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28 June 2010 Quantifying the Economic Effects of Hypoxia on a Fishery for Brown Shrimp Farfantepenaeus aztecus
Ling Huang, Martin D. Smith, J. Kevin Craig
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Abstract

Although hypoxia is a threat to coastal ecosystems, policy makers have limited information about its economic impacts on fisheries. Studies using spatially and temporally aggregated data generally fail to detect statistically significant effects of hypoxia on fisheries. Limited recent work using disaggregated fishing data (microdata) has revealed modest effects of hypoxia on the catches of recreationally harvested species. These studies did not account for important spatial and temporal aspects of the system, however. For example, the effects of hypoxia on catch may not materialize instantaneously but involve a lagged process reflecting cumulative past exposure. This paper develops a differenced bioeconomic model to account for the lagged effects of hypoxia on the North Carolina fishery for brown shrimp Farfantepenaeus aztecus. The model integrates high-resolution oxygen monitoring data with fishery-dependent microdata from North Carolina's trip ticket program to investigate the detailed spatial and temporal relationships of hypoxia to commercial fishery harvests. The main finding is that hypoxia may have resulted in a 12.9% annual decrease in the brown shrimp harvest during the period 1999–2005. The paper also develops two alternative models—a nondifferenced model and a polynomial distributed lag model—whose results are consistent with those of the main model.

Ling Huang, Martin D. Smith, and J. Kevin Craig "Quantifying the Economic Effects of Hypoxia on a Fishery for Brown Shrimp Farfantepenaeus aztecus," Marine and Coastal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science 2010(2010), 232-248, (28 June 2010). https://doi.org/10.1577/C09-048.1
Received: 24 August 2009; Accepted: 26 January 2010; Published: 28 June 2010
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