UC Santa Barbara

A recent highly cited paper from this journal develops a model predictingmaximum sustainable yield (MSY) of a fishery using the historical maximum catch(MaxCatch). The model is parameterized with a small sample of fisheries from theUnited States, and is subsequently applied globally to estimate the benefits of fisheryrecovery. That empirical relationship has been adopted for many subsequent highprofileanalyses. Unfortunately, the analysis suffers from two important oversights:(1) because the model is non-linear, it suffers from "retransformation bias" and thereforethe results significantly understate MSY and (2) the analysis is parameterizedfrom of a very limited data set and so generalizability of the fitted empirical relationshipbetween MSY and MaxCatch to global fisheries is questionable. Here, werectify both oversights and provide an updated estimate of the relationship betweenMSY and MaxCatch. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.