Instructors and participants at the CMSY workshop in Qingdao.
In June 2019, the Sea Around Us PI, Dr. Daniel Pauly, and Project Manager, Dr. Deng Palomares, co-hosted a successful, three-day workshop at the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) in Qingdao, a city on China’s Yellow Sea coast. They were assisted by graduate student Lu Zhai and long-time Sea Around Us collaborator Dr. Liang ‘Elsa’ Cui.
Dr. Rainer Froese, who refined the method for estimating maximum sustainable yield (MSY) from catch time series and estimates of the rate of population growth or resilience, joined the instructors and participants via Skype.
During this workshop, 17 researchers from various parts of China learned how to use the so-called CMSY method for the assessment of 80 Chinese fish populations.
The participants achieved this objective by using time series of catch data and estimates of resilience derived from FishBase. They also learned to use the newly developed Length-Based Bayesian Biomass Estimation Method (LBB), also developed by Dr. Froese, to get a snapshot of stock status from length-frequency data from commercial catches.
“One of the surprising things was that one of my colleagues used two methods, LBB and ELEFAN and he got pretty similar results,” Dr. Liang said.
Following this training, Dr. Liang traveled to the Sea Around Us’ headquarters in Vancouver where she is going to stay for a few months editing, jointly with Dr. Pauly, the papers that emanated from the workshop for a special issue of Frontiers in Marine Science on ‘The Status of Marine Fisheries in East Asia.’