Here is an opportunity to tell your data story!

• What kinds of data are needed for successful 21st century fisheries conservation and management?:  integrating existing strengths, persistent gaps, and new perspectives

• In this symposium, we cast a wide net across professionals who work with fisheries field data.  We would like to include freshwater, estuarine, and marine examples from lakes, reservoirs, streams, rivers, coastal areas, and blue water ecosystems.
• We are interested in hearing from project planners, data collectors, and analysts in research, management, restoration, monitoring, and administration.
• We would like to hear talks about data successes, data challenges, and data surprises (especially case studies that include all three issues).
• We are also interested in hearing creative perspectives on new and existing approaches to collecting, connecting, and interpreting data as well as ideas about data-tool-analysis needs.
• If the above describes you or your team, please consider joining us by submitting an abstract (information below).

• Data provide the foundation for fisheries conservation, management, and restoration.  Reviewing current status, gaps, and future goals can help 21st century professionals get enough of the right kinds of data to get ahead of persistent problems.
• Fisheries  professionals presently have extensive knowledge of how to plan field studies, collect environmental data, and run statistical analyses. Consequently, in many areas of fisheries and natural resource conservation, as a profession, we are very successful.
• Yet, at one time or another, most field biologists (researchers, managers, administrators) have been disappointed by the ability of even the most successful field studies to answer all questions of interest, explain unanticipated results, accumulate insights across studies, guide future needs, and translate research into useful actions.
• Here we start a profession-wide conversation about (a) present successful data collection and analysis capabilities for management and research, (b) persistent road blocks with which we currently struggle, and (c) new ways to think about data needs.

• Success stories for data collection and analysis that deliver solutions for fisheries problems (management, research, monitoring in freshwater and marine ecosystems).  We are especially interested in data examples for which some objectives were achieved, others were not, and surprises emerged (positive and negative).
• Integrating research and management; status and trend monitoring; data case studies that aid understanding, and or aid decisions and management actions.

• Why are we often not ready to address emerging problems?
• We  know a lot but often we don’t know what we need to know
• Are we asking the right questions?

• New perspectives on team interactions; data synthesis; realistic expectations; funding, time frames, capacity; strategic planning
• Tools that are needed
• What does success look like?

• Martha Mather, mmather@ksu.edu
• Stephen Tyszko, Stephen.tyszko@ohio.gov
• Sean Hitchman,  Sean.Hitchman@uncp.edu
• Dennis DeVries, devridr@auburn.edu

For more information, visit the abstract page. Abstracts are due April 22nd, find the submission form here.