Pacific Fisheries/Census of Marine Life

SS8.03: Operational Fisheries Oceanography
Organizer: Mitchell A. Roffer, Roffer's Ocean Fishing Forecasting Service, Inc. (roffers@bellsouth.net)

Understanding how fish stocks change in response to their environment and to the effects of fishing is critical for improving fisheries management decisions and improving the efficiency of fishing operations. This symposium will bring together fisheries scientists involved in operational fisheries oceanography from both the public and private sectors. There is a critical need to bring together fisheries oceanographers from both sectors to exchange ideas, approaches, and experiences to examine how to integrate operational fisheries oceanographic information to improve fish stock assessments and policy. This session will facilitate a comparison of the utility of different data, analyses, and visualization tools that will benefit all participants. Uses of derived or assumed physical, chemical and biological relationships for understanding changes in fish distribution, catchability (availability and vulnerability), and relative apparent abundance will be reviewed from different fisheries at different temporal and spatial scales. Comparisons of using different in-situ data and information gained from modeling, as well as, from different data collection platforms will provide researchers and policy makers with information needed to prepare to integrate the data derived from the next generation of observational platforms and coupled bio-physical models. Additional focus will be on an evaluation of what research, data products, and tools are needed to improve the accuracy and reliability of forecasting and diagnostic fisheries models and data products.