Where does harvest collide?

In fisheries and population ecology, the harvest is the quantity of fish or animals taken from a wild stock over a period, and management asks how large that removal can be without shrinking the population that produces it. Schaefer's 1954 Some aspects of the dynamics of populations important to the management of the commercial marine fisheries modelled a stock's surplus production and defined the maximum sustainable yield, the largest catch a population can replace indefinitely. The referent here is a flow of biomass drawn from a self-renewing wild population and set by its growth rate, not a surgeon's removal of tissue from a donor, a firm's cash extraction from a fading product, or a program's collection of records from the web.[1]

Unit

A catch removed from a stock per period, in tonnes or numbers of animals

Recovery means

The stock regrows between harvests through recruitment and growth, and sustainable yield is set to match that surplus

Measured by

Estimated from catch and effort data fitted to surplus-production or age-structured stock models

In business strategy and marketing, a harvest strategy deliberately cuts investment in a weak product or business to pull out the cash it still generates before withdrawal. Kotler's 1978 Harvesting strategies for weak products named the approach for products in decline, and Harrigan's 1980 Strategy formulation in declining industries placed it among the options for a shrinking market. The referent is a managerial decision to extract short-term earnings from a declining asset while spending as little as possible on it, tracked in cash flow, not a catch taken from a fishery, tissue taken from a donor, or records taken from the web.[2][3]

Unit

A managed decline of one product or unit, tracked by the cash it releases

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by cash flow, margin, and market-share trends over the wind-down period