FISH 504: Quantitative Analysis of Fisheries I

FISH 504 (3 credits; Section 001)

Course Instructor: Dr Steve Martell, Fisheries Centre, UBC

Schedule: Term 1, Fridays 9-10:30 am and 2-4 pm

Place: Room 107, Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory (AERL), 2202 Main Mall

Course Description:

This course provides an introduction to the quantitative theory of fishing, and the use and estimation of population parameters in various types of fishery assessment. Lectures are supplemented with tutorial sessions, mainly using R, where students first work on set problems followed by open-ended explorations.Topics covered include: population and fish growth and mortality, length-based methods, recruitment, the dynamic pool approach, the surplus production approach, virtual population analysis, and simple bio-economic models. An introduction to programming in R and the use of R-packages will also be provided.

Evaluation:

60% 5 biweekly assignments
40% Assessment report

Topics:

• Methods to estimate fish growth rates
• Methods to estimate natural mortality
• Dynamic Pool Models (production models & bio-economic models)
• Virtual Population Analysis
• Statistical Catch-at-age models
• Data standardization techniques
• Fitting models to data
• Integrated fitting approaches & parameter uncertainty

Software & Text:

• Fisheries Ecology and Management, by Walters and Martell. Princeton University press. 2004.
• R (R Development Core Team, 2006) http://www.R-project.org
• You may use Microsoft excel, but I (Steve) won’t.

Course website