FleaFlicker -- my kind of a-ha moment with this tool is trying what you're suggesting -- which is "letting more wild fish spawn" and seeing that it doesn't really do anything. That's, to me, the point of all this. The gravel is effectively incapable of doing anything with those spawners. The escapement is (at least apparently) directly linked with habitat carrying capacity. You can increase escapement by cutting fishing, but not in a way that leads to recovery. You just get more fish escaping and not finding good habitat for their redd.

Carcassman, it's certainly true that it's an ecosystem wide "habitat" problem. I think the point of the article is again that cutting FISHING right now isn't going to do jack squat for recovery. It will not produce larger returns in future years--what it arguably will do is decrease the chances that an overly optimistic forecast will in turn lead to overfishing. So if that's what we're doing we shouldn't call it a "rebuilding escapement rate" we should call it a "less likely to go extinct" escapement rate.