December 8, 2014 — By identifying the most efficient fishing practices and behaviors, a new model developed by economists at Duke University and the University of Connecticut could help fishermen land larger paychecks while reducing the risk of fishery depletion.
"We're not talking about a trivial improvement. In some cases, we found that identifying the most efficient practices led to a 20 percent annual increase in total revenues if the fishery is managed differently," said Martin D. Smith, professor of environmental economics at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment.
"Under perfect conditions, you could see up to a 49 percent increase in profits on average," he said.
The empirical bioeconomic model developed by Smith and Ling Huang, assistant professor of economics at the University of Connecticut, is the first of its kind. It was created using six years of previously unavailable fine-scale fishing data from the North Carolina shrimp fishery, provided to the researchers by the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries.
"Every single vessel that went out was tracked—what it caught, when it fished, what price it sold its catch for, and what equipment was used," Smith said. "We also tracked daily weather conditions, fuel prices, fishery closures and other external factors that affect fishermen's decisions of whether to fish or not."