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| Purpose
and Contents
A general aim in marine management is to devise management strategies
that are robust to uncertainties in our understanding of marine
ecosystems. It is necessary, therefore, to have a means for testing
management strategies under a range of different assumptions. This
course aims to introduce a means for achieving this: Management
Strategy Evaluations (MSE).
The course will describe how to implement a simple single species
population model to serve as an operating model (OM). It will describe
deficiencies in this type of OM and alternatives that are available,
for example models with spatial structure, different stock structure,
multi-species models and models driven by oceanography. The course
will then describe how to couple the OM with a management strategy
model in order to test whether the management strategy is effective.
Emphasis will be placed on the fact that the management view of
the ecosystem may differ substantially from the real (simulated)
state of the OM.
The course will also discuss issues surrounding the use of this
methodology in practice.
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Course
Prerequisites
The course is only open to graduate students. General computer and
numeric literacy is required. Students must have some experience
using a statistical computer system (e.g. Minitab, R, S-PLUS, SAS,
Matlab, SPSS...). Ideally they should have completed an “Introduction
to R” (or S-PLUS) course. Students should have some knowledge
of marine ecosystems and management, for example from “Fisheries
Ecology: Management and conservation of marine resources in a changing
ocean”. |
| Learning
Outcomes
By the end of this course, students should
Describe the need for management strategy evaluation (MSE)
Describe the structure of a MSE
Explain why the manager's understanding of a systems state is necessarily
different from the actual state, and how a MSE deals with this uncertainty
Implement a simple Operating Model (OM)
Describe deficiencies with simple OMs and describe some alternative
models available to deal with these
Implement a simple management strategy
Link OM and management strategy to form a complete MSE
Discuss the use of MSE in practice
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