Maia Kapur, a new PhD student in the Punt Lab, recently published a simulation study with coauthors in Biological Conservation on the accuracy of simple fisheries indicators in predicting the status of pelagic shark populations. Fisheries indicators, such as time series of average length or catch per unit effort, are used in some data-limited or bycatch fisheries to perform rough population status estimates. This study demonstrated that such approaches pose the risk of being very inaccurate, especially when the time series is short.

Maia will be presenting this work at the SAFS Grad Student symposium in November.

Carvalho, F., Piner, K.R., Lee, Hui-Hua, Kapur, Maia, Clarke, S., 2018. Can the status of pelagic shark populations be determined using simple fishery indicators? Biol. Conserv. 228, 195–204.

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