Dr. Jerald S. Ault

Professor of Marine Biology and Fisheries

My research centers on theoretical and applied population and community dynamics for fishery assessment and management in tropical marine ecosystems. Requirements for fishery management have fundamentally changed so that fruitful areas of research now transcend the bounds of traditional assessment theory and new approaches must be explored. The fishery management system is a new approach to integrate quantitative techniques in sampling design, fish stock assessment, operations research and management science, biometrics, numerical modeling, and scientific visualization in a computer-based expert decision support system to provide cost-effective high-precision estimates of fish stock abundance for assessments and short-term fishery forecasts. In support of my analytical approach, I conduct regional fishery-independent field assessment studies on multispecies coral reef fish communities, pink shrimp, bonefish, tarpon, billfishes and tunas that are focused on the biophysical linkages reflected in fish ontogenetic migratory behaviors to better quantify optimal sampling surveys and define underlying empirical mechanisms in population dynamics and spatial grouping. I am also interested in exploring means of taking structure into account in population and community models and building spatially-explicit coupled biological-physical models of coastal ocean ecosystems both to understand the forces driving recruitment variability and to improve resource prediction and the prospects for sustainability.