Worshop on modeling marine resources
A Coruña, Thursday, November 20, 2025. The Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO-CSIC) organized a national forum for scientific collaboration and reflection in A Coruña to promote new tools aimed at improving the responsible and sustainable management of marine resources. The meeting focused on the potential of integrating the knowledge generated about the early life stages of fish —especially eggs and larvae— into fish stock assessment methods.
The workshop ‘From the individual to the stock: integration of results from IBM models and other early phase approaches in the assessment of fish stocks’, was held on November 11 and 12 at the Higher Technical School of Nautical Studies and Machines of A Coruña. It was organized by the research groups EPB (Plankton Ecology and Biogeochemistry) and MERVEX (Modeling and Evaluation of Exploited Resources) of the IEO-CSIC.
Over the course of two days, two invited lectures and 14 scientific contributions were presented, addressing recent advances in oceanographic modeling, larval dynamics, and integrated approaches for the assessment of exploited populations. Subsequently, several discussion sessions were held aimed at identifying innovative strategies to connect information derived from biophysical models of eggs and larvae with the methods used in fisheries assessments.
Among the main conclusions of the workshop, the potential of oceanographic models to improve the estimation of essential parameters in assessment models, such as natural mortality or the stock-recruitment relationship, as well as their usefulness in the standardization of abundance indices, was highlighted.
This activity is part of the work package "End-to-end models in fisheries" of the Marine Sciences Program of Galicia, belonging to the Complementary Science Plans of the Ministry of Science and Innovation and integrated into the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan (PRTR-C17.I1). It is funded through the Xunta de Galicia with NextGenerationEU funds and the European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund of the European Union. In addition, it has had the collaboration of the DEMON project (Dissipation of Energy in Ocean Models and Connectivity), coordinated between the ICM-CSIC and the IEO-CSIC of A Coruña and funded by the State Research Agency (MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and FEDER funds.