https://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/StockAssessment/workshop_documents/nsaw5/bohnsack.pdf
Incorporating No-Take Marine Reserves into Precautionary Management
and Stock Assessment
by James A. Bohnsack Proceedings, 5th NMFS NSAW. 1999. NOAA Tech. Memo. NMFS-F/SPO-40. NMFS,
Southeast Fisheries Science Center, 75 Virginia Beach Drive, Miami, Florida 3314.
Abstract
No-take marine reserves, areas protected from all fishing and other extractive activities, offer a conservative, ecologically and habitat based, tool for fishery management. They can support sustainable fisheries by providing significant protection of species composition, abundance, size and age structure, fecundity and spawning potential. They offer particular potential for protecting stock genetics from detrimental selective effects of fishing and are ideal for species with few available data or that have little economic importance. In many cases marine reserves may have less detrimental impacts on fisheries and provide better resource protection than more traditional measures, such as quotas, and size and bag limits. Marine reserves also provide essential reference areas to assess fishing effects, interspecies interactions, and environmental effects on stocks. Although few exist, they are being created at an accelerated rate worldwide. Increased use of no-take marine reserves poses some problems for stock assessment because portions of the stock will not be subject to traditional fishery-dependent data collection. This problem can be treated by greater use of spatially explicit models, fishery-independent length-frequency data, ‘mean size in the exploitable phase’, and stereo video technology.
E-mail address: Jim.Bohnsack@noaa.gov