FEMAR

For more than a decade, Dr. Jerald Ault has guided scientists and students to establish a fisheries systems science approach for multispecies fisheries management, and develop novel sampling, stock assessment, and simulation modeling methods to assist management decision making in Florida as well as in Chesapeake Bay, Costa Rica, California, and Hawaii.

The FSS framework has two “primary” elements, the coral reef ecosystem and the interacting human-fishery sector, and three “derived” elements: data acquisition, model building, and resource risk assessment. Data acquired from biotic and abiotic components of the coral reef ecosystem and the human-fishery sector are used to construct mathematical and statistical models that reflect the complexity and uncertainty of real ecosystem processes and their interactions with the human-fishery sector. Models of perceived reality are then employed to assess the risks to fish stock sustainability under current and anticipated future conditions of fishing intensity, water management practices, and other environmental conditions. Knowledge and insights gained are provided to managers and policymakers, who in turn implement regulations to modulate human impacts on the ecosystem to ensure fishery sustainability. The key difference between our FSS approach and simpler decision theory approaches is our assumption that more complex models are necessary to adequately describe and manage complex natural ecosystems.