With the collapse of global populations, New Zealand has one of the last wild abalone fisheries. The blackfoot abalone ( Haliotis iris) supports important customary, commercial and recreational harvests, but environmental stressors and overfishing have prompted restoration and stock enhancement efforts. We used field surveys to quantify effects of the 2018 commercial outplanting of 167,000 hatchery‐raised juvenile abalone foll...

Fisheries management uses a variety of methods to assess stocks, assign quota or allocations, and calculate potential for sustainability. In the New Zealand abalone (pāua) fishery, neither the total stocks nor amount removed in any fishing year are well‐known because a major portion is fished ‘recreationally’, for which there is no requirement for a licence or catch reporting. Actual harvests relative to allocations cannot be...