Observing fish populations

Abstract

In the previous two sections of this book, we examined why we do stock assessment and how fisheries behave. We have studied alternative models of fish and fisherman dynamics, but we have not yet looked at how to determine which models are actually most consistent with the data, nor how to estimate the parameters of the models. This section, entitled ``Estimation of parameters'' is the traditional hard core of fisheries stock assessment; the nuts and bolts techniques used to answer the important question,``what happens if … ?''