FISHE organizes multiple methods that can be helpful in estimating the status of data-limited fisheries — many of these methods can use either fishery independent or dependent data streams. The climate projections you will make in Step 1 depend on the outputs of regional climate models, combined with data and local knowledge about the physiological limits of fish tolerance to temperature and pH, as well as fish behavior and ecology. Fishery independent data streams are available from multiple sources, including independent scientific sampling of the fishing operations, or resource surveys (i.e., trawl and seine surveys) or ecological monitoring (i.e., underwater visual surveys, sonar). Fishery dependent data streams are collected directly from the commercial and recreational harvester. Fishery independent data are useful for assessing fished populations and are used in conjunction with fisheries dependent data for estimating total population size and mortality rates. We provide guidance on how to account for differences in gear selectivity (i.e., the degree to which the gear catches some or all size classes of the fish) in order to reduce bias in length frequency data (Collect More Data section). The Method Matrix describes the data streams that are required and/or nice to have for each of the potential methods included in FISHE.
