Purpose of this site

What the web site is about

This web site provides links to, and is a summary of, most of the freely-available packages to conduct stock assessments for fish and invertebrate stocks.

What is Stock Assessment?

Stock assessment includes the activities related to the data collection, analysis, and scientific review components of the fishery management process. At its core, stock assessment involves using statistical and mathematical models and available data to make quantitative predictions about the abundance and trends of fish stocks and of fishing intensity. Stock assessments can make use of many tools – this web-site is focused on tools for analyzing data collected from a fishery to estimate biomass (B) and fishing intensity (F), in absolute terms and relative to reference points typical used to summarize stock status.

What is the purpose of this web-site?

Many stock assessment methods have been developed. This web site provides a summary of those methods that have been assembled into ‘packages’ (broadly defined as software that can be run by a user other than the developer of the method).

How do you use the web-site?

The Package List and Search page provides a table to help users identify the most appropriate packages for their stock. For each package, we provide summary information and detailed specifications, complementing the survey of US stock assessment packages by Dichmont et al. (2016). Many implementations are available for some methods and we provide suggestions for which implementation we prefer. For a sub-set of the packages, we provide Guidelines for package installation and use an example data set to undertake an assessment using the relevant package. As a separate resource, the full simulated test data set can also be downloaded if you want to use it as a test set for a selected package or your own assessment.

Funding and support

The FRDC provided the funding for the web-site development and partial funding for the assembly of the content, including the guidance documents. In-kind contributions have been provided by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and Cathy Dichmont Consulting.

Caveats

We include as many packages as possible, noting that packages are continually under development, and that a package may be available from multiple repositories.