Spatially Explicit Optimal Harvesting and Adjoint-Based Diagnostics for Nonlinear Biomass Dynamics

Abstract

We develop a spatially explicit nonlinear biomass model for exploited fish populations incorporating density-dependent Beverton-Holt production, natural mortality, diffusion driven spatial movement, and harvesting. Starting from a reduced biomass model motivated by spawning stock biomass data, we derive a reaction-diffusion model with Neumann boundary conditions and spatially distributed harvesting. We establish positivity, boundedness, and well-posedness of the biomass dynamics, and identify a critical harvesting threshold separating persistence and extinction regimes of spatially homogeneous equilibria. A distributed optimal harvesting problem is then formulated, and the corresponding state-adjoint optimality system and pointwise projection characterization of the harvesting control are derived. The adjoint variable provides a measure of the marginal future value of biomass within the harvesting objective and offers a diagnostic that complements biomass abundance alone. Numerical simulations examine the coupled evolution of biomass, the adjoint variable, and optimal harvesting effort. The results show that diffusion progressively reduces the initial spatial heterogeneity in biomass, while the computed adjoint and optimal harvesting fields exhibit limited spatial variation under the parameter regime considered. These results illustrate how the coupled state-adjoint-control framework links spatial biomass dynamics with future management value and harvesting decisions.