Thursday
January 9, 2003
4:30-5:30 pm
102 Fishery Sciences
(auditorium)
Social follows talk
Thursday
January 9, 2003
4:30-5:30 pm
102 Fishery Sciences
(auditorium)
Social follows talk
André PuntResearch Associate Professor, UW Aquatic & Fishery SciencesBayesian Methods, Species Interactions, and MPAs: Fisheries Stock Assessment in the New Century |
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http://fish.washington.edu/people/punt
Fisheries management is perceived widely as having failed during the last decade of the 20th Century due, in particular, to some spectacular and highly-publicized fishery collapses. Reasons advocated for this perceived failure include lack of appropriate incentives for fishery participants and poor scientific management advice. Bayesian techniques, multi-species / ecosystem modeling, and Marine Protected Areas have emerged in recent years as major foci for research in fisheries stock assessment. Although yet to be fully developed and utilized, each of these addresses a major weakness in the prevailing assessment paradigm. However, they fail to satisfy the real needs related to the management of the oceans which involve sectors other than just fisheries. The future direction of fisheries assessment must therefore be towards developing decision support systems that integrate multiple stakeholder interests and large diverse data sets, as is illustrated by the current multi-agency, multi-discipline work off Australia’s North West Shelf. This direction is, however, not without its challenges. These include the need to develop skills to process very large data sets, to communicate with an even greater number of user groups, and to interact with multiple management and scientific agencies.
Dr André Punt is a Research Associate Professor with the School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle. Prior to this he was a Senior Research Scientist with CSIRO Marine Research in Hobart, Australia. He holds an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. André has been involved in research on marine population dynamics, stock assessment methods, and harvesting theory since 1986, and has published over 80 papers in the peer-reviewed literature along with over 300 technical reports. His current research focuses on the performance of stock assessment methods, application of Bayesian approaches in fisheries assessment and decision analysis, and management strategies for fish and marine mammal populations.
Until early 2000, when he left Australia to join the University of Washington, André was chair of Australia’s Southern Shark Fishery Assessment Group and a member of the Shark Fishery Management Advisory Committee. He has been a member of several other stock assessment teams and is currently an at-large member of the Scientific and Statistics Committee of the Pacific Fisheries Management Council. He is also a member of the IUCN Shark Specialist Group, participated in the review of the IUCN criteria for listing species at risk of extinction, and is currently a member of the IUCN Red List Standards and Petitions Committee. André has participated in the Scientific Committees of the International Commission for the South East Atlantic Fisheries (ICSEAF) and the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). He has been an invited participant to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) since 1990.
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