Limit Reference Points for Pacific Salmon Fisheries

Abstract

“Limit reference points” define a state at which fishery management has reached overfishing, overfished stock status, or some other regulatory or conservation point of concern. In many Pacific salmon Oncorhynchus spp. fishery jurisdictions, management only uses “target reference points”—the specific numerical management objective intended to bring about some fishery benefit. There are several reasons to adopt limit reference points, and jurisdictions without previously defined limit reference points could adopt them in order to align better with the Magnuson–Stevens Act (American fisheries) or, more importantly, to facilitate cross-jurisdiction sustainability assessments, which are increasingly needed for certifications of sustainability. In actual practice, the stock size of 0.5 times a target reference point has been used as a limit reference point for some Pacific salmon fisheries, or at least as a proxy for a limit reference point. We term this point the “minimum stock size threshold,” following a convention already in use, and we note that limit reference points defined this way are increasingly being accepted as a standard either because of justification based on simulation and fishery principles or for purely pragmatic reasons.

Received July 2, 2013; accepted January 6, 2014

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was funded by the Marine Stewardship Council and the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, although the opinions expressed are only those of the authors. We thank Al Cass for important comments about Canadian management and for several suggestions that improved our presentation. Also, we warmly thank Milo Adkision, Andrew Munro, and Eric Volk for thoughtful comments and debate on the topic of limit reference points, and we thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.