Are Marine Reserves Worth It? The Value of Scientific Information for Reserve Design

The science of spatial fisheries management, which combines ecology, oceanography, and economics, has matured significantly.  As a result, there have been recent advances in exploiting spatially explicit data to develop spatially explicit management policies, such as networks of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).  However, when data are sparse, spatially explicit policies become less viable, and we must instead rely on blunt policies such as total allowable catches or imprecisely configured networks of MPAs.  Therefore, spatial information has the potential to change management approaches, and thus has value.  We present a general framework within which to analyze the value of information for spatial fisheries management and show examples of how it might be applied to fisheries in southern California.  We find that improved spatial information can increase value significantly (>$ 10% in our simulations), and that it dramatically changes the efficient management approach - switching from diffuse effort everywhere to a strategy where fishing is spatially targeted, with some areas under intensive harvest and others closed to fishing.  Using all available information, even when incomplete, is essential to management success, and may as much as double fishery value relative to using assumptions commonly invoked in the literature.