Spatial Management of Fisheries (Report‪)‬

Introduction Most fisheries management systems have historically managed individual populations over either the entire geographic range of the population, or a smaller regulatory jurisdiction associated with a political boundary. The boundaries of typical management regimes have thus been relatively large, often either with homogeneous regulations applied over the whole range of the population, or with some spatial differentiation designed to counter concentration of fishing effort in various "hotspots." This somewhat ad hoc approach to fine-tuning regulations over space largely reflects the underdeveloped state of knowledge of marine ecosystems that managers have had to work with in the past. However, over the past decade or so, there have been improvements in fine-scale monitoring of species abundance and oceanographic processes thought to determine spatial abundance. As a result, ecologists have begun to understand more about the manner in which populations are spatially distributed over ocean environments and the mechanisms that determine this distribution.