Pollock Conservation Cooperative Research Center
Fisheries Management and Marine Research Fellowships
The PCCRC awarded two graduate student fellowships for the 2009-2010 academic year. Each fellowship covers a student stipend based upon the degree sought and candidacy status, tuition and fees, health insurance, and $2,000 in research expenses.
PCC Research Center fellow Sara Miller
Sara Miller recently graduated from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2007 with a Masters degree in fisheries. Her thesis title was "Estimating Movement with a Spatially-Explicit Stock Assessment Model of Eastern Bering Sea Walleye Pollock, Theragra chalcogramma." She is currently working towards her Ph.D. in fisheries testing the optimal stability hypothesis (Gargett 1997) using juvenile hatchery pink salmon samples from the northern Gulf of Alaska (GOA). In her optimal stability window hypothesis, Gargett (1997) argued that atmospheric circulation fluctuations between strong and weak phases of the Aleutian low pressure system produce in-phase changes in regional, coastal water column stability that affect production of phytoplankton and zooplankton. In northern regions, as the GOA, macronutrients are not limited but primary production is light-limited during winter and early spring due to both a deeper mixed layer and less sunlight. During the spring, there is a great burst of primary production that is initialized by the shallowing of the mixed layer when phytoplankton cells are now inhabiting the light zone. Therefore, the GOA is at lower end of the optimal stability window and salmon survival is likely to be favored if water column stabilities increase everywhere.
Although Sara grew up in eastern Wisconsin on Lake Michigan and earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado Boulder in Environmental Studies, she would spend her college summers in Bristol Bay Alaska. She worked both as a quality control and roe specialist at a salmon processing plant. The Bristol Bay region has the largest returns and commercial harvest of sockeye salmon in the world! This spawned her interest in fisheries management and biological aspects of fish. After college, she worked as a Student Conservation Association intern at the Bureau of Land Management in Eugene Oregon and collected information on riverine fish habitat and salmonid presence.
Sara Miller's advisor is Milo Adkison.
PCC Research Center fellow Kray Van Kirk
Fisheries management is dependent on models and methods that encompass major system dynamics as well as being robust to uncertainty from sampling, observation, and process. The ability to model distinct processes such as predation is fundamental to improving the accuracy of traditional single-species fisheries models and reducing their statistical uncertainties. Increasing accuracy and quantifying uncertainty, in turn, allow for the reduction of the economic and ecological risks inherent in determining fisheries management strategies.
For his M.S. degree, Kray constructed an age-structured multispecies model under a framework developed by Dr. Terrance J. Quinn II, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Dr. Jeremy Collie, University of Rhode Island. Termed "multispecies age-structured assessment" (MSASA), it estimates predation mortality as a flexible function of predator and prey abundances fitted to stomach-content data. Earlier multispecies models that include predation, such as multispecies virtual population assessment (MSVPA), use stomach-content data directly in predation calculations, and thereby incorporate observation and measurement error into their estimates. MSASA is thus able to accommodate statistical error in a way that MSVPA cannot. MSASA was applied to the Gulf of Alaska (GOA), modeling the population dynamics of three species with close predator-prey interactions: walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma), arrowtooth flounder (Atheresthes stomias), and Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus).
Mr. Van Kirk is continuing to develop the GOA MSASA under Dr. Terrance J. Quinn II for his PhD, with an eye to the assessment and exploration of pollock population dynamics as they relate to both fishing pressure and complex multispecies interactions. Work for the first year will include the addition of major pollock predators to the model, construction of fishing scenario simulations, and an exploration of fisheries management strategies from the simulation results.
Kray Van Kirk's advisor is Dr. Terrance J. Quinn II.
For further information about the PCC Research Center, please contact Denis Wiesenburg at the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at 907-474-7210 or via e-mail at wiesenburg@sfos.uaf.edu.
Denis Wiesenburg, PCCRC Director
School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences
University of Alaska Fairbanks
P.O. Box 757220
Fairbanks, AK 99775-7220
Phone: (907) 474-7210
Fax: (907) 474-7204
Email: wiesenburg@sfos.uaf.edu