AFS Annual Meeting Symposium Announcement

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to participate in a symposium at this year’s annual meeting of the American Fisheries Society titled Integration of Genetic Techniques with Quantitative Stock Assessment and Ecological Models for Resolving Fishery Management Issues. The meeting will be held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, from August 19-23, 2018. A description of the symposium is provided below. To summarize, we are soliciting presentations from freshwater or marine systems where genetic principles or techniques have been integrated with stock assessment or ecological models in fishery research or fishery management applications. Our goal for the session is to highlight to symposium attendees the power of integrating cutting-edge genomic techniques with other emerging modeling techniques. If there is sufficient interest among symposium participants, we are considering developing a multi-authored review paper that summarizes major themes and individual topics presented in the symposium.

The deadline for submitting oral presentation abstracts for the meeting is March 16, 2018. However, the Symposia Chair for the meeting has requested that we provide a complete list of confirmed titles and speakers by March 9, 2018. Therefore, we would appreciate if you could send us an email with the presentation title and list of presentation co-authors by March 9 so we can provide the Symposia Chair with the requested information.

If you have questions regarding whether your presentation might be suitable for the symposium or other aspects of this invitation, please do not hesitate to contact either Kim or I. Thank you for your consideration.

Travis Brenden (brenden@msu.edu) and Kim Scribner (scribne3@msu.edu)
Symposium Organizers


Symposium description — The benefits of using micro-evolutionary processes and molecular genetic techniques to address fisheries management issues has long been recognized. Recently, however, there has been considerable proliferation of research where genetic techniques have been integrated with quantitative stock assessment or ecological models to address management issues. One likely reason for this expansion is the availability of and increasing familiarity with cutting-edge genomic techniques, such as high-throughput genetic markers (e.g., single-nucleotide polymorphisms), DNA barcoding, and environmental DNA, which has enabled cost-effective assessments of genetic variation and population or individual assignment of samples for a wide variety of situations. Recent examples where genetic techniques have been integrated with stock assessment and ecological models and tools include DNA barcoding of stomach contents for identifying diet items and incorporating stock identification information in catch-at-age models for spatially-explicit assessment modeling of intermixed fisheries. The purpose of this session is to highlight the power of integrating contemporary genetic techniques with other traditional and emerging modeling techniques. We invite submissions from both marine and freshwater systems where inter-disciplinary integration of techniques has yielded beneficial results for fishery managers.