Bioeconomic diversity dynamics of a marine ecosystem

This paper models the bio-economic diversity dynamics of a marine ecosystem made up by its entire commercial fish species and, from the fitted model, obtains a quantitative measure of its resilience to disturbance in terms of recovery time after a shock. Such shocks might be produced by both, downturns in catches and/or prices related to changing regulatory and environmental conditions. To that end, monthly time series of bio-economic diversity indices will be used and the framework of a mixed cyclical ARFIMA joint with a GARCH type heteroscedaticity model will be explored to analyse the dynamic properties of such indices and, based on the estimated impulse response functions (IRF) to measure the effects and duration of a unitary random shock or disturbance. One of our findings is that bio-economic diversity is a mean-reverting process with an estimated recovery time between 7 and 10 years.