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.
Much of Mark's research is summarized in the following paper
Maunder, M.N., 2024. Towards a comprehensive framework for providing management advice from statistical inference using population dynamics models. Ecol. Mod. 498, 110836 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380024002242
Please use the "Mark's Research" menu and select the research topic to view further details and a list of journal publications and reports