About the site
The central idea behind this work is that the uncertainty of the biological basis of fisheries management can be greatly reduced by examining many data sets and combining the results by various statistical methods. A major cause of uncertainty in the population biology of exploited species is the lack of very long time series; this can be overcome by examining data on many populations (over 600 are included here). Meta-analysis can be used to address the fundamental problems of population biology and management, e.g. the relationship between spawner abundance and recruitment, the existence of depensation, the estimation of the limits of fishing.
Meta-analysis is the term used to describe quantitative methods for combining evidence across studies. In the work we describe here, results are combined across populations instead of experiments. That is, we treat the time-series of each population as a realization of a natural experiment, and combine results across populations.
