The impact of climate change on the performance of rebuilding strategies for overfished groundfish species of the U.S. west coast

Management Strategy Evaluation is used to evaluate the performance of management procedures based on how management decisions are made for groundfish stocks off the U.S. west coast. The analyses focus on rebuilding the stock of Pacific ocean perch to its target level when future recruitment may exhibit a long-term trend, owing to environmental forcing. Several variants of the management procedure currently used to provide scientific management advice for U.S. west coast groundfish are evaluated. The performance of variants of this management procedure which “know” (on average) the true relationship between recruitment and the environmental variable driving recruitment is not superior to that of a management procedure which bases forecasts of recruitment on average historical recruitment. Moreover, the best performance in terms of recovery rates occurs when rebuilding decisions are based on a relatively high probability of recovery.

► Management Strategy Evaluation is used explore the implications on the performance of rebuilding strategies of climate-induced effects on mean recruitment.
► Higher initial rebuilding probabilities lead to lower probabilities for the need to revise a rebuilding plan but at the cost of lower yields during the rebuild period.
► Knowing that recruitment is driven by the environmental when conducting projections does not necessarily lead to better rebuilding outcomes.