Fisheries Management Practices: Key Terms

Fisheries Management Terms

• Absolute Abundance: The total number of a specific kind of fish in a population, which is rarely known but often estimated from relative abundance.

Management Agency Terms

• Acceptable Biological Catch (ABC): The range of allowable catch for a species or species group set by a scientific group each year.
• Annual Total Allowable Catch (TAC): The annual catch limit set by a management agency based on the ABC estimate.

Fish Population Analysis

• Age Frequency or Age Structure: A breakdown of the different age groups of a kind of fish in a population or sample.
• Cohort: A group of fish spawned during a given period, usually within a year.

Fishing Effort and Catch

• Annual Mortality (A): The percentage of fish dying in one year due to both fishing and natural causes.
• Catch: The total number or poundage of fish captured from an area over some period of time, including fish that are caught but released or discarded.
• Catch Per Unit of Effort (CPUE): The number of fish caught by an amount of effort, typically a combination of gear type, gear size, and length of time gear is used.
• Effort: The amount of time and fishing power used to harvest fish, including gear size, boat size, and horsepower.

Economic Efficiency and Yield

• Economic Efficiency: The point at which the added cost of producing a unit of fish is equal to what buyers pay.
• Maximum Economic Yield: The point at which producing fewer fish would bring the cost lower than what buyers are paying, and producing more fish would raise the cost higher than what buyers are paying.

Zones and Management

• Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ): All waters from the seaward boundary of coastal states out to 200 nautical miles.
• Fishery Conservation Zone (FCZ): The area from the seaward limit of state waters out to 200 miles, also known as the EEZ.
• Fishery Management Plan (FMP): A plan to achieve specified management goals for a fishery, including data, analyses, and management measures.
• Fisheries Management: The integrated process of information gathering, analysis, planning, consultation, decision-making, allocation of resources, and formulation and implementation with enforcement as necessary to regulate fisheries activities.