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Snapper caught in Whanagamata 2023
Mark Maunder is the Head of the Stock Assessment Program at the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), located in La Jolla, California. He is also co-founder of the Center for the Advancement of Population Assessment Methodology (CAPAM) and co-founder and past president of the AD Model Builder (ADMB) Foundation. Mark co-ordinates, and often chairs, the CAPAM workshop series on fisheries stock assessment methodology.
Marks research focuses on population assessment methodology, with particular focus on fisheries stock assessment. He completed his Phd at the University of Washington under the supervision of Professor Ray Hilborn, where he pioneered the integration of tagging data into stock assessment models. Since then his research has covered a range of topics and he has collaborated with a wide variety of researchers as outlined on these pages.
Mark started his career at the New Zealand Fishing Industry Board where his supervisor Paul Starr, who took a chance at hiring a fresh inexperienced MSc graduate, set the stage for the rest of Mark's career. Professor Andre Punt has been his longtime mentor. Dave Fournier provided inspiration on what could be done to improve stock assessment while collaboration with Kevin Piner provided constant motivation throughout the years. His supervisors Rick Deriso and Alex Aires da-Silva have provided the direction and freedom to conduct the research required to improve stock assessments for tunas in the eastern Pacific Ocean and stock assessment methodology in general. Many other people from various backgrounds, too numerous to mention, have influenced Mark's thinking over the years. Many of them co-authors of the publications listed here.
Mark is originally from New Zealand and is a keen recreation fisherman. Both his Masters thesis and PhD dissertation were on New Zealand snapper, the main recreational species in New Zealand.
Research summary
Mark and his colleagues have been involved in extensive research into the development and application of fisheries stock assessment models. He was an early pioneer and advocate of the integrated assessment approach to stock assessment. His Phd dissertation involved integrating tagging data into stock assessment models. He was also the lead programmer of the general stock assessment model Coleraine that was the first ADMB based general model, and extensively used the integrated approach in a Bayesian framework, and codeveloped ASCALA that was used for assessing tunas. He has also applied integrated analysis to protected species. Some highlights of his research and collaborations include: pioneering contemporary approaches to model recruitment as a true random effect (or within a state-space model) in a frequentist framework; leading the development of the low fecundity stock-recruitment curve and the growth cessation model both now available in Stock Synthesis; implementation of age-conditioned-on-length composition data; developing and evaluating likelihoods for automatically weighting index and composition data; pioneering work on stock assessment specific diagnostics such as the likelihood component profile, Age-Structured Production Model (ASPM) diagnostic, and Catch-Curve diagnostic; spatial standardization of composition data; separating CPUE index composition data from removals composition data; dynamic reference points and fishery impacts; recruitment based limit reference points; and risk analysis using diagnostics to weight models. Mark is an Editorial Board Member with Fisheries Research.
CAPAM
In 2012, Mark co-founded the Center for the Advancement of Population Assessment Methodology (CAPAM; http://capamresearch.org/) with Paul Crone of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries (NMFS) Southwest Fisheries Science Center and Brice Semmens of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). The goal of CAPAM is to improve quantitative methods used in fisheries stock assessment and facilitate the development of a Good Practices Guide (GPG) to stock assessment modelling. The main activities of CAPAM revolve around the workshop series and associated special issues in the journal Fisheries Research. Mark has co-organized all the CAPAM workshops and chaired most of them. He has also been a guest editor for all the special issues. The workshops have covered several topics including: diagnostics, natural mortality, next generation stock assessment models, spatial stock assessment models; spatio-temporal modelling, recruitment, data weighting, growth, and selectivity. CAPAM has built an excellent reputation, which has been recognized through being awarded the American Fisheries Society's (AFS) William E. Ricker Resource Conservation Award in 2018 and the American Institute of Fishery Research Biologists’ (AIFRB) Outstanding Group Achievement Award in 2017.
Much of Mark's research and that of CAPAM contributions of others has been summarized in these two papers:
Mark (center) and Paul Crone receiving the AIFRB award
Mark's presentation on stock assessment good practices
Mark's presentation on the IATTC risk analysis method
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