ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE OF THE QUAHOG TRANSPLANT PROGRAM IN RHODE ISLAND

Assessing the economic performance of any management strategy is essential for analyzing its success, especially stock replenishment programs. Since most of the replenishment programs are designed for local fisheries, the economic performance of these programs varies with location and fishery. Using Rhode Island as a case study, we consider the shellfish transplant program and measure its economic performance. The transplantation is carried out in Rhode Island by collecting marketable size quahogs from prohibited fishing areas and stocking them to selected open fishing areas. The direct benefit of transplantation is increased harvest of quahogs from the transplanted fishing areas. The economic benefits from the program cannot be estimated directly, since there is no tracking mechanism for transplanted quahogs.

One way to assess the benefits of enhancement programs is to analyze their effects on the quantity of harvested quahogs. This study used a daily dealer shellfish harvest, combined with the weather data of the region and data on transplantation of quahog to identify the effect of transplant on quahog harvest. A bioeconomic model  was developed to estimate the effect of transplant on harvested quantity of quahogs  after controlling all other factors such as  stock effect,  fishing area, time, and  weather. The panel data was analyzed  multi-level, mixed model where the time variable was considered as fixed variable and fishing area was considered as random variable .  The result from the model showed that the there is no statistical evidence to indicate that transplantation influences the harvest of quahogs from the Narragansett Bay area. However, the net returns indicate that the transplant program is profitable.  However, this result is not assessing the indirect effect - the recruitment of the  transplanted quahog- into the account. Thus, a further research in this area is warranted.