Vismon : Facilitating Risk Assessment and Decision Making In Fisheries Management

Fisheries management involves the regulation of fishing to balance the interests of groups of people who want to catch fish now, and the goal of sustaining viable fish populations for the future. Policy makers make these regulatory decisions in consultation with fisheries scientists, who run extensive computer simulations informed by real-world data. The sophistication of these simulations has steadily increased, and they now generate complex multi-dimensional datasets. The latest simulation models are stochastic and time-dynamic and reflect the variation in environmental influences and uncertainties of many processes [WM04]. The greatest need in this domain is to analyze the relationship between the simulation inputs and outputs. That is, there is a need to quantify tradeoffs among the simulation outputs in the form of outcome indicators, which are produced by the set of management options that are part of the simulation inputs. A second goal is to support sensitivity and uncertainty analysis; that is, to understand when small changes in inputs lead to relatively large changes in outputs.