Assessing the Scope for Local Management Regulations in Fisheries for Widely Distributed Coastal Stocks with Limited Dispersal: The Case of the Florida Snook Fishery

Some coastal fish stocks are widely distributed but are nonetheless characterized by limited dispersal within their area of distribution, leading to local signals in stock dynamics and calls for locally adapted management regulations. We present a spatially explicit modeling framework for recreational fisheries operating in such stocks and evaluate the impact of local variation in fishing effort and severity of environmental disturbances onto local population structure and management alternatives, using common snook in Florida as a case study. Our results show how the spatial distribution of fishing intensity and episodic mortality events (due to cold kills or red tides) can result in local depletion. Juvenile dispersal and adult movement can reduce the effects of elevated local mortality. Locally adapted regulations (e.g. lowering of harvest or discard mortality or diverting effort) can yield improvements in local and stock-wide fishery performance indicators. The implementation of any local fishing management emerging from spatially explicit assessment or analysis will require further work into the relationship between geographical scale of the assessment and statistical uncertainty in the management emerging from it.