Tidal wetland channels provide rearing habitat for juvenile Chinook salmon as they emigrate from freshwater habitat and prepare to enter the ocean. Widespread diking and drainage of estuarine marshes for agricultural and urban development may have contributed to a decline in salmon abundance in the Pacific Northwest, prompting efforts to...
The endemic cyprinids of Lake Lanao, Philippines have been described as a species flock and are thought to be an example of explosive evolution. However, based on historical surveys, 16 of the 18 cyprinid species endemic to Lake Lanao are now believed to be extinct. Furthermore, non-native species have been...
Co-management is considered an alternative approach to fisheries management,
however, not all co-managed fisheries have been successful. Most studies discussing the
success and failure of co-management have emphasized economic and social attributes of
success and failure, such as fishery rights and institutional arrangements. The effect on
co-management of biological characteristics,...
Depletion-Based Stock Reduction Analysis (DB-SRA; Dick and MacCall, 2011) is a catch-only fisheries stock assessment model that has been developed to estimate an overfishing limit (OFL) in data-poor situations. DB-SRA projects the biomass trajectories of a stock by means of a catch time series and five parameters: the instantaneous, per...
Salmonid run sizes are strongly affected by their early marine stage. Fully understanding the life history of salmonids means understanding how they interact with their marine environment and with other fishes. Changes in the biological and physical environment off the Columbia River region affects the distribution and abundance of predatory...
Fishery dependent data--length distributions, sex ratios, maturity schedules, and species composition of landed catches--are necessary for stock assessments. These data are currently collected by state port biologists using a sampling design that randomly selects samples from a small percentage of a very large target population. Sampling programs may need to...
Sampling error associated with estimates of species composition and age composition
of commercial groundfish landings in Oregon from 1989 to 1991 is documented to evaluate
the impact of variable landing data on fisheries management and monitoring programs. The
statistical reliability and bias associated with two multistage sampling designs are
investigated...
Statistical modeling has evolved around building increasingly more complex models, even though it is common knowledge among statisticians that an optimal model size usually exists for any given data set. Having overly complex models leads to imprecise parameter estimates and tends to increase the subjective role of the modeler, which...
Stock assessments for many U.S. Pacific coast groundfish stocks are developed using the catch-at-age method known as Stock Synthesis. In this work a simulation package was developed and used to evaluate the sensitivity of the Stock Synthesis program. More specifically, the evaluation focused on the impacts of input data errors...