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ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil Advance Access originally published online on July 16, 2007
ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil 2007 64(6):1085-1100; doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsm102
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© 2007 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Published by Oxford Journals. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Constructing a coherent joint prior while respecting biological realism: application to marine mammal stock assessments

John R. Brandon1,, Jeffrey M. Breiwick2, André E. Punt1 and Paul R. Wade2

1 School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, University of Washington, PO Box 355020, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
2 National Marine Mammal Laboratory, Alaska Fisheries Science Center, NOAA Fisheries Service, 7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115, USA

Correspondence to J. R. Brandon: tel: +1 206 2216793; fax: +1 206 6857471; e-mail: jbrandon{at}u.washington.edu

Brandon, J. R., Breiwick, J. M., Punt, A. E., and Wade, P. R. 2007. Constructing a coherent joint prior while respecting biological realism: application to marine mammal stock assessments. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 64: 1085–1100.

Bayesian estimation methods, employing the Sampling–Importance–Resampling algorithm, are currently used to perform stock assessments for several stocks of marine mammals, including the Bering–Chukchi–Beaufort Seas stock of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) and walrus (Odobenus rosmarus rosmarus) off Greenland. However, owing to the functional relationships among parameters in deterministic age-structured population dynamics models, placing explicit priors on each life history parameter in addition to the population growth rate parameter results in an incoherent joint prior distribution (i.e. two different priors on the estimated parameters). One solution to constructing a coherent joint prior is to solve for juvenile survival analytically, using values generated from the prior distributions for the remaining parameters. However, certain combinations of model parameter values result in values for juvenile survival that are larger than adult survival, which is biologically implausible. Therefore, to respect biological realism, certain parameter values must be rejected for some or all the remaining parameters. This study investigates several alternative resampling schemes for obtaining a realistic joint prior distribution, given the constraint on survival rates. The sensitivity of assessment results is investigated for data-rich (bowhead) and data-poor (walrus) scenarios. The results based on limited data are especially sensitive to the choice of alternative resampling scheme.

Keywords: age-structured population dynamics model, Bayesian statistics, biological realism, bowhead whale, coherent joint prior, marine mammal, modelling, sensitivity analyses, stock assessment, walrus

Received 3 October 2006; accepted 5 June 2007; advance access publication 16 July 2007.


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