fishing fleets, a failure to take the ecosystem effects of fishing into account, and a failure to enforce unpalatable but necessary re...