Optimum Harvesting with Marine Reserves

Abstract

The optimum harvest fishery is modeled as a perpetual annuity investment with a sudden and total stock collapse governed by a Poisson process in a linearly homogeneous harvest production model. The traditional economic harvesting models, which use harvest effort as the only control variable to maximize seasonal harvest profit, are extended to include reserve size as a second control variable to maximize total fishery value (present and future potential harvest profits). As insurance against the risk of a stock collapse at the expense of lower seasonal harvest profits, the optimal size of a marine reserve can achieve the most common management objectives of lowering harvest output, increasing the sustained stock, and decreasing the catch rate. As a management tool, an optimal size reserve can also make fishery management errors more tolerable and less costly. A stylized fishery is included to give a quantitative demonstration. © 2000 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.