Introduction to Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE): Part 2 of Conversations with Blue Matter Science’s Dr. Tom Carruthers

August 27, 2024

As we continue our deep dive into Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) with Dr. Tom Carruthers, CEO of Blue Matter Science, this second and final part focuses on the advanced perspectives and future directions that shape the evolution of MSE in fisheries management. From the integration of Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) principles to the impact of climate change and technological advancements, this discussion delves into how MSE can address the complex challenges facing our ocean. With his extensive experience, Tom shares invaluable insights on stakeholder engagement, international collaboration, and the need for modern innovation.

---

Part 2: Advanced Perspectives and Future Directions in Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE)

Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management

HS.org: How do you perceive the integration of EBFM principles within current MSE frameworks, and what strides must be taken to ensure a holistic approach to fisheries management that adequately protects marine biodiversity and supports the resilience of oceanic ecosystems and the sustainability of fisheries?

Tom: Ah, EBFM. Scarcely has there been a topic in fisheries of so much discussion and so little management action! A few years ago, I was asked to review the history of EBFM in fisheries. Despite many hundreds, maybe thousands of papers on the subject spanning more than 15 years, I could find evidence of only one fishery, Atlantic menhaden, where the principles of EBFM had shaped tactical management advice. 

In my view, MSE is the only existing framework that can operationalize EBFM in the routine provision of tactical advice. This is because most ecosystem models are difficult to evaluate empirically. They often struggle to pass conventional standards of peer review for models used to inform management advice. MSE is expressly designed to navigate such hypotheses, potentially ending in an adopted harvest strategy robust to hypothetical scenarios for ecosystem dynamics.

Stakeholder Engagement

HS. org: How do you involve stakeholders, including fishers and conservation interests, in the MSE process, and why is their involvement crucial?

Tom: A common reason for pursuing MSE is that the conventional stock assessment approach excludes the interests, experience, and values of the wider group of fishery participants. To many participants whose livelihoods are directly impacted by the results of stock assessments, the process can feel like a technologically complex exercise that removes all but a handful of nerdy scientists and reviewers (I am probably one of those!). 

Stock assessment is like designing a car engine – it is necessarily complicated. MSE, on the other hand, is more about driving the car – the controls and the instrumentation. MSE asks stakeholders what they know and care about and how best to achieve those outcomes. All this should be presented in a package that is easy to drive, with the focus being on where we are going, not the complexities under the hood. 

Technological Advances

HS.org: How have recent technological advances and data analytics improved the MSE process?

Tom: We’ve come a long way from coding a bespoke MSE from scratch for every case study. Packages like FLR and OpenMSE standardize data inputs and harvest strategy configuration, allowing for greater focus on the more important issues, such as management objectives and the harvest strategies themselves. 

My colleague, Dr. Adrian Hordyk, has been working hard on Slick, which is a package and online app that presents MSE results and diagnostics using graphics conceptualized by scientific communications experts. All together, this new technology has made MSE much more accessible and efficient.

HS. org: Where is there even more room for improvement?

Tom: MSE is still relatively new in the field of fisheries science and management. As a result, MSE processes tend to be rather ad-hoc and differ among fisheries management organizations and stocks. Much could be learned and synthesized from these various applications. 

Having the tech to do MSE easily is one thing. What is needed now is an established framework, an MSE roadmap of sorts, that is integrated with stakeholders and the tech so that the process is standardized, efficient, and disciplined. As it happens, this is something we are currently working on; what are the odds?!

Climate Change Adaptation

HS.org: How does MSE help adapt fisheries management to the impacts of climate change?

Tom: In a way, this is similar to the question about MSE and EBFM above. 

Just about every fishery management organization I know of has an objective along the lines of ‘implement management considerate of changing climatic conditions.’ Despite a huge amount of scientific literature naming possible impacts, there are very few that make quantitative predictions that could be used to inform management advice. From my perspective, the forecasting of climate impacts on fish populations is necessarily hypothetical. I simply don’t think we can reasonably evaluate the credibility of an ‘end to end’ model that combines the predictions of climate, oceanographic, ecosystem, physiology, and fleet models to forecast impacts on a fishery. This is a problem for the conventional stock assessment approach that focuses on scientific veracity. This is less of a problem for MSE, which focuses on harvest strategy robustness, including robustness to highly uncertain future fishery scenarios. MSE might be the only framework we have available for establishing tactical advice for fisheries, providing us with harvest strategies that have demonstrated climate readiness.

HS.org: What roles do climate change and environmental variability play in shaping MSE approaches?

Tom: In general, these phenomena interact with the types of harvest strategies being tested. In an attempt to consider possible climate change or environmental conditions, MSEs often simulate changes in future stock productivity. Systematic productivity shifts tend to favor harvest strategies aiming to fish a consistent fraction of the stock over those that aim for a particular stock level. Variable stock productivity tends to favor harvest strategies that are responsive to recent data and allow for larger changes in management advice. Depending on resource conservation objectives, climate change, and other challenging environmental scenarios can be highly influential in harvest strategy selection if they provide an extreme stress test.

Global Collaboration

HS.org: What role does international collaboration play in developing and applying MSE, especially for transboundary fisheries?

Tom: Collaboration on both scientific and management aspects is absolutely essential. On the science side, an MSE for an international transboundary stock almost always requires the timely submission of standardized data from all fishing nations and a shared understanding of the important fishery uncertainties. Although these may already be a part of an existing stock assessment process, MSE tends to go further and allow for a wider range of data and hypotheses. 

You could argue that the most important collaboration occurs at the management level, where I have less experience. Those managers must agree on aspects that may include the mundane, such as how often to update advice; the important, such as the principle management objectives; and the contentious, such as catch allocations. For transboundary stocks, international collaboration can be seen as an opportunity and a strength, but it is also a necessary precondition of MSE.

HS.org: In your opinion, which regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) are leading the way in adopting and refining MSE practices? What lessons can be learned from these pioneers that could be applied globally?

Tom: I think CCSBT does a remarkable job of including new genetic technology in their MSE frameworks, not just in defining fishery hypotheses but also in the harvest strategy itself. I think the lesson from CCSBT is to keep innovating and looking for new sources of scientific information. 

Now, sadly, I am biased toward those processes I have had some direct involvement with:

The Canadian DFO is leading the way with data-poor and data-moderate MSE frameworks in B.C. DFO has established a framework for its groundfish fisheries that allows for the rapid adoption of simple empirical harvest strategies where a stock assessment is not feasible. The lesson from DFO is that MSE is not necessarily an exercise for data-rich stocks – the whole idea of establishing tactical advice in the face of uncertainty is very much a data-poor fishery problem.

Future Directions

HS.org: What do you see as the future directions for MSE in fisheries management over the next decade?

Tom: In the next decade, MSE should:

1. become more efficient (faster / cheaper);
2. become better standardized (i.e., an established roadmap or modus operandii);
3. develop a standard language and testing approach for EBFM and climate projections;
4. inform other aspects of the overall management strategy, including data collection and enforcement;
5. lead to clearer statements about the aims of fisheries managers.

HS.org: What are the key research questions or areas that, if addressed, could significantly advance the field of MSE? Are there particular gaps in our current understanding or methodology that need to be filled?

Tom: For the most part, we still think of fishery management in terms of individual species and data streams for individual species. From the early work I have been doing, it is apparent that if we consider multiple stocks together, the data may have considerably more information about stock and exploitation levels. I think there must be more investigation into multi-species MSEs and harvest strategies. We could be ignoring a lot of information. 

In most cases, MSE has been used to establish a harvest strategy that sets a catch limit. There needs to be a greater focus on the efficacy of mixed management options, such as a catch limit in combination with other regulations such as bag limits, effort limits, spatiotemporal closures, and size limits. Exploration of mixed management controls often reveals opportunities to obtain a superior trade-off in yield and resource conservation. 

Advice for Practitioners

HS.org: What advice would you give fisheries managers and scientists who are new to MSE and looking to implement it in their region’s fisheries?

Tom:

1. Be clear about the problem you are solving by pursuing MSE
2. Hire an experienced MSE expert to chair the process
3. Develop a roadmap of MSE processes and assign roles to participants
4. Engage in a comprehensive and ongoing consultation with stakeholders and managers on objectives, fishery hypotheses, and candidate harvest strategies
5. Work fast, hard, and with discipline 
6. Be decisive. 
7. Don’t forget that if this is a new MSE, you are currently managing the fishery with an unknown performance approach!

---

Dr. Tom Carruthers’ insights highlight the critical role of innovation, collaboration, and a disciplined approach in advancing MSE to address the evolving challenges in modern fisheries management. By focusing on efficiency, stakeholder engagement, and adapting to environmental changes, MSE can provide robust and sustainable solutions for the future of our oceans. To learn more about MSE and Tom’s work, please visit www.bluematterscience.com.