Abstract
A recent highly cited paper from this journal develops a model predicting maximum sustainable yield (\(MSY\)) of a fishery using the historical maximum catch (\(MaxCatch\)). The model is parameterized with a small sample of fisheries from the United States, and is subsequently applied globally to estimate the benefits of fishery recovery. That empirical relationship has been adopted for many subsequent high-profile analyses. Unfortunately, the analysis suffers from two important oversights: (1) because the model is non-linear, it suffers from “retransformation bias” and therefore the results significantly understate \(MSY\) and (2) the analysis is parameterized from of a very limited data set and so generalizability of the fitted empirical relationship between \(MSY\) and \(MaxCatch\) to global fisheries is questionable. Here, we rectify both oversights and provide an updated estimate of the relationship between \(MSY\) and \(MaxCatch\).
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Notes
\(MaxCatch\) is from reported catch statistics and \(MSY\) is estimated from various forms of stock assessments.
This database is constantly being expanded. As more stocks are added, our estimates could be refined.
The new data span \(MaxCatch\) values between 97 and 2 million metric tons, which covers about 70 % of the 20,000 fisheries reporting landings to the FAO and over 90 % of global landings.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Dan Ovando for assisting with data collection and Jameal Samhouri for helpful suggestions.
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Costello, C., Deschênes, O., Larsen, A. et al. Removing biases in forecasts of fishery status. J Bioecon 16, 213–219 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-013-9158-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-013-9158-4