Ecosystem Elements in Stock Assessments for the Southeast U.S. and Atlantic Regions

The National Marine Fisheries Service's Southeast Fisheries Science Center is responsible for providing assessment advice to management bodies in the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and Atlantic Ocean.  The Center employs a wide variety of statistical techniques and interdisciplinary modeling approaches to mechanistically explore the effects of environmental drivers on fish stocks in these regions, and where practical and possible, these effects are quantitatively incorporated into stock assessments.  We highlight several research efforts in the region, including: 1) a biophysical modeling approach to estimating the expected recruitment strength due to oceanographic factors in the Gulf of Mexico, 2) a statistical model to estimate the natural mortality from episodic red tide events on the Florida West Shelf, 3) the development of a hydrodynamic model from which pelagic habitat quality can be measured in the South Atlantic region, and 4) an analysis of the impacts of decadal-scale climate variations on the migration patterns of highly migratory species in the Atlantic.  We briefly discuss how each method is used to create a time series, which is then linked to specific process in the assessment model, and show how inclusion of the environment alters: 1) model fit, 2) model plausibility or 3) predictive capacity.