Sustainable yield

Sustainable yield is the amount of a resource that humans can harvest without over-harvesting or damaging a potentially renewable resource.[1]

In more formal terms, the sustainable yield of natural capital is the ecological yield that can be extracted without reducing the base of capital itself, i.e. the surplus required to maintain ecosystem services at the same or increasing level over time.[2] The term only refers to resources that are renewable in nature as extracting non-renewable resources will always diminish the natural capital.[3] The sustainable yield of a given resource will generally vary over time with the ecosystem's needs to maintain itself. For instance, a forest that has suffered from a natural disaster will require more of its own ecological yield to sustain itself and re-establish a mature forest. This results in a decrease of the forest's sustainable yield. The definition of sustainable yield has changed throughout history and the term itself has been described as anthropocentric due to limitations in applying ecological complexity.[4] The term sustainable yield is most commonly used in forestry, fisheries, and groundwater applications.

A sustainable yield is calculated by dividing carrying capacity by 2.[5] At half of the carrying capacity, the population is considered harvestable and capable of regrowth.[6] Errors in calculating the maximum sustainable yield can lead to over or under harvesting a resource. [6]

  1. ^ "Sustainable yield | ecology | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 2024-05-06.
  2. ^ Constanza, Robert; Daly, Herman (1992). "Natural Capital and Sustainable Development". Conservation Biology. 6 (1): 37–46. doi:10.1046/j.1523-1739.1992.610037.x – via JSTOR.
  3. ^ Bateman, Ian; Mace, Georgina (2020). "The natural capital framework for sustainable efficient and equitable decision making". Nature Sustainability. 3 (10): 776–783. doi:10.1038/s41893-020-0552-3. hdl:10871/121848.
  4. ^ Callicott, J.B. (2018). "Ecological Sustainability". A Sustainable Philosophy-The Work of Bryan Norton. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics. 26: 27–47. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-92597-4_3. ISBN 978-3-319-92596-7 – via Springer Link.
  5. ^ Takashina, Nao; Mougi, Akihiko (October 2015). "Maximum sustainable yields from a spatially-explicit harvest model". Journal of Theoretical Biology. 383: 87–92. arXiv:1503.00997. Bibcode:2015JThBi.383...87T. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2015.07.028. PMID 26254215. S2CID 5211753.
  6. ^ a b Stokes, Michalr (2012). "Population Ecology at Work: Managing Game Populations". Nature Education. 3 (10): 5 – via Knowledge Project.