Improving Fishery Data Collection; Is the Cost Worth the Benefit?

All fishery stock assessments can benefit from better data.  Research recommendations inevitably ask for more data, but with the budget for sampling programs getting smaller, more data is a lot to ask.  Also, the type of data to gather or improve upon differs depending on the species being assessed.  In this study, we simulate the stocks of a short- and long-lived species with corresponding fisheries and then ‘fish’ the stock and observe the data that comes in from typical sampling protocols.  We then ‘sample’ the simulated stock in two different ways: improving the life history parameter estimation, or improving the CPUE trends with abundance.  For the long-lived species, the improvement of the CPUE sampling had a greater positive effect on the accuracy of the stock assessment.  For the short-lived species, the improvement of estimating life history parameters, particularly the stock-recruit relationship, had a greater positive effect on the accuracy of the assessment.  These simulations were then coupled with a cost-benefit analysis to determine the potential cost-efficiency of increasing the sampling efforts.  The costs of each type of data are known. However, the utility of a more accurate stock assessment is hard to quantify.  We attempt to do so by including the potential difference in yield, the cost of operations, and the potential fisher longevity and satisfaction in the fishery.