Abstract:
This study extended a bio-economic fishery model to establish an explicit link between coastal and estuarine
ecosystems ecological composition (biodiversity) and functional (nutrient supply) attributes and the dynamics
and productivity of KZN coastal fisheries. Results confirmed the importance and strong contribution of the tested
ecological attributes. In-sample simulation indicates that current fishing efforts and harvest rates are sustainable,
but are sensitive to changes in nutrient influx and rainfall. This confirms the need to modify conventional
fisheriesmodels to include environmental variables as additional predictors of fish stocks in addition to historical
catch records and catch effort for management and control of fishing efforts and permits. This study provided
confirmation of the strong linkage between nutrient levels and productivity of coastal fisheries thus enabling
investigation of runoff and rainfall related climate change effects on the KZN fisheries.
