Finishing Up
Published:
The spring survey was a crazy five week field season. Weather held throughout the survey allowing us to complete all 9 of our scheduled sample dates despite the slightly condensed schedule. We saw significantly less lobsters during the fall survey, especially in the landable / legal size class. Additionally, while in the fall survey the test site performed slightly better during the spring we seemd to catch more lobsters in the control site.
Now that the survey is over there will be a mad dash to get preliminary results submitted for review by the end of the summer. These results will also be presented at the American Fisheries Society’s Annual Meeting in Spokane, WA in late August. To get there I’ll need to finish transcribing the data from this survey; model the data from both surveys using the GAM methods we established for the project during the fall (borrowed from Kisei Tanaka and Yong Chen); and then write a report and presentation for submission. Once this is all completed, I will be able to begin thinking about next steps with our survey data as well as my Graduate career in general.
Hopefully, these steps will include finally beginning to understand the guts of the mark-recapture model we will be using.
