Quota Baskets
As a management strategy:
Quota baskets are an emerging fisheries management strategy that can reflect the ecological, market, and real-world complexity of fisheries. Quota baskets may capture some of the complexity that ecosystem based management schemes address while remaining easier to implement and enforce. The quota basket approach selects a single characteristic (eg. trophic level), groups fisheries based on this characteristic, and places a single quota on all fishes within that basket. No group, to our knowledge, has comprehensively studied how quota baskets may apply in the real world.
Main Objective
The main objective of this project is to design a theoretical framework of quota baskets to guide managers and decision-makers in determining whether quota basket approaches are an appropriate management strategy for a fishery.
Other objectives
-
Explore different grouping methods (baskets) for multi-species management. Outline the benefits, drawbacks, and potential application of each basket. Outline how the literature suggests each basket grouping (i.e. stock, harvest, and profit; age or size structure; etc) will affect the fishery.
-
Develop a model that demonstrates how a select few basket groupings would be expected to affect fishery management goals.
-
Compare quota-basket management, including the model outputs (current and future), to the existing fishery management in China (i.e. summer moratorium).
Other questions we will address:
-
Why should a manager select quota baskets over another management strategy?
-
Why pick a certain quota basket grouping?
-
How will we determine that one management strategy is “better” than another?
-
What fundamental unit will we measure fisheries by?
-
Can QB facilitate the coexistence of multiple management goals?
-
Do QB have limits in terms of area, number of species, sizes it can include? When QB approaches begin to be similar to single and multispecies management?
