Assessing Data Requirements for Calculating Sustainable Marine Mammal Bycatch Limits
Abstract
The Fish and Fish Product Import Provisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act extend
several domestic marine mammal management tools to foreign fisheries wishing to export
their products to the United States. One of these tools is the calculation of bycatch
limits for marine mammal populations impacted by fishing operations. Several methods
exist for these calculations, with the most ubiquitous methodology being the Potential
Biological Removal model. This study explores all calculation methods and their data
requirements, categorizing methods based on model structure and input data. Measures
and concepts of population size are most crucial to creating bycatch limit models
across existing methods. Exporting fishery managers in low-data environments should
focus on collecting population abundance data while being mindful of other important
factors such as data uncertainties, how models fit into larger regulatory schemes,
and conservation objectives. Further, these models are most accurate and impactful
when they are updated and grown as more data about marine mammal populations are collected.
Data availability is the primary limiting factor in implementing bycatch limit methods,
and this work has important implications for comparability determinations for foreign
fisheries under the new Import Provisions.
Type
Master's projectPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/24828Citation
May, Eva (2022). Assessing Data Requirements for Calculating Sustainable Marine Mammal Bycatch Limits.
Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/24828.Collections
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