Factors affecting management uncertainty in U.S. fisheries and methodological solutions

The management of marine fisheries is often based on a system of target and limit reference points, and contains significant amounts of scientific and management uncertainty that need to be interpreted and reconciled by managers. While scientific uncertainty has been thoroughly studied, described, and techniques have been developed to address this type of uncertainty; studies of management uncertainty are lacking and of the few studies available most are theoretical in nature. We evaluated 17 U.S. fisheries to describe how management uncertainty varies among management regimes and identify some potential factors that drive these variances. Our analysis found that a managerʹs ability to keep a fishery at or under the targeted catch level can vary substantially among fisheries, depending on the sector of the fishery, the management regime being used, the frequency at which landings are reported, and the magnitude of inter-annual target variability. Within our study, reporting frequency and the type of management regime being used seemed to describe the majority of the variance we observed among fisheries.