CAPAM awarded William E. Ricker Resource Conservation Award
CAPAM received the American Fisheries Society's (AFS) William E. Ricker Resource Conservation Award for improving the quantitative methods used in fisheries stock assessment. This is the second year in a row that a major national award has gone to CAPAM. The Ricker award recognizes major accomplishments and long-term contributions that advance aquatic resource conservation across the country or the world. In his nomination letter, Richard D. Methot Jr., NOAA Fisheries Senior Scientist for Stock Assessments, stated that CAPAM’s contributions have “advanced the state of the science, communicated these advancements through the peer-reviewed literature, facilitated incorporation of these advances in actual stock assessments, facilitated collaboration among researchers, and engaged a new generation of assessment scientists at each step”. Some other highlights from the nomination letter include:
CAPAM “has led a movement in fisheries stock assessment that far surpasses any advances in the past 30 years in multiple ways.” (Trevor Branch, Associate Professor School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, University of Washington). "The series of workshops … probably the best of its kind in current operation worldwide.” (Doug Butterworth, Professor Emeritus, Director MARAM (Marine Resource Assessment and Management Group), Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town, South Africa). “The Special Issues of Fisheries Research have consistently been the most cited issues of the journal, with papers in the issues being amongst the most cited papers in the journal.” (André E. Punt, Professor and Director, School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington). One is “hard pressed to think of another achievement which has had such deep and far‐reaching influence on improving approaches to support the conservation and management of the world’s oceans.” (Éva Plagányi, Principal Research Scientist and Team Leader, CSIRO, Australia). The research has "substantively influenced the way we do business in the Southeast" (Clay Porch, Director of NOAA Fisheries’ Southeast Fisheries Science Center) and " have been taken up by many of the tuna stock assessments worldwide" (Victor Restrepo, Vice President – Science, International Seafood Sustainability Foundation). “The knowledge generated through CAPAM has far-reaching impact, over and above stock assessment, in fields such as ecology and wildlife conservation” (Takis Besbeas, Associate Professor, Department of Statistics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece). “It’s hard to imagine how the science of fisheries assessment would continue its rapid advance without the CAPAM community as a scaffold” (Brice Semmens, Assistant Professor, Director of the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation (CalCOFI), Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego).
American Fisheries Society's press release
Lynn Waterhouse (former CAPAM PhD student) and Richard Methot Jr. (member of the CAPAM Advisory Panel and NOAA Fisheries Senior Scientist for Stock Assessments) receiving the American Fisheries Society's (AFS) William E. Ricker Resource Conservation Award on behalf of CAPAM.
