Fisheries Climatology focuses on the possible impacts of climate and climate change on the productivity, abundance, distribution, and dynamics of marine fish stocks on the west coast of Canada.   Traditional stock assessment models have concentrated primarily on the response of fish stocks to fishing pressure, under the assumption that environmental effects are too random and/or too complicated to include in the model parameters.  Recent work suggests that climate effects should not properly be considered the result of random fluctuations over a continuum, but rather they are the result of abrupt shifts between several steady states, or regimes.  We hope to be able to incorporate an understanding of climate regimes and regime shifts into the stock assessment process, thereby improving our understanding of stock dynamics, and improving our ability to predict changes in stock abundance.

Staff:

Within the Groundfish Section:
Gordon (Sandy) McFarlane
Jackie King
Maria Surry

Outside the Stock Assessment Division:
Richard Beamish
Chrys Neville
Rusty Sweeting