Abstract

Reef fishes provide numerous ecosystem services throughout the Gulf and Caribbean region. including artisanal. commercial. and recreational fisheries. Effective governance of these resources often requires assessment of stock status relative to biological reference points. However. state of the art integrated assessment models typically require long time series of multiple parameters which may not be available in the region. or when data do exist they are confounded by the multispecies nature of many reef fisheries. Numerous data-limited assessment approaches have been proposed in recent years that do not require time series of the age composition of landings. but most still require time series of catch. effort. or fish length estimates. Recent advances in relatively low-cost optical technologies. combined with Bayesian analyses for age validation and growth estimation. provide yet another approach to fisheries assessment that may be ideal for data-limited reef fisheries in the Gulf and Caribbean region. The focus of this talk will be to introduce these technologies and modeling approaches via recent applications to regional fisheries questions. The case studies to be presented were performed by multidisciplinary teams of ecologists. chemists. molecular biologists. and modelers. Such approaches may seem daunting for some scientists or agencies in the Gulf and Caribbean region. However. partnerships leverage the expertise and skills of collaborators to make studies more efficient and less expensive. Finally. the availability of modeling packages through the R Project for Statistical Computing puts the analytical tools required in the hands of regional scientists at no cost.

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