California Sea Grant College Program

The overall project objective was to develop, calibrate, and refine an integrated spatially explicit bioeconomic model of the California sea urchin fishery. The model was designed to gain some insights into how spatial management measures, primarily reserves, might impact both the biological and economic health of a fishery in general, as well as how spatial policies might impact the California sea urchin fishery, in particular. We were successful in meeting our primary objectives for this project, and we have a variety of new and interesting results that we are in the process of publishing and presenting in workshops. This project involved fieldwork, econometric and statistical estimation, and programming, calibration, and simulation with a newly developed integrated bioeconomic model.