What sort of work do Pop Dy teams do?

 

“… I confess that I rather hate that question … I replied … :  “Well, I work with fish populations. The trouble with fish is that you never get to see the whole population.  They’re not like trees, whose numbers could perhaps be estimated by flying over the forest.  Mostly,  you can see fish only when they’re caught . ….  So, you see, if you study fish populations, you tend to get little pieces of information here and there. These bits of information are like the tip of the iceberg; they’re part of a much larger society.  My job is to try to put the story together. I’m a detective, really, who assembles clues into a coherent picture. ”  (Schnute 1987, 210)

We work on population dynamics, stock assessment, risk assessment, species distribution and catch rate analysis, general quantitative ecology and ecological modeling. We use computing heavily at the same time …