Despite the fact that fishing is an inherently uncertain business, risk has rarely been formally recognized in fisheries science or management. Few fishery management plans include any form of risk assessment and those that do focus on minimizing risk caused by uncertainty associated with markets and environmental conditions. Fishermen's attitudes towards risk, whether they are risk-neutral, risk-averse, or risk-prone, have rarely been considered. Although fishermen's attitudes towards risk have been shown in theory to have an impact on fish populations, none of the previous investigations precisely identified whether fishermen are risk-neutral, risk-averse, or risk-prone. This research attempted to identify fishermen's attitudes towards risk from an analysis of their decisions about where to fish. The research applied risk-sensitive foraging theory to an analysis of data from the Oregon trawl fishery for 1991. The data were provided by the Oregon Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. One file contained tow-by-tow information for each fishing trip on landings by species, time spent fishing, type of gear, and fishing locations. A corresponding file contained trip-by-trip information on landings and price by species. The two data files were screened for inconsistencies and then classified into small homogeneous categories based on port, fishing gear, fishing area, and boat size. Various variance-discounting models were fitted to each category to determine fishermen's attitudes toward risk. The models describe the expected utility of fishing at a given distance from port as a linear function of the mean, variance, and third moment of the dollar value per hour of the retained catch. The unknown parameters were estimated from the data using logistic regression techniques. The results of the analysis indicated that in two of fifteen categories the fishermen were risk-averse, and in four categories they were risk-neutral. However, for the remaining nine categories the results were inconclusive and in some cases the fishermen's choice of fishing locations appeared illogical. Instead of preferring fishing grounds that generated higher profits, it appeared that fishermen actively avoided such grounds. The inconclusive and sometimes illogical results may have been due to inappropriate assumptions about the data and about the factors motivating fishermen's decisions. Additionally, there might have been some factors that could have affected the analysis which this research overlooked. For example, this research only accounted for monetary rewards, but fishermen may have preferences other than revenues and costs that influence their choice of fishing grounds. / Graduation date: 1995

The groundfish trawl fishery operating off the coasts of Oregon and Washington 1985-1987 caught six major assemblages of species which could be treated as units in developing mixed-species management plans. Eighty-one percent of the tows observed on commercial vessels were consistently placed in one of the assemblage designations using three multivariate techniques. Two of the assemblages were dominated by a single species, pink shrimp (Pandalus jordani) or widow rockfish (Sebastes entomelas). The other assemblages identified were: a deepwater rockfish assemblage, a deepwater Dover sole assemblage, a nearshore mixed-species assemblage, and a bottom rockfish assemblage. The assemblage designations of the consistently placed tows were predicted with an estimated 85% average accuracy using discriminant functions based on the gear used and bottom depth fished. Fishermen had different targets (intended catch) for each assemblage caught. The mixed-species assemblages had several targets, representing at least some of the dominant species in the assemblage. Targeting and discarding information indicated that fishermen did not always intend to catch the species together; there were unintentional or unavoidable catches of all the major species except for shrimp in the shrimp assemblage. Discarding occurred in all the assemblages, primarily due to unmarketable species or fish that were too small to market. Monitoring the assemblages over time could be accomplished by using the defined strategies with logbook data, particularly if the large and small rockfish categories were used to consistently separate shelf and deepwater rockfish. The defined strategies could not effectively predict the research cruise assemblages or catches; research data do not accurately describe commercial catches. / Graduation date: 1994