An ecological‐economic fishery model: Maximizing the societal benefit through an integrated approach of fishing and ecotourism

Abstract

One of the essential tasks of the modern fishery is to integrate fishery‐based tourism with it as a part of sustainable development. Here, we propose and study a two‐species fishery model where the ecological and economic concepts are integrated. The objectives are to demonstrate the effect of fishing tax and tourist entrance fees to stabilize fishery dynamics and maximize revenue generation. For this, we consider a predator–prey fishery model coupled with dynamic harvesting and time‐dependent fish price variation. The prey fish is commercially harvested, and the predatory fish is used for recreation purposes of the visitors with an entry fee. A fishing tax is levied on the fishers to restrict the overfishing of this renewable resource. We provide the local and global stability conditions of different equilibrium points of the system and unveil the broader dynamics through bifurcation analysis. Pontryagin's maximum principle shows the existence of an optimal fishing tax that maximizes overall revenue generation.