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Optimization of sampling effort for a fishery-independent survey with multiple goals

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Abstract

Fishery-independent surveys are essential for collecting high quality data to support fisheries management. For fish populations with low abundance and aggregated distribution in a coastal ecosystem, high intensity bottom trawl surveys may result in extra mortality and disturbance to benthic community, imposing unnecessarily large negative impacts on the populations and ecosystem. Optimization of sampling design is necessary to acquire cost-effective sampling efforts, which, however, may not be straightforward for a survey with multiple goals. We developed a simulation approach to evaluate and optimize sampling efforts for a stratified random survey with multiple goals including estimation of abundance indices of individual species and fish groups and species diversity indices. We compared the performances of different sampling efforts when the target estimation indices had different spatial variability over different survey seasons. This study suggests that sampling efforts in a stratified random survey can be reduced while still achieving relatively high precision and accuracy for most indices measuring abundance and biodiversity, which can reduce survey mortality. This study also shows that optimal sampling efforts for a stratified random design may vary with survey objectives. A postsurvey analysis, such as this study, can improve survey designs to achieve the most important survey goals.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all scientific staff and crew for their assistance in data collection during the trawl surveys. This work was funded in part by the Public Science and Technology Research Funds Projects of Ocean (Grant No. 201305030), the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (20120132130001), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41006083), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 201262004). Thanks are given to China Scholarship Council that financially supported B. Xu’s study as a visiting scholar at the University of Maine. Supports from the Ocean University of China and the University of Maine are also appreciated greatly. We also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments that greatly improved the initial manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Fisheries, Ocean University of China, 5 Yushan Road, 266003, Qingdao, China

    Binduo Xu, Chongliang Zhang, Ying Xue & Yiping Ren

  2. School of Marine Sciences, University of Maine, Orono, ME, 04469, USA

    Binduo Xu & Yong Chen

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  1. Binduo Xu
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  2. Chongliang Zhang
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  3. Ying Xue
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Correspondence to Yiping Ren.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 4 Individual species that comprised the finfish, cephalopod, shrimp, and crab groups given in Table 2
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Xu, B., Zhang, C., Xue, Y. et al. Optimization of sampling effort for a fishery-independent survey with multiple goals. Environ Monit Assess 187, 252 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-015-4483-9

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