Moving Fisheries from Data-Poor to Data-Sufficient: Evaluating the Costs of Management versus the Benefits of Management

Abstract The data-poor status of a fishery usually occurs because the fishery is low in value and as such has the lowest priority for funding. However, there is often no formal evaluation of the cost of data collection versus the benefits it brings. In this article, we describe how the costs and benefits of data collection can be evaluated within the context of fisheries management procedures. Based on a data-poor fishery in New Zealand, we illustrate how to evaluate the utility associated with simple management procedures that incorporate no monitoring, fixed monitoring, or adaptive monitoring. We demonstrate that it is feasible to do formal evaluations of alternative data collection regimes by including their costs in a utility function that incorporates other performance measures. Our particular example demonstrates the potential benefits of monitoring even in low-value fisheries and shows, in principle, the gains that can be made through the use of management procedures that include adaptive monitoring.