Utilizing Fishset to Model the Economic Impacts of Fisheries Management Actions and Environmental Change

NOAA Fisheries and partners have developed the Spatial Economics Toolbox for Fisheries (FishSET) to provide better information to managers and the public about the economic tradeoffs among different uses of our marine resources.  Since the 1980s, economists have modeled the factors that influence fishers’ spatial and participation choices to understand the trade-offs of fishing under different conditions.  This knowledge can improve predictions of how fishers will respond to the creation of marine reserves, to changes in market conditions, to increases in target stock abundance, or to management actions such as the implementation of catch share programs. As well as enabling efficient data organization communication of best practices, FishSET facilitates robust model development, execution, comparison, and interpretation.  Here we discuss current pilot projects from around the U.S. in the context of multispecies fisheries and the interaction of target fisheries and protected species.  We also discuss how FishSET can allow models of fisher behavior to be better integrated with ecosystem and stock assessment models.