Estimation of biological and economic parameters of a bioeconomic fisheries model using dynamical data assimilation

Abstract

A new approach of model parameter estimation is used with simulated measurements to recover both biological and economic input parameters of a natural resource model. The procedure efficiently combines time series of observations with a simple bioeconomic fisheries model to optimally estimate the model parameters. Using identical twin experiments, it is shown that the parameters of the model can be retrieved. The procedure provides an efficient way of calculating poorly known model parameters by fitting model results to observations. In separate experiments with exact and noisy data, we have demonstrated that the adjoint technique of parameter estimation can be an efficient method of analyzing bioeconomic data. Results of sensitivity analysis of the model parameters show that the environmental carrying capacity (e.g., habitat) is the most important input parameter in the model.