Integrating Recreational Fishing Behaviour within a Reef Ecosystem as a Platform for Evaluating Management Strategies

The management of recreational fishing is a controversial subject in most jurisdictions. On the one hand, recreational fishing provides substantial economic benefits. Fishing activities, on the other hand, can threaten valuable fish stocks and cause damage to marine environments. However, most management strategies undertaken so far tend to be ad hoc and not supported by proper modeling. To address this, this paper proposes an integrated agent-based model of recreational fishing and a coral reef environment as a platform to evaluate both the economic and biophysical impacts. The platform is used to evaluate the effects of an incentive-based scheme for the management of recreational fishing in coral reef environment. A negative incentive in the form of fish extraction fee is evaluated. Simulation of fish extraction fees indicate that high value fish biomass can be increased substantially when fish extraction fees are pushed to a certain critical but narrow range. Anglers benefit from high catch rates and this compensation dampens the degree of economic welfare loss among anglers. The results from the simulations demonstrate the extent to which the often controversial subject of recreational fishing management can be facilitated using integrated modeling.