The Importance Of Virtual Population Analysis In Fish

917 Words2 Pages

Sustainable harvest management of commercially important fishes is resident on the comprehension of the individual populations’(stocks) dynamics. Particularly, species with long longevity, delayed maturation process, sexual-sized dimorphism, it is imperative to have insights of population size, population age structure and inter-annual recruitment variability (Bruch, 1999; Scarnecchia et al., 2014). To understand population size of fish species becomes incomplete without insights into virtual population analysis. Generically referred to as Cohort analysis, Virtual Population Analysis has become a preeminent method of stock assessment since its inception 2-3 decades ago (MacCall, 1986). Further, information gained from Virtual Population Analysis (VPA) are often used in monitoring fisheries resources as well as providing more information on fish stock status in relation to growth overfishing and recruitment overfishing. due …show more content…

(2014) added that the rationale behind the Virtual Population Analysis in fisheries stock assessment is to analyze what can be seen, the catch, in order to calculate the population that must have been in the water to produce this catch and till date Virtual Population Analysis is widely used in making management decisions for marine species. Cohort analysis and its statistical variants are the most widely used methods for estimating the size of fish stocks which rely on the catch in numbers at age (Pope 1972) or catch in biomass at age (Zhang and Sullivan 1988). Application of Virtual Population Analysis requires the use of an age– length key to estimating age dubbed age based VPA and length based VPA respectively. Sometimes age determination for age based VPA for the stock of interest is difficult or impossible to carry out, and it is often a costly procedure. Also, in data-deficient situations, traditional age-structured stock assessment models cannot be applied, particularly in developing countries (Zhang & Megrey,

Open Document