Spatio-temporal models are widely and increasingly used, and provide important insights in ecology and fisheries management. They extend the tradition of state-space models in fisheries science by accounting for spatial and temporal autocorrelation, and can include mechanistic processes including movement, species interactions, size/age structure, and ecological teleconnections. They can account for spatially unbalanced sampling from multiple platforms, and are increasingly being used to develop indices of population abundance from fishery-dependent and/or -independent data, areas with little to no data, and combine data collected under different sampling programs. In this symposium we hope to illustrate the ways in which spatio-temporal models can provide powerful ecological insights as well as useful input to stock, ecosystem, habitat, and climate assessments. We invite talks that use spatiotemporal models to understand variations in environmental conditions, species distribution and abundance, marine diseases, and invasive species in both freshwater and marine systems.
Organizer: Janet Nye, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, [email protected]
Co-organizers: James Thorson, Cecilia O’Leary, Jie Cao