410 
Fishery Bulletin 96(3), 1998 
Figure 7 
Estimates of percent spawning potential ratio (SPR%) for 35 species of Florida Keys reef fish comprise groupers, snappers, 
grunts, hogfish, and great barracuda. Darkened bars indicate stock “overfishing,” and open bars indicate the stock is above the 
30% SPR U.S. Federal standard. 
vented and habitually fail to control fishing effort 
effectively, particularly in an open access fishery 
(Waters, 1991; Bohnsack and Ault, 1996). For ex- 
ample, bycatch mortality and high fishing effort from 
the expanding fleets can make size limits ineffective. 
In theory, every fish can be caught once it reaches 
minimum legal size with the result that insufficient 
mature adults survive to reproduce. The tradition of 
open-access management systems coupled with risk- 
prone management decisions remains a principal 
obstacle to achieving renewable resource sustain- 
ability (Rosenberg et al., 1993). 
Reversing adverse trends in the Keys reef fishery 
are likely to require other innovative approaches for 
controlling exploitation rates. Rothschild et al. (1996) 
recommended that fishery management maintain a 
systems view of the resources, emphasizing strategy 
over tactics. With this in mind, we recommend cou- 
pling traditional management measures with a spa- 
tial network of areal closures called “no take” ma- 
rine reserves. Marine reserves provide an ecosystem 
management strategy for achieving long-term goals 
of protecting biodiversity while maintaining sustain- 
able fisheries. The establishment of a network of 
small (16 to 3,000 ha) no-take reserves in the FKNMS 
on 1 July 1997 (U.S. Dep. Commerce, 1996) is a first 
step. A key to the success of this effort is a conscien- 
tious, continuous assessment program for integrating 
fishery-independent and fishery-dependent data to 
evaluate the effectiveness of these reserves (Bohnsack 
and Ault, 1996). With adaptive management (Walters, 
1986), improvements can be implemented over time. 
Multispecies assessment 
Our overall goal was to improve the scientific basis 
for managing tropical multispecies fisheries by pro- 
viding an efficient, quantitative framework to assess 
multispecies fisheries. New assessment methods are 
particularly needed for complex fisheries that have 
been poorly documented, are not well understood, and 
face increased exploitation. Traditional single-spe- 
cies stock assessment methods are at times inappro- 
priate or inadequate to deal with the dynamics and 
structure of multispecies assemblages with large 
numbers of exploited species (Caddy, 1981; Ault and 
Fox, 1990; Appledorn, 1996). Owing to a lack of data 
and basic biological information, only a few reef spe- 
cies in the entire southeastern U.S. have had com- 
prehensive stock assessments. 
We emphasized a multispecies ecosystem approach 
because traditional fishery models have been inef- 
fectual in creating sustainable fisheries (Ludwig et 
al., 1993; Sharp, 1995; Caddy, 1996; Russ, 1996). 
