Tips and tricks in designing management procedures

Management procedures (MPs) are becoming widely used in fisheries management, but guidelines to assist in their construction, evaluation, and implementation are few. We provide simple guidelines by drawing on experience from developing and applying MPs in southern Africa and internationally. Suggestions are provided on how to choose between candidate MPs and on key trade-offs in selecting between data-based (empirical) and model-based formulations. Assistance is also provided in dealing with different sources of uncertainty, such as deciding which operating models should be included in a reference set used for primary simulation testing and tuning (in contrast to robustness or sensitivity tests), and on how weights for the associated alternative hypotheses are most practically assigned. Finally, some guidelines are given for presenting the results effectively, which is one of the key challenges of a successful implementation process