Introduction
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| Assessing in style |
Stock assessments are an important
part of the way we manage fisheries in the U.S. A lot goes into a single stock
assessment, and they can be quite daunting to navigate. However, when you break
them down into their component parts they really aren’t so bad! In this post we
will begin to explore stock assessments by introducing the concept and talking a
bit about the process involved with stock assessments in Federal waters (*in
Florida, marine waters past 3 miles offshore in the Atlantic and past 9 miles
offshore in the Gulf of Mexico are governed by the Federal government through
NOAA’s Fisheries branch, and waters inshore of that are governed by the State
through the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission; they also use
stock assessments, and we will tackle their management process in a future
post).
