Management of an Annual Fishery in the Presence of Ecological Stress: The Case of Shrimp and Hypoxia

The emergence of ecosystem-based management suggests that traditional fisheries management and protection of environmental quality are increasingly interrelated. But fishery managers have limited control over most sources of marine and estuarine pollution and at best can only adapt to environmental conditions. This paper presents a bioeconomic model of optimal harvest of an annual species that is subject to an environmental disturbance, and parameterizes the model to analyze the effect of hypoxia (low dissolved oxygen) on the optimal harvest path of brown shrimp, a commercially important species that is fished in hypoxic waters in the Gulf of Mexico and in estuaries in the southeastern United States.

Author(s): Ling Huang and Martin D. Smith

Published: September 2010

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