An investigation into fisheries interaction effects using Atlantis

Abstract

Fisheries management is commonly based on the outputs of single-species stock assessment models. While such models are appropriate for tactical issues such as quota setting, they typically omit explicit trophic interactions between different parts of the ecosystem. To successfully manage multiple fisheries in the same ecosystem, we need to understand how fishing one species may indirectly affect other species. In this paper, we used a simulation model of the southern Benguela ecosystem, built in the Atlantis framework, to explore fisheries interaction effects. We first measured the impact of fishing different stocks individually at FMSY, the hypothetical level of fishing effort which produce..