Characterizing fish populations: effects of sample size and population structure on the precision of demographic parameter estimates

By J. Kritzer, C. Davies, B. Mapstone. 2001

102 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examined precision of size, age, growth, and mortality parameters for four reef fishes at sample sizes ranging from 25 to 1000 using bootstrapped population samples. The results are illustrative rather than prescriptive in that we do not determine "optimum" sample sizes, but rather describe improvements in precision with increasing sample size. Furthermore, we do not address the related issue of accuracy. In general, a sample size needed to be tripled to halve precision at that sample size. Mean lengths and ages were most precise, reaching 10% by a sample size of 75 for all species. von Bertalanffy growth parameters were up to an order of magnitude more precise when constraints were placed upon the fitting process. Asymptotic lengths, L, were up to eight times as precise as Brody growth coefficients, K. Catch curves were generally less precise than two other mortality estimators, but we cannot advocate any estimator until accuracy is addressed. We propose a general rule of collecting an average of 7–10...

Subfields: Aquatic Science, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae8bcef0b6e423e2f088cbf4265227ca7d62240f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aquatic Science

1. J. Hoenig
2. A. Then
3. D. A. Hewitt
4. N. Hall
5. E. Cortés
6. Mark N. Maunder
7. K. Piner

In Global and Planetary Change

1. J. Hoenig
2. A. Then
3. D. A. Hewitt
4. N. Hall
5. E. Cortés
6. Mark N. Maunder
7. K. Piner

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

1. J. Hoenig
2. A. Then
3. D. A. Hewitt
4. N. Hall
5. E. Cortés
6. Mark N. Maunder
7. K. Piner

Citations in the corpus

• Evaluating the predictive performance of empirical estimators of natural mortality rate using information on over 200 fish species (2015, background): “Kritzer et al. (2001) demonstrated that a sample size of 200 is generally sufficient to obtain a reliable estimate of tmax, which is likely a lot less than the sample size of ageing for many exploited stocks.”