Understanding The Inter-Annual Variability of Fraser River Salmon Populations with Dynamic State Space Reconstruction: A New Predictive Approach for Ecological Dynamics

鲑鱼物种无论在文化上、作为北美原住民的偶像，还是在经济上都非常重要。它们的种群也是年复一年变化最大的种群之一，这一特征对以野生鲑鱼渔业为基础的当地经济相当重要，因为它造成了高度的金融风险或不确定性。了解是什么控制了鲑鱼库存的戏剧性年度波动并预测这些波动，这是一个具有重大现实意义的问题。这个问题在加利福尼亚州很明显，2009年禁止捕捞鲑鱼，这一管理决定导致州政府收入损失超过2.2亿美元。在这个项目中，将开发一种新的生态动力学范式，它与渔业管理和种群生物学的经典观点截然不同，后者主要基于经典的平衡和稳定思想。这个项目的目标是开发和使用来自非线性科学的新工具，这些工具使用预测而不是事后拟合作为衡量优点的最终标准。这一新范式不需要均衡概念和稳定性，而是将渔业问题视为一个非线性相互依赖的动态复杂系统。它明确承认，从对自然种群的实地测量中获得的越来越多的证据表明，非线性复杂性和不稳定性是无处不在的，静态或多重均衡尽管简单且在概念上是可管理的，但很可能是理想化的例外，而不是规则。将开发的状态空间重建方法将使用时间序列数据来重建和预测9个主要弗雷泽河红鱼种群的非平衡鲑鱼种群动态，最终目的是实施这些方法来管理这一渔业。

Salmon species are tremendously important both culturally, as an icon for Native North Americans, and economically. Their populations are also among the most variable from year to year, a trait that is of considerable importance for local economies based on wild salmon fisheries because it creates a high degree of financial risk or uncertainty. Understanding what controls the dramatic annual swings of salmon stocks and predicting these swings is a matter of significant practical importance. This problem was apparent in California with the 2009 ban on salmon fishing, a management decision causing a loss to state revenues in excess of $220 million. In this project, a new paradigm for ecological dynamics will be developed, one that differs dramatically from the classical views of fisheries management and population biology that are based largely on classical ideas of equilibrium and stability. The goal of this project is to develop and use new tools from nonlinear science that use prediction, as opposed to post hoc fitting, as the ultimate measure of merit. This new paradigm does not require equilibrium concepts and stability, but views the fisheries problem as a dynamic complex system of nonlinear co-dependent interactions. It explicitly recognizes the growing evidence from field measurements on natural populations that nonlinear complexity and instability are ubiquitous, and that static or multiple equilibria, though simple and conceptually manageable, are likely to be idealized exceptions rather than the rule. The state space reconstruction methods that will be developed will use time series data to reconstruct and predict non-equilibrium salmon population dynamics for the 9 major Fraser River sockeye stocks, with the ultimate view toward implementing these methods for managing this fishery.