Multispecies Modeling (Including Humans!) for Fisheries Management: Where Are We Now and Where Can We Go? Part 1

Fisheries management agencies are increasingly asked to consider species, fleet, ecosystem, climate-change, and human interactions in decision-making. To meet these management needs, multispecies models are evolving from research projects into operational assessment tools. In this session, we evaluate the current state of multispecies models, and explore a range of applications with varying emphasis on links between fish species, fleets, the environment, human society, and economics. Presentations range from methods for building models, estimating parameters, projecting models, and evaluating model performance to better understanding fisher behavior in multi-species fisheries to visualizing and communicating results to diverse stakeholders.  Applications include freshwater and marine systems. The ultimate aim of this session is to identify the current state of the art, build collaborations among modelers and managers, and discuss best practices and next steps for integrating these more complex models into natural resource management. Discussion sections during the day will aim to connect the specific talks with common themes across different fisheries and ecosystems.