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Wednesday, October 2, 2019. 12:00PM. Webinar: Spatio-temporal models connecting across line offices; regional ocean models, biogeographic assessments, and modes of variability in fish spatial distribution. James Thorson, Alaska Fisheries Science Center. Sponsored by NOAA’s National Ocean Service. More information here. 

NOAA Line Offices conduct research on a tremendous variety of topics, including hurricane tracking, harmful algal bloom forecasts, support for marine sanctuaries, and information for fishery harvest advice. Research communities addressing these different topics often develop different analytic methods, using various standards of model evaluation, and communicating results differently. In response to differences between habitat, ecosystem, and stock-assessment methods within the National Marine Fisheries Service, colleagues have been developing spatio-temporal methods that estimate variation in population density across space for multiple species and its evolution over time; these models can then be summarized to identify key habitats, summarize community dynamics, or estimate regional population abundance. In this talk, I speculate about how spatio-temporal models could also address important topics for other NOAA line offices; for illustration I focus on regional ocean models, biogeographic assessments, and identifying modes of variability in ocean and atmospheric dynamics that drive biological processes. I hope to start a conversation this powerful new class of statistical methods that can be adapted NOAA-wide.