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 …
Fisheries science is concerned with the management and understanding of the raising and harvesting of fish. Fish stocks are assessed using biological and fisheries data with the goal of estimating either their total population or biomass. Stock …