Source:  Quarterly Review of Biology, Sept 2000 v75 i3 p336.
                                                                             
Title:  QUANTITATIVE FISH DYNAMICS.(Review)_(book review)

Author:  JERALD S AULT
                                                                             
Subjects:  Books - Reviews

People:  Quinn, Terrance J., II
            Deriso, Richard B.

Nmd Works:  QUANTITATIVE FISH DYNAMICS (Book) - Reviews
                                                                             
Electronic Collection:  A66010367

RN:  A66010367
                                                                             

Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 University of Chicago Press

QUANTITATIVE FISH DYNAMICS. Biological Resource Management Series. By Terrance
J Quinn II and Richard B Deriso. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
$95.00. xvii + 542 p; ill.; index. ISBN: 0-19-507631-1. 1999.

Over the last two decades the fields of fish population dynamics and stock
assessment have seen major advances; concomitantly, fisheries worldwide have
declined in productivity owing to overfishing, habitat degradation, and
climate change. This suggests that strategies for improved fisheries
assessment and management will require greater overall understanding of
linkages among demographic, environmental, and anthropogenic processes that
underlie the dynamics of exploited populations.

This book provides an up-to-date synthesis and coherent framework with which
to explore and comprehend these theoretical and practical issues. The volume
is well organized, and the authors have gone into great depth in the
development, derivation, and analyses of models such as elemental processes
affecting individual and population growth, natural and fishing mortality,
fecundity, and spawner-recruit relationships. These population demographic
concepts are clearly linked to models of stock biomass and surplus production,
analytical yield per-recruit and delay-difference, and catch-age and
age-structured assessment methods (including an excellent discussion on
size-structured models). Issues in statistical parameter estimation using
maximum likelihood, stochastic and sampling theories are explored from both
frequentist and Bayesian perspectives, and their unique and thorough
presentation makes a number of modern mathematical and statistical techniques
accessible. The book also covers key topics usually overlooked, such as
environmental variability, time-varying models, and recreational fisheries.
The authors give some attention to geographic and multispecies multistock
considerations through simple compartmental models of spatial structure and
migratory stocks, while emphasizing links between biology and quantitative
theory by explaining and delineating the assumptions inherent in methods and
models. Finally, optimal harvest strategies are considered in light of
bioeconomic theory, and up-to-date advances in operations research, risk
analysis, and decision making under uncertainty.

The book is intended for upper-division and graduate courses in fish
population dynamics and stock assessment. It provides good coverage of the
primary literature in a well-written, easy-to-read manner that is structured
to give sufficient essential details on mathematical derivations. The book
probably suffers somewhat from limited use of graphical tools, and although it
presents a number of worked examples, the data provided in some cases limit
checks for consistency. Nonetheless, the book clearly fills a void where no
up-to-date textbooks exist with reasonably in-depth development of
quantitative analytical models and statistical methods. But, Quantitative Fish
Dynamics will clearly be useful to a wider audience of fishery scientists,
mathematical ecologists, conservation biologists, population dynamicists, and
resource managers involved in research, particularly those endeavoring to gain
a better comprehension of the dynamics, productivity, and sustainability of
exploited populations.

JERALD S AULT, Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science, University
of Miami, Miami, Florida