Objectives

Successful restoration and continued management of recreational fisheries therefore depends on a good understanding of linkages between broader processes and local dynamics in the interlinked ecological and human components of this social-ecological system.

Methods

A fully integrated and spatially explicit quantitative model that describes age and size structured red drum populations with accounting of larval diffusion, settlement and recruitment processes, as well as multi-attribute utility-based angler effort dynamics has been developed. This model allowed us to evaluate the dynamic consequences of spatio-temporal variation in recruitment and fishing effort derived from gulf-wide data. The model was used to evaluate potential restoration strategies following disturbances such as oil spills and longer-term habitat loss.

Preliminary results

The integrated, spatially explicit social-ecological systems model showed that, due to spatial connectivity of the fish populations and the multi-attribute nature of angler utility in this fishery (e.g. anglers gain utility from catch-and-release fishing even when harvest are temporarily prohibited to speed up recovery from disturbances), the fishery is overall quite resilient.

Publications

Coming soon

Code

Coming soon