Can information from marine protected areas be used to inform control-rule-based management of small-scale, data-poor stocks?

Many small-scale, nearshore fisheries lack the historical catch and survey information needed for conventional stock-assessment-based management. The potential use of the ratio of the density of fish outside a marine protected area to that inside it each year (the density ratio, DR) in a control rule is evaluated to determine the direction and magnitude of change in fishing effort in the next year. Management strategy evaluation was used to evaluate the performance of this DR control rule (DRCR) for a range of movement rates of larvae and adults and other biological scenarios, and the parameters of the control rule that maximized cumulative catch (over 95 years) for each scenario were found. The cumulative catch under the optimal DRCR was 90% of the cumulative catch from an optimal constant effort rule (CER). A small range of parameter values for the DRCR produced 75% or more of the cumulative catch produced from optimal CERs for a variety of assumptions about biology and initial stock status. The optimal DRCR was most sensitive to the movement patterns of larvae and adults and survey variability.