April 12, 2018 — Getting ahead of the economic impacts that tend to accompany fisheries’ closures is the basis of a new predictive model put together by a team of scientists from NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NFSC) and the University of Washington.
When fisheries shut down, entire communities suffer, the scientific team recognized, and oftentimes, funds doled out to help fishermen weathering rough patches arrive months after they are needed. The new predictive model, which was published recently in the journal Marine Policy, is designed to help mitigate some of this damage, explained Kate Richerson, a marine ecologist at NFSC and the University of Washington, and the lead author of the model.
To develop their predictive standard, Richerson and her team focused on the 2017 closure of the U.S. West Coast’s salmon troll fishery, collating fish ticket data as a starting point.
“We looked at a pretty broad cohort of vessels and found that some of these vessels are almost entirely dependent on salmon, while others are almost entirely dependent on other fisheries,” Richerson said. “Then we looked at their predicted behavior and revenue under the conditions of a closure and under the conditions of an average year. And we used that in combination with this economic input-output model, which links fishing revenue to jobs and sales, to make a sort of back-of-the-envelope prediction of what the impacts of the 2017 closure might have been.”
They estimated the closure, leveled to protect struggling Chinook runs on the Klamath River, would cost trollers anywhere from USD 5.8 million (EUR 4.6 million) to USD 8.9 million (EUR 7.2 million), along with 200 to 330 jobs and USD 12.8 million (EUR 10.3 million) to USD 19.6 million (EUR 15.8 million) in sales. The numbers were confined to trollers, and would have likely been far higher with the inclusion of other fisheries, such as gillnetting and recreational fishing.
Read the full story at Seafood Source