Center for Industrial Mathematics and Statistics » REU 2015 – Integrating Fish Movement in Multispecies Population Models

Alex Gambino

Cody FitzGerald

James Keane

China Mauck

Overview

Industrial Sponsor: Dr. Sarah Gaichas, NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center

Faculty Advisors: Minghao Wu Rostami, Burt Tilley

Fisheries management in the US is currently based primarily on spatially aggregated single-species analyses. The goal of these analyses is to estimate population status relative to management objectives for sustainable stock yield. If sufficient data are available, single species population dynamics models are used to estimate current stock status and expected productivity under varying levels of fishing mortality. These models are often quite complex in terms of accounting for population age structure and employing statistical parameter estimation with multiple data sources. However, they still cannot evaluate population productivity changes due to multispecies interactions, changes in migratory habits, and or changes in species distributions. In particular, climate change can drive changes in species distributions, resulting in different patterns of species overlap and potential changes in population productivity and species interactions. In this project, we would like to explore multiple ways to estimate fish movement from various data sources, as well as how best to incorporate this information into multispecies population models in this region.