Estimation of Biological and Economic Parameters of a Bioeconomic Fisheries Model Using Dynamical Data Assimilation

A new approach of model parameter estimation is used with simulated measurements to recover both biological and economic input parameters of a natural resource model. The data assimilation technique is the variational adjoint method (VAM) for parameter estimation. It efficiently combines time series of artificial data with a simple bioeconomic fisheries model to optimally estimate the model parameters. Using identical twin experiments, it is shown that the parameters of the model can be retrieved. The procedure provides an efficient way of calculating poorly known model parameters by fitting model results to simulated data. In separate experiments with exact and noisy data, we have demonstrated that the VAM can be an efficient method of analyzing bioeconomic data.