After much rescheduling, the Center for the Advancement of Population Assessment & Modeling (CAPAM) Workshop on Natural Mortality was hosted in a free, fully virtual format the week of June 14, 2021. Conference co-organizers Claudio Castillo-Jordan, Maia Sosa Kapur, André Punt, and Owen Hamel (NWFSC) worked hard to create a schedule which accomodated over 300 participants from all over the world (see map).  The workshop was concurrently livestreamed to the UW SAFS YouTube page and will be available indefinitely. Keynote speakers gave provocative talks about the state-of-the art of estimating, developing priors for, and evaluating bias caused by natural mortality in population dynamics and assessment models. Much discussion centered around untangling the influences of life history (such as growth) and environment on temporal variation in M. Talks on the final day of the workshop highlighted how temporal variation in natural mortality brought about by climate change might complicate the accuracy of management reference points.

Please check out the CAPAM website for more background on the workshop and instructions on submitting to the special issue of Fisheries Research, which will include a Best Practices guide edited by the conference organizers.