Population Dynamics and Quantitative Assessment of Hatchery-Enhanced Fisheries

Quantitative assessment of the contribution a hatchery program can make to fisheries management goals, including synergies and tradeoffs with fishing regulations and habitat management, is a key requirement if enhancements are to be effective and sustainable. Over the past decade, population dynamics models commonly used in fisheries assessments have been extended in various ways to allow evaluation of release programs. This includes ‘unpacking’ of the stock-recruitment relationship to describe dynamics in the pre-recruit stage explicitly; quantifying compensatory density-dependent processes in the recruited phase of the life cycle; accounting for differences in fitness between hatchery-released and wild fish; and explicitly modeling spatial dynamics. In several areas, such as the consideration of size-dependence in lifetime mortality schedules, models originally developed for enhanced fisheries have become widely used in the assessment of wild stocks. I provide a critical review of these developments and close by outlining best practice guidelines for quantitative assessment of enhancements and priorities for further research.