Description

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.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this course, students should be able to

• 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

Assessment

Assessment will take the form of a single piece of practical work to be completed in the final week of the course. This will take the form of a modeling exercise (based on taught practical sessions) to be written up as a short paper in introduction-methods-results-discussion format and with all computer code and raw results appended as supplementary material.

Instructor

Guest lecturer

Further reading