A technique for estimating maximum harvesting effort in a stochastic fishery model.

Exploitation of biological resources and the harvest of population species are commonly practiced in fisheries, forestry and wild life management. Estimation of maximum harvesting effort has a great impact on the economics of fisheries and other bio-resources. The present paper deals with the problem of a bioeconomic fishery model under environmental variability. A technique for finding the maximum harvesting effort in fluctuating environment has been developed in a two-species competitive system, which shows that under realistic environmental variability the maximum harvesting effort is less than what is estimated in the deterministic model. This method also enables us to find out the safe regions in the parametric space for which the chance of extinction of the species is minimized. A real life fishery problem has been considered to obtain the inaccessible parameters of the system in a systematic way. Such studies may help resource managers to get an idea for controlling the system.