The Future of Fisheries Science: Merging Stock Assessment with Risk Assessment, for Better Fisheries Management

The future of fisheries science, as a science, can be expected to follow the largely self-correcting and improving trajectory of any science with an empirical basis. As long as we continue our monitoring, surveys, and experiments, the science will progress, giving us somewhat increased predictive power with time, and also giving, us better-documented predictive power in the form of realistic confidence intervals for the predictions. The open question that is explored ill this chapter is how fisheries management in the future might capitalize on the capabilities of the fisheries science of the future. Our premise is that predictive power, though it increases, will still remain limited in practice, SO that much of the potential for improved management will rest with the decision-process making use of the quantification of uncertainty along with making use of the predictions themselves. The key to effective use of rigorous but partially uncertain scientific predictions in decision making is the adoption of properly crafted decision rules. The proper crafting (optimization) of a decision rule requires I utility function - a metric which honestly represents the desirability Or Undesirability of the Possible Outcomes. The content of I utility function expresses social values, which is not the domain of the science, but the correct use of the utility function definitely is within the domain of science. Furthermore, a commitment to operate within this kind of science-triggered decision framework would be a policy decision in its own right, and that decision has not yet been made. The scientific community will have an important educational role to play in the discussions which might lead to Such a sea change. In this chapter, we review the theory of a science-triggered decision framework and illustrate a number of the issues with I concrete case history.