Research Motivation

Climate change is affecting the California Current fishery by causing increased temperature in the upper ocean, reducing dissolved oxygen concentrations, and increasing ocean acidity. This affects fish migration patterns and spawning and shellfish production in a $12B industry. Yet most current models can not produce the correct temperatures for the upwelling region, so predictions of future stock changes are likely to be wrong. In addition to this, the offshore wind industry coexists with marine ecosystems, and yet uncertainty remains about how wind farms affect marine fisheries. Developing an integrated fishery decision management system requires information from many different sources and disciplines with various levels of degrees of uncertainties. It also requires changing from a system that relies on past performance to one that can utilize uncertain projections of the future and considers dynamic planning processes. The existing management evaluation tools lack the capability of modeling spatial dependencies between various decision objects (e.g., climate information, stock value, biological conditions, and harvest control rules), and help decision makers to weigh different options and eliminate the obviously bad choices.