Elasmobranchs typically display slow growth, late maturity and low fecundity life history characteristics, making them vulnerable to fishing pressures and environmental perturbations. The whitespotted eagle ray (Aetobatus narinari), a large pelagic …
The somatic growth of individuals governs many aspects of a species' life history and is an important parameter in the assessment of populations. Population growth parameters are typically derived by relating the length of individuals to their age, …
Although the generally high fertility of volcanic soils is often seen as an opportunity, short-term consequences of eruptions on natural and cultivated vegetation are likely to be negative. The empirical knowledge obtained from post-event impact …
State space models (SSMs) are now ubiquitous in many fields and increasingly complicated with observed and unobserved variables often interacting in non-linear fashions. The crucial task of validating model assumptions thus becomes difficult, …
Natural mortality, M, is a key parameter for the assessment and management of living resources but is difficult to observe directly. Therefore, M is often estimated indirectly from life history traits and typically assumed to be invariant over size, …
The validity of estimation and smoothing parameter selection for the wide class of generalized additive models for location, scale and shape (GAMLSS) relies on the correct specification of a likelihood function. Deviations from such assumption are …
One of the central interests of animal movement ecology is relating movement characteristics to behavioural characteristics. The traditional discrete-time statistical tool for inferring unobserved behaviours from movement data is the hidden Markov …
State-space models (SSMs) are now popular tools in fisheries science for providing management advice when faced with noisy survey and commercial fishery data. Such models are often fitted within a Bayesian framework requiring both the specification …