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PopDyn
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Table of Contents:
With the cost of fishery research and the information requirements increasing daily, most fishery scientists recognise the value of developing databases to promote exchange stock assessment and fisheries data. Obtaining such information is however a time consuming and difficult task, because it is often reported in publications which are not easily accessed at scientific libraries. Many of these publications often contain a lot of information which is not relevant to the person interested in comparative dynamics, and it is very time consuming to extract the main fishery parameters of interest.
WinPopDyn is a pure database, developed by FAO, with procedures for data entry, cataloguing, search, and reporting with an assisted interface to a MicroSoft Excel workbook for further processing of the data.
Its primarily objectives is the establishment of a a Regional Network, where all the "workers" in Stock assessment may contribute and use it irrespectively whether they are data providers or information users.
Salvatore R. Coppola
FAO Fisheries Department
Marine Resources Service (FIRM), FAO
Viale delle Terme di Caracalla,
00100 Rome, ITALY
Tel.: +39 06 57053034
Fax: +39 06 57053020
Email: Rino.Coppola@FAO.ORG
This software was originally created as a complementary module of SPECIESDAB4 for storing population dynamics information (1992), and it was only in a later stage that it was decided to prepare it as a separate module allowing users to enter their own data.
POPDYN has been conceived for the following purposes:
To supply a tool for storing data and information (also unpublished) of institutions, researchers and any other people working in population dynamics/stock assessment in a predefined structure for their own use. to assist regional working groups on stock assessment (population dynamics) to collect data gathered in a given area for use during the meetings for joint analysis and stock evaluation; to gather all the data inserted in the software by users/collaborators in a global database on population dynamics/stock assessment located in FAO headquarters.
One of POPDYN’s main goals was to enable the standardisation of stock assessment parameters to make them more uniform and comparable. For this reason, not all the parameters can be hosted in POPDYN and only the most commonly used have been selected. However some of the comments received suggested including other parameters that could serve for future work.
The rationale of the PopDyn project greatly influenced the development of the software. WinPopDyn has been developed for specific applications which can be summarised in the following scenarios:
Institutions or individuals collecting data on population dynamics parameters and fishery characteristics of exploited stocks normally did not have a tool to store, retrieve and print these data in a standard way. PopDyn was therefore a tool for users to keep their data in a structured format. Certainly it was also an attempt to encourage people working in fisheries to use the same codification system to store information. For this reason, users are requested to use the recommended codes for their input. These codes for species, countries, fishing areas, and fishing gears, are the same as those used in other FAO Global Databases for Fisheries. FAO Fishery Bodies convene periodic regional Stock Assessment Working Groups aiming at evaluating the status of the stocks in their areas as well as the best assessment parameters for the most important species. The use of PopDyn in these circumstances was twofold (this was actually the primary objective of the PopDyn Project):
Provide the scientists participating in the working group with this tool for data storage, in order to arrive at the meeting with all data entered in the database, ready to be shown, discussed, or merged with other parameters presented by other participants. This should have saved an enormous amount of ‘limited time’, thus giving more space to the discussion and decision making. Once decisions were made on the best parameters to accept for that session’s assessment, (the status of the stocks, management options exerted, etc.) the results had to be recorded in the regional PopDyn Data Base. These results, (certified data) region by region, stock by stock, and even by major species, would have formed the global monitoring intelligence in
FAO. ( see point 3 below)
The concise presentation of certified data and the range of topics covered, from basic life history to management, reflects the objective of FAO to provide information to scientists, fishery managers and the public in general. The PopDyn database should be seen in this context, where dynamic data resulting from stock assessment and management working groups (therefore certified data) are stored ready to be presented in informative, analytical and comparative ways.
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