NOAA_DucharmeBarth

NOAA Fisheries uses stock assessments to monitor the condition of nearly 500 fish stocks and stock complexes (groups of similar stocks managed together). Stock assessments are scientific efforts that involve data collection, data processing, and mathematical modeling that estimate the health and size of a fish stock, measure how fishing affects the stock, and project harvest levels that achieve the largest sustainable long-term yield. Stock assessments are the backbone of sustainable fisheries management. These assessments allow us to evaluate and report the status of managed fisheries, marine mammals, and endangered/threatened species under the authorities of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Endangered Species Act. The outcome of this project will be to develop and document a workflow for running existing stock assessment platforms (e.g. StockSynthesis, Multifan-CL, Beaufort Assessment Model, etc.) on a distributed computing system in order to facilitate the script based, ‘simultaneous’ exploration of multiple alternative model configurations. This workflow can be used to develop a stock assessment in either the single best base case or ensemble model framework. This project will support hypothesis exploration, model ensembling, and improved automation of stock assessments.